11/9/2023 0 Comments Xbox typepadIt currently stretches 1,500 miles long by 680 miles wide and covers 80 percent of Greenland. The Greenland ice sheet was likely first formed some 3 million years ago, but it has grown and shrunk as the planet has warmed and cooled. Using this information, they are able to reconstruct past climates and determine local temperature, greenhouse gas concentrations, and volcanic and solar activity. Back in the lab, the glaciologists then analyze the ice to identify the particulates and chemicals captured by the falling snow. The process can take years, especially in a place like Greenland, where the ice sheet is more than 2 miles thick and drilling can only be done during the summer. Using a drill that cuts a circle around a central point, they extract long, skinny tubes of ice. We know this because glaciologists have taken ice cores from the center of the country. One million years ago, when mastodons roamed the Atlantic Coastal Plain in what is today New London, Connecticut, it was snowing in Greenland. They show us that these frozen beasts are not entirely unapproachable. The iceberg cowboys, however, give us a hint of what it will take to harvest icebergs if we are ever going to use them to save the planet. To that end, the brave seafarers make bad role models for academics interested in icebergs and ship captains navigating the North Atlantic. They are undaunted by warnings issued by the International Ice Patrol. These rough-and-tumble mariners earn their living wrangling icebergs-sometimes to subdue and capture the leviathans, other times to herd the ice in new directions. This is when iceberg cowboys head to sea. The final stage of an iceberg’s life is especially volatile and difficult to predict. It is no wonder, then, that the International Ice Patrol and Canadian Ice Service describe the summertime influx of icebergs as an annual “migration.” In Albanian, Farsi, and Italian, it is even more explicit: Glaciers “give birth.” Across cultures and languages, icebergs are conceptualized like wild cattle or horses roaming the maritime frontier in our rhetorical imagination. Most break off of glaciers on the west coast of Greenland-what glaciologists call “calving.” Speakers of a variety of languages, from Afrikaans to Uzbek, use the same word to define the process, as if the icy masses are the living offspring of glaciers. The Arctic ice pack undergoes its seasonal melt and Baffin Bay thaws, allowing the frozen mountains to continue their journey toward the Atlantic. In this brief window, when Newfoundland relishes nearly half of the sunshine it will absorb for the entire year, icebergs fill the Labrador Sea. But for a few months, from May to August, the sun breaks through the clouds and warms the freezing waves swirling off the coast. John’s is so overcast, the difference between it and Seattle is greater than that between Seattle and Tampa. Seattle, for comparison, gets 2,200 hours of sun annually. John’s, is known as “Canada’s Weather Champion.” Among major Canadian cities, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador is the snowiest, windiest, wettest, and cloudiest, enjoying fewer than 1,500 hours of sunshine each year. For most of the year, Iceberg Alley is gray and cold.
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