Giant iceberg drifting could threaten ships, oil platforms

This iceberg recently spotted near Lancaster Sound is large, but a much larger iceberg measuring about 28 kilometres long and nine kilometres wide calved off a glacier in Greenland last week. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

RANDY BOSWELL
Postmedia News

The Canadian government’s top ice experts have begun planning how to deal with a massive iceberg that broke off a Greenland glacier last week and is expected to drift south over the next two years into East Coast shipping lanes and toward offshore oil platforms.

NASA, the European Space Agency and a host of academic institutions are already helping Canadian officials monitor and analyze the mammoth object, the biggest free-floating mass of ice in the Arctic Ocean in 50 years.

Environment Canada’s Trudy Wohlleben, the Canadian Ice Service forecaster who first spotted last Thursday’s birth of Petermann Ice Island 2010, said Tuesday that federal scientists plan to parachute beacons onto the 250-square-kilometre monolith next month to help track its movements along Ellesmere and Baffin islands and, eventually, down the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland.

Icebergs calved from Greenland’s glaciers and floating ice shelves typically follow that Canadian route south, as did the huge one that struck and sank the Titanic in 1912.

Wohlleben said the Canadian Ice Service does have “a precedent” to help shape its response to the latest threat — a 29-square-kilometre iceberg that broke away from the Petermann Glacier in 2008 and required constant monitoring until the end of last summer.

“But this one is about 10 times larger,” she told Postmedia News on Tuesday. “It’s something we’ll be watching closely.”

The ESA released satellite images of the ice island on Monday and the agency’s Italy-based spokesman Robert Meisner said Tuesday that Canadian officials will have “regular and full access to Envisat Radar data for sea ice charting activity.”

Wohlleben said the colossal initial size of the ice island — currently about 28 kilometres long and nine kilometres wide — means that as it gradually breaks apart while drifting south into warmer waters, the resulting fragments will be considerably bigger and heavier than normal icebergs.

That poses a risk to ships that, in recent years, have become a more common sight in Canada’s Arctic waters because of retreating sea ice.

The ice island or its fragments could also drift dangerously toward offshore petroleum operations in Atlantic Canada, said Wohlleben.

“The main concern when it’s this big is oil platforms,” she said. “And when it starts fragmenting into smaller pieces it may become a hazard to shipping.”

Typical methods used to steer icebergs toward a safe course — towing by tug boats or water blasting to reshape the berg and divert its path — could also prove more challenging because of this ice island’s enormous scale, she added.

The “huge tabular masses” typical of ice islands “tend to have a lot of inertia” compared with conventional, “pinnacled” icebergs.
Wohlleben said ice experts from around the world flooded the Canadian Ice Service with information and offers of assistance within hours of the news that the glacier had cracked.

“There were loads and loads of calls from academic colleagues in the U.K., Denmark, the United States and elsewhere,” she said.