![]() ![]() While some ice melts into the ocean, a lot breaks off into icebergs, which range in size from small chunks up to the size of a. In all likelihood, the iceberg that sank the Titanic didn't even endure to the outbreak of World War I, a lost splash of freshwater mixed in imperceptibly with the rest of the North Atlantic. Ice in Antarctica flows to the coast along glacier-filled valleys. That means it likely broke off from Greenland in 1910 or 1911, and was gone forever by the end of 1912 or sometime in 1913. The average life expectancy of an iceberg in the North Atlantic is only about two to three years from calving to melting. To estimate how much of the increase in sea level is due to actual mass. Such a temperature was of course lethally cold for all those passengers who had been forced to take to the open water to escape the sinking ship.īut such temperatures are far too warm to sustain icebergs for very long. In the early 20th century, the glacier met the water and calved icebergs into a. The water temperature on the night of the Titanic sinking was thought to be about 28 degrees Fahrenheit, just below freezing. 15, 1912, the iceberg was some 5,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Of the 15,000 to 30,000 icebergs calved each years by the Greenland glaciers, probably only about 1 percent of them ever make it all the way to the Atlantic. Most icebergs in the Northern Hemisphere break off from glaciers in Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. Icebergs float in the ocean, but are made of frozen freshwater, not saltwater. The Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage on April 14, 1912, and sank early the following morning, claiming some 1,500 lives in the process. The Titanic iceberg was one of the lucky ones, so to speak, as the vast, vast majority of icebergs melt long before they reach that far south. Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary Icebergs are large chunks of ice that break off from glaciers. Starting on the Greenland coast, it would have moved from Baffin Bay to the Davis Strait and then onto the Labrador Sea and, at last, the Atlantic. We know that because the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, rather than the Arctic, which means the currents must have taken it far south of where it was calved. Image: Russell Huff and Konrad Steffen/CIRES/University of Colorado/NASAīut once all that's done, the iceberg's life was a short one. ![]()
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