Jan 28 2013
Ice is on my mind this morning because of the freezing rain that began last night, so I couldn’t resist writing about this iceberg series by Kim Hansen on Wikimedia Commons.
The photo above shows a black ice growler (tiny iceberg) found at Upernavik, Greenland on Baffin Bay. It’s one of the last intact pieces of a larger iceberg that broke apart while melting.
Black ice forms in a glacier when melt water refreezes in a crevasse without incorporating any air bubbles. This ice is so clear that it takes on the color of its background. Here it’s dark because of the sea.
At first it was completely transparent but as it sat on the ground, exposed to sun and heat, it developed hairline cracks and began to turn white. Click here and scroll down to see the experiment they tried on it.
This solid transparent ball, only two feet across, was hidden inside the iceberg until its last days on earth. It could have been the iceberg’s heart.
(photos by Kim Hansen on Wikimedia Commons)