Ice Patrol Warns Ships of North Atlantic Peril

Icebergs. Huge, silent perils, they lurk in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic and threaten ships.

But far to the south and even farther from harm’s way, in a dingy basement at the University of Connecticut’s Groton campus, the International Ice Patrol provides these same vessels with a lookout for the floating mountains.

A branch of the U.S. Coast Guard, the patrol was created in 1913 in response to the loss of life when the luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank, claiming 1,513 victims.

Since the patrol’s founding, there has never again been a report of life lost from a ship colliding with an iceberg within the area the patrol monitors.

“A Korean ore carrier, which was traveling considerably inside our established danger zone at the time, did hit a ‘berg in the mid-1980s,” Cmdr. Alan Summy said in an interview. “There was a good deal of damage, but nobody was killed.”

The 16-member team runs a $2-million-a-year operation charged with finding and tracking the giant ice chunks that break away from Greenland glaciers and drift into North Atlantic shipping lanes during the warmer months.

Gathering information from surveillance flights, special buoys and passing ships, the patrol outlines the probable perimeters of the iceberg danger zone in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.

Like a weather forecast, the results are provided daily in an ice bulletin broadcast by radio stations in the United States, Canada and Europe for vessels crossing the North Atlantic.

“During the iceberg season we also produce a map, which is radio-faxed to any ship that wants it,” Summy said.

“The map is superimposed over a chart of the region and shows the borders of the danger zone,” he said. “We don’t try to pinpoint the locations of individual icebergs because we don’t want anybody trying to thread their way through the zone, using our map.”

This year’s season--which began in late February and was winding down with autumn’s approach--was hectic. The patrol spotted more than 600 icebergs in the North Atlantic shipping lanes.

“We consider any year with more than 600 icebergs to be a busy season,” said Don Murphy, the patrol’s chief scientist and one of two staff civilians. “Last season was extremely busy. We had 1,974 confirmed sightings.”

A big North Atlantic iceberg may tower 250 feet above the water’s surface and extend 1,600 feet below. The largest can be as long as two football fields and weigh more than 1 million tons.

These days, the patrol simply tracks the icebergs until they break up in the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream. In times past, patrols tried to blow up rogue icebergs that floated far south.

Mining icebergs was tried in 1923 and gunfire in 1925. “They bombed them in 1959 and 1960, using 1,000-pound bombs,” Summy said.

“Of course, it was just a waste of time,” he said, “given that seven-eighths of an iceberg is beneath the surface. In fact, blowing up the top part probably just made them harder to see.”

Capt. Harvey Smith, vice president of marine operations for the Cunard Line, owner of the luxury liner Queen Elizabeth 2 among others, said the service is essential to anyone plying the North Atlantic.

“We make 22 trips across the Atlantic each year (with the QE2),” he said from his New York office. “We always plot our course based on the report we get from the ice patrol.”

Some operational support comes from other countries, since the patrol was formed by 20 countries that met at the Safety of Life at Sea Convention held after the Titanic went down.

And during the patrol’s off-season, when wintertime virtually eliminates the iceberg danger, the job falls to the Ice Center Environment Canada, a year-round Canadian operation that looks for sea ice.

But at the season’s height, a Hercules C-130H aircraft carries three patrol members from Groton to Newfoundland every other week. They spend five days combing the area off the Grand Banks, locating icebergs by radar.

Each evening, the patrol sends its findings to the Groton operations center for feeding into a computer along with ocean current and other environmental information to forecast the icebergs’ drifting course and deterioration.

“Once the icebergs get out of the cold Labrador Current, which carries them down from Greenland, the warmer water and wave action causes them to begin calving, or breaking up,” Summy said.

While some North Atlantic icebergs may exceed 1 million tons, they’re puny compared to those in Antarctica, which break off from the ice shelf, Murphy said.

“Down there,” he said, “they sometimes are as big as the state of Rhode Island, or bigger.”

Next year, the patrol marks the 80th anniversary of its founding. The operation has been interrupted only twice, by the two World Wars, when man-made destroyers replaced icebergs as the major threat to North Atlantic shipping.