Antarctic Dictionary

iceberg

Thesaurus

iceberg noun

[Icebergs and penguins are the two greatest symbols of Antarctica. Icebergs are also found in high northern latitudes, but the earliest use I have found of the word is in an antarctic context (see 1738 quotation below).]

1. A very large piece of glacier of shelf ice (usu. more than 5 m or 16 ft above sea level), usually floating in the sea but sometimes grounded and occasionally frozen into pack ice - essentially, a piece of land ice which is now at sea.

Although the Arctic has icebergs, antarctic icebergs are generally larger. Arctic icebergs mostly come from glaciers, and indeed glacier is an early sense of the word iceberg (see below). In both the Arctic and Antarctica, immense flat ice shelves can calve huge areas of ice in one berg. Antarctica has far larger ice shelves than the Arctic, and flat-topped, massive tabular bergs are characteristic of Antarctica but rare in the Arctic. See also ice island.

1738 Behrens, Carl Friedrich quoted in Balch, Edwin Swift (1902) Antarctica Allen, Lane & Scott, Philadelphia: 61.

These icebergs, which one sees here at the height of Cape Horn or in more southern latitudes, show that the southern lands extend towards the Pole, as do the lands towards the North Pole; for one can easily see, that the icebergs cannot grow in the sea, nor would such monsters increase from any greater distance than ice could freeze.

25 Jan 1820 ("New Shetland") The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres [London], quoted in Polar Record (1946) 4(32) Jul: 389.

On the night of the 25th there was a heavy fall of snow and a swell from the eastward, and an immense iceberg was drifted nearly upon the vessel.

11 Apr 1842 Davis, J.E. quoted in Polar Record (1961) 10(69) Sept: 588.

I think the first sight of a large iceberg is one of the most magnificent and stupendous in nature, but the novelty soon wears off.

1901 (nr Cape Adare) Bernacchi, Louis To the South Polar regions Hurst and Blackett Ltd, London: 157.

That night, as there was every prospect of a gale reaching us in a few hours, we made everything snug; tightened up the tent, attended to the dogs and sledges, and then had supper, smoked, and speculated upon the commercial value of the iceberg in a warm climate such as Australia, where ice sells for sixpence a pound.

1911 Hobbs, William Herbert Characteristics of existing glaciers The Macmillan Company, NY: 235.

The normal iceberg of Antarctic seas is as different as possible from the Arctic type, and for reasons which are now sufficiently obvious. In Greenland, true glacier ice descends to the fjord heads, and there gives birth to bergs of blue ice which are limited in size both by the size of the fjord and by the crevasses upon the ice. In the Antarctic, so far as yet known, glacier ice descends directly to the open sea at few points only, but in its place appears the shelf-ice, and tabular bergs separate along broad sea fronts which are measured sometimes in the hundreds of miles. The size of Antarctic bergs is in consequence many times greater, and their form is tabular like the ice-shelf from which they have been born.

1958 Bursey, Jack Antarctic night Longman, Green & Co., London: 111.

I counted five whales and 170 icebergs as we sailed through the Devil's Graveyard on January 2, 1940. Some of the bergs were tabular in shape and others looked like old forts or big castles.

1984 Lye, Keith Let's go to Antarctica Franklin Watts, Sydney: 7.

Many icebergs from Antarctica have flat tops and steep-sided cliffs. The world's biggest known iceberg came from Antarctica. It covered an area larger than Belgium.

1991 Venables, Stephen Island at the edge of the world: a South Georgia odyssey Hodder and Staughton, London: 103.

The first course was our now well-rehearsed formula of stuffed eggs with caviar, Parma ham, artichoke hearts and olives, washed down with a couple of bottles of Champagne chilled on fragments of iceberg.

1995 The Advertiser [Adelaide] 25 Mar: 7.

The giant iceberg, which measures 78 km by 37 km by 200 m thick, calved from the Larsen Ice Shelf - the same area where the cracks have been found by an Argentinian research team.

2. Historical, sealing

A glacier.

1827 (South Shetlands) Weddell, James A voyage towards the South Pole, performed in the years 1822-24, 2nd edn David and Charles Reprints, Newton Abbot, Devon (1970): 133.

The appearance which these islands would assume, were they divested of ice, would be very different from what they at present exhibit. In Smith's Island, an ice-berg runs through from north to south; indeed, almost all of them are so interspersed and intersected with ice-bergs, that the earthy, or rather rocky, parts of the country are much smaller in bulk than would be supposed from a distant view.

1879 (Heard Island) Moseley, H.N. Notes by a naturalist on the "Challenger" Macmillan and Co, London: 227.

On the more exposed side of the island there is an extensive beach, called Long Beach. This is covered over with thousands of sea-Elephants in the breeding season, but it is only accessible by land, and then only by crossing two glaciers or "ice-bergs" as the sealers call them.

The Antarctic Dictionary, Hince, 2000; 174