Icebergs have always been the bane of ships. In history, countless ships hit icebergs, resulting in too much water in the cabin and eventually sank, including the Titanic, which is known as "unsinkable". In addition to ships, icebergs also pose a threat to the oil drilling platform fixed on the sea. During the drift process, they may hit the drilling platform and cause damage.
In the polar regions, in addition to the sea ice, there are also spectacular icebergs floating on the ocean. These icebergs are gorgeous and dazzling under the sunshine, just like the jade mountain carved from white marble. Many people mistakenly believe that icebergs are a kind of huge sea ice. In fact, icebergs are glacial ice that originated from land, but later flowed into the ocean.
Glaciers are developed on the Antarctic continent and Greenland. These glaciers cover the whole continent, forming a large ice sheet. The ice sheet flows towards the continental margin at a slow speed, and there are many ice shelves or ice tongues extending into the sea. The ice shelf and glacier tongue move up and down with the tide and surge of the sea water, and the front-end breaks and falls into the sea, forming a large iceberg.
Icebergs are often pyramid shaped or table shaped. Pyramidal icebergs are most common in the Arctic. In the ocean near the Antarctic ice sheet, table icebergs often float. Icebergs can reach great heights. Near the Malvinas Islands (Falkland Islands) in Antarctica, a desktop iceberg was seen, 45 meters above the water. The exposed part of the iceberg is less than one eighth of its volume, so it is speculated that the whole height of the iceberg is nearly 400 meters. The area of icebergs is also large. An iceberg, 75 kilometers wide and 120 kilometers long, was once found in the South Atlantic.
It's dangerous for a ship to encounter an iceberg. The British mail ship Titanic, which crossed the Atlantic, hit an iceberg near Newfoundland in 1912 and caused 1500 people’s death. In 1959, the Danish ship Hans Hertfort crashed into an iceberg and killed nearly 100 people.
