Catching a Break: In Defense of Icebergs

Of all the inanimate, would-be wonders of the natural world, there are phenomena repeatedly doled short shrift.

Take icebergs. Folks are constantly salting on the poor brutes. Scumbag icebergs sink titanic cruise ships. (Actually, lax crow’s nesters do, even if this unsuspecting bulk may have been the culprit.) Melting icebergs are raising sea levels. (They aren’t. Icebergs already float to begin with; their melting will thus not raise waters. It’s the gradual melting of land-based ice masses, like glaciers, that’s steadily overflowing the world’s oceans.) Icebergs are unsightly – shattered bones whithering away to nothing on the high seas.

You get the idea. Icebergs can never catch a break. This is a real bummer.

Not only has drift ice long been critical to Arctic exploration and monitoring. But icebergs fizz as they melt. Fizz! This is the result of the popping of ancient, compressed air bubbles. There is also no denying the bleak romance of a hulking and frozen lone wolf left to wander some of earth’s most punishing environments.

Better still, no two icebergs are identical. Throughout the course of forming – a process called calving, whereby the repeated stress of tides and waves eventually chips away a giant chunk of glacial ice, which then drifts out on its own – and then deteriorating with time, icebergs take on a breathtaking array of shapes and sizes, forms and colors.

Clean and simple, yet formidably sublime. A true classic.

This guy here is particularly Devils Towerish.

Blockies are sort of the bastard children of Tabulars. I think? Still, rad. Look at that thing!

Isn’t this a level in Wave Race?

Not entirely sure what to say, here, other than that this really ought to be the cover art on the next True Widow record.

Here’s a ‘berg nearing the end of a long, solitary life, having eroded down to little more than a blown-out-U-shaped, harbor-like depression. Soon enough she’ll be lost entirely to the waves.

ODDITY examines strange and esoteric phenomena and events from the remote, uncanny corners of technology, science and history.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @TheBAnderson

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