Richard Davenport-Hines - Titanic lives : migrants and millionaires, conmen and crew

There were no witnesses. It didnt look like a moment from history. A great block of ice broke off the end of a glacier, and crashed down into a fjord with a rumbling roar. Probably it was the Jakobshavn glacier, the source of most of the worlds largest icebergs. A hundred years ago Jakobshavn was the fastest-moving glacier in the world, pushing down from the ice cap at the rate of 65 feet a day, until it reached the west coast of Greenland. About 10 per cent of all Greenland icebergs have split or calved from the end of Jakobshavn. After they have wrenched away from the glacier, itself made of densely compacted snow which fell on the Arctic ice cap thousands of years earlier, icebergs rock and tilt on the water until finally they settle into balance.

Although there is a human settlement at Jakobshavn, Greenland is an inhuman landscape of neverending wastes. One cannot hope for mercy from the elements in this savage land of lifeless gloom. Long, dark, freezing winters are followed by brief, colourful summers so bright that Matthew Henson, the black American who accompanied Robert Peary to the North Pole in 1909, found summer midnight in Greenlands ice-bound wilderness as bright as dusk in New York on the 4th of July. The land belongs to polar bears, reindeer, musk oxen, wolves, arctic foxes and mountain hares. White-tailed eagles rule the skies, especially near Cape Farewell; black ravens are ubiquitous with their croaking; guillemots and ptarmigans are hunted as food; stiff-winged gliding petrels, snow buntings and peregrine falcons abound. There are fish, and walruses, but until recently no pleasure-seekers in the fjord. In such a wilderness of primeval rocks and eternal ice was launched the iceberg that made history.

Since 2000 the tongue of Jakobshavn glacier has retreated at an alarming rate from the coast, and the ice flow behind has sped up. Jakobshavn, indeed, is one of the great loci of global crisis. Nowadays 35 billion tonnes of iceberg calve from the glacier each year and float oceanwards down the fjord. Only about one-eighth of an iceberg is visible above water: the submerged seven-eighths can be so deep that icebergs get wedged on the floor of the fjord, and remain jammed there until broken by the weight of other icebergs smashing onto them from the glacier. As they are largely submerged, the drift of icebergs is governed by current and little affected by wind.

Some icebergs from Iceland are carried by the east Greenland current round Cape Farewell, where they join thousands of other icebergs from the western glaciers and together sweep into Baffin Bay. There they are taken by the Labrador Current, which carries them southwards towards the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Many icebergs run aground on the coast of Labrador or on the northern part of the Banks and there disintegrate. The first appear near the Grand Banks about the beginning of March cold monsters that are so beautiful to look at and so dangerous to touch, in the words of a Cunard captain on the North Atlantic run.1 By the end of June they have ceased. During a normal year some 300 to 350 icebergs drift south of Newfoundland, and about fifty are borne south of the Grand Banks. Short of bombardment there is no means to destroy an iceberg except by waiting for it to melt. The largest of them drift 2,500 miles before they dwindle away in the sun around Latitude 40. From the bridge of a liner on a clear day a large iceberg can be seen at 16 to 20 miles distance. In bright sunshine it appears as a luminous white mass. In dense fog its sombre bulk is undetectable at more than a hundred yards. On a fogless night without a moon an iceberg would be visible at a quarter of a mile, but in moonlight it might be seen at a distance of several miles.