As the tour boat Juris Graney was on approached the massive slab of ice known as Petermann Ice Island–A, the water around the ship had so much ice in it that it sounded like someone was popping Bubble Wrap all around them.
Graney and his tour group got within 600 metres of the giant iceberg before they decided they’d probably gone as close as safety allowed.
“As we pulled up, we were just sitting there and you hear it rumble,” recalled Graney. “And this huge chunk just fell off sort of in front of us and crashed into the water. You could see this sort of uplift in the wave as it came towards the boat. So we said, ‘you know what? We don’t need to get too much closer,” he laughed.
So what does the ice island look like?
“The biggest chunk of ice I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” chuckled Graney.
“Honestly, you just can’t get your head around it.”
“You know ... visually it’s not that stunning. It’s just a big wall of ice. You look at it and just say ‘right, fair enough,’” he said.
It wasn’t until a large fishing vessel appeared out of the mist next to the island that he said he truly grasped the magnitude of what he was seeing.
“At that point you kind of went, ‘wow, this is huge,’” he said.
Graney, originally from Australia, is a journalist with the weekly newspaper The Northern Pen in St. Anthony.
Last Saturday he hopped on a local tour boat and convinced the guide to take the group over to Petermann Ice Island-A, now floating a few kilometres off shore from town.
According to Environment Canada numbers, when the island first calved from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland in August 2010 it was 280 square kilometres in size. During its year-long journey to Newfoundland, the island has been reduced to about 58 square kilometres according to local research and development corporation C-CORE.
The island is continually breaking apart and has made Newfoundland’s Iceberg Alley a veritable buffet for tourists hungry for berg sightings.
Graney reports having several smaller icebergs floating around the ice island and surrounding waters, creating a bit of a stir in his part of the province.
“The locals are mildly amused by it all, I think. The tourists up here have gone manic. Tourism up here is huge, people are just flying in or driving up, just wanting to come and see it,” he said.
The locals are more subdued, having seen icebergs their whole lives, but even they are impressed by the Petermann Ice Island-A
During his tour boat ride Graney asked the pilot, “do you ever get bored of this?”
“Not when things like this happen,” he replied.
Even if they wanted to, it seems the people around St. Anthony can’t ignore the ice island.
Intermittently you can hear the burgs cracking, snapping and falling apart, said Graney.
“One calved off yesterday and it just sounded like an explosion,” he said.
It’s unclear how long the ice island will be around St. Anthony before it gradually makes its way farther down the coast. It’s also unclear how long the island will last before it finally cracks apart and disintegrates.
C-CORE had a manned expedition to the ice island in June and at that time it was moving about 40 kilometres a day, they now estimate it has slowed to about 24 kilometres a day.
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cmaclean@thetelegram.com
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