A spinning world

Watching icebergs can not only send imaginations off on tangents, it once set in motion a whole new science.

- BY MATT VANCE

If you stare at icebergs too long you can see some strange things. A small group of us are watching an armada of bergs from the top deck of our ice-strengthened expedition ship deep in the Ross Sea. It is midnight but the sun has shown no inclination to set and just trundles around the southern horizon looking lost.

As their guide aboard, I have recently converted this group of wildlife nuts to watching icebergs. They are full of the vim and chatter of new converts. One of them is a short, elderly, bespectacled woman named Glenis. She sips whiskey and hot water from an orange thermos. Glenis describes her trip down to the ice as “just the ticket”.

We have been watching icebergs for a while, rugged up against the cold. The bergs around us show the signs of advanced age having been ravaged by time and the weather into all manner of tortuous shapes and sizes. Like cloud watching, berg watching lends itself to the imagination, a sort of Rorschach test for the adventurous. Among the fleet of bergs that surrounded the ship were spaceships, tankers, the Empire State Building and the ubiquitous Henry Moore sculptures.

One of the group confesses to having seen the Virgin Mary earlier in the day. Glenis gives out a snorty laugh before stopping it short with a gasp: “Oh look at that one, it looks like the face of Roald Amundsen.” It has the hooked nose and wild staring eyes of the Norwegian whose expedition was the first to reach the South Pole. It appears to be going against the drift of all the other bergs, smashing its way through the pack ice like an icebreaker.

LOCKED IN ICE