Dancing with Icebergs

You think icebergs are white. I thought so, too, until I was close enough to dance with one.

Icebergs come in different shapes and sizes; small as a porpoise, one as big as
Belgium when viewed by satellite. Some, breaking away as sea ice, are flat as a
table, others, calved from the tongue of a glacier that has inched down to the
sea over millions of years, tower hundreds of feet high. All have a grandeur,
stark and graphic; they can rip a ship apart - or nudge gently against the
taffrail, as one did, on a memorable day for me, in the remote wastes of the
Antarctic Sea.

We had nosed into the inlet during the night; a sunlit night because in these
high latitudes, the setting sun merely flirts with the horizon before arcing back for another ellipse. Only body and mechanical clocks divide the hours into sleeping, waking and mealtimes. Before us, twenty icebergs bobbed and curtseyed as they slowly drifted in a stately dance, driven by the circling currents. We piled into our inflated rubber Zodiacs, and joined in the gavotte, plying in and out between the bergs.

Icebergs that calve from glaciers tumble many times once they break free into open sea. As they melt, sun, wind and currents change their shape and size, huge pieces break away; what was born as the bottom of the glacier floats to the top. Here the elements of the original land, minerals, mosses and fungi, have dissolved into the glacial ice to create streaks and patches of all the colours nature can mix on her palette.

The colours were startling. Predominantly blue, but interspersed with shades of brown, pink and red; streaks of black weaved filigreed patterns against the severe white background.