Iceberg Hunt

Last week a lonely Coast Guard cutter, the Tampa, was hurrying north to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Behind her lay a winter season of snooping after rum-runners off the U. S. Before her stretched a season of snooping af-ter icebergs. On April 15 she, or her alternate iceberg scout, the Modoc, will heave to at latitude 41DEG 46' north, longitude 50DEG 14' west. Her crew, except for the ever present watch in crow's-nest and bridge, will fire three volleys, will moan "taps" in lament for the sinking of the Titanic on that spot 14 years before.

The Titanic disaster aroused the nations to institute an annual patrol from April to July along the northern steamer lanes, whither the icebergs float after they break from their Greenland glaciers. The U. S. took up the burden, many nations sharing the expense. So efficient has been this search for and report of wandering bergs that not a life has been lost since the patrol was set up in 1913.

The Tampa and the Modoc take turns patrolling the danger area, where the warm Gulf currents meet the Arctic flows at the "cold wall." Their duties are to spot the huge chunks of ice by their own lookouts or from the wire-lessed reports of other ships, to destroy such bergs by explosives if possible, otherwise to keep them ever in sight, reporting twice a day their whereabouts to ships which might be struck and to the U. S. hydrographic office at Washington. Fogs and other weather conditions too are radioed, and on this news the weather department partly bases its reports for the eastern coast regions.

Destroying icebergs is dangerous work. Usually a small boat puts off from the cutter carrying high explosives, which are planted at accessible spots. Sometimes, though, overhanging ledges threaten to snap off with cold, pitiless destruction. Here mines are floated down. Often a berg is too enormous to destroy; one has been sighted 65 feet _ high, 1690 feet long, with an estimated content of 36,000,000 tons of ice, of which about 8/9 was. under water out of view. In such cases the guard cutter can only follow until the mass "calves," lets small chunks break off. These accompany the "mother" as "growlers." Then eventually all disappear into slush. The Tampa or Modoc is free to find another.

This year Dr. Howard T. Barnes of McGill University will try to destroy icebergs at their source, in the Greenland glaciers. Here the ice cap is 7,000 feet thick. Vast bits break off at the sea edges to float south to the Newfoundland banks as bergs. Dr. Barnes hopes to smash the glacier edges with thermite, a chemical which develops enormous heat in contact with ice.* (TIME, March 1.)

*The thermite procedure recently failed to break up an ice pack at Oil City, Pa.