No Icebergs

Something has happened to North Atlantic icebergs this season. Up to last week only two small "growlers" had floated into the shipping lanes. The U. S. Coast Guard was puzzled. Every spring since the Titanic collided with a berg (April 1912). Coast Guard cutters have roved the northern sea in behalf of international shipping. Two of the cutters, the Mojave and the Pontchartrain, last week rode idly in Boston Harbor. Another, the General Greene, was still out searching. This abnormal situation of course pleases navigators. Last year the Coast Guard apprised them of 440 dangerous bergs. For this year some 250 bergs had been predicted.-- Where are they? For Greenland glaciers calved their bergs and Arctic ice floes cracked up as usual. Lieutenant Commander Edward H. Smith of the Coast Guard, who expects to be on the Graf Zeppelin's proposed flight this summer, last week thought he knew. Bergs drift south from the Arctic toward Labrador and Newfoundland. Normally an "ice fence" exists along those coasts, against which the bergs strike. The soft collision sends the bergs caroming eastward into the shipping lanes. This year, he believes and hopes to find, the "ice fence" has failed to form. Consequently the southing bergs must have piled up on the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts, as though Jack Frost and King Neptune, bored with spring gambling, had laid aside their sea dice.

-- Biggest herding of bergs occurred in 1909 with 1,024 sighted. Next biggest: the 1,019 of 1912. Lightest record, prior to 1931: the eleven of 1924.

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