The Iceberg Cowboys Who Wrangle the Purest Water on Earth
For most of the year, Iceberg Alley is gray and cold. The largest city on its shores, St. John’s, is known as “Canada’s Weather Champion.” Among major Canadian cities, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador is the snowiest, windiest, wettest, and cloudiest, enjoying fewer than 1,500 hours of sunshine each year. Seattle, for comparison, gets 2,200 hours of sun annually. St. John’s is so overcast, the difference between it and Seattle is greater than that between Seattle and Tampa. But for a few months, from May to August, the sun breaks through the clouds and warms the freezing waves swirling off the coast.
In this brief window, when Newfoundland relishes nearly half of the sunshine it will absorb for the entire year, icebergs fill the Labrador Sea. The Arctic ice pack undergoes its seasonal melt and Baffin Bay thaws, allowing the frozen mountains to continue their journey toward the Atlantic. Most break off of glaciers on the west coast of Greenland—what glaciologists call “calving.” Speakers of a variety of languages, from Afrikaans to Uzbek, use the same word to define the process, as if the icy masses are the living offspring of glaciers. In Albanian, Farsi, and Italian, it is even more explicit: Glaciers “give birth.” Across cultures and languages, icebergs are conceptualized like wild cattle or horses roaming the maritime frontier in our rhetorical imagination. It is no wonder, then, that the International Ice Patrol and Canadian Ice Service describe the summertime influx of icebergs as an annual “migration.”
The final stage of an iceberg’s life is especially volatile and difficult to predict.
This is when iceberg cowboys head to sea. These rough-and-tumble mariners earn their living wrangling icebergs—sometimes to subdue and capture the leviathans, other times to herd the ice in new directions. They are undaunted by warnings issued by the International Ice Patrol. To that
