The apogee of my career was the short time I spent up in Newfoundland studying icebergs. For a time I knew more about icebergs than pretty much anybody and I loved it.
There is a mathematical construct called a drunkard’s walk which describes a stepwise progress in which the direction of each successive step bears absolutely no relation to its predecessor. I came to icebergs through just such a process.
It all started right here in Burton Hall where I discovered a passion for paleontology. Then I changed my mind, lured by the romance of marine biology, in pursuit of which I took off for grad school in British Columbia, because there was an ocean there but largely because it was as far as I could get from my family.
About a year into it I left the master’s program and got a job as technician culturing phytoplankton. After an exquisitely tedious year in this job I crawled back to the University to resume my studies.
I chose a project that would allow me to spend the summer in my family’s summer house in Vermont. This led to a happy summer spent playing house with my newly minted husband and studying pitcher plants on Snake Mountain.
Upon return to British Columbia, I finally completed my master’s degree and we moved to Nova Scotia where I waited on tables for a while before finding work with the Canadian Wildlife Service analyzing phytoplankton in Newfoundland. I was captivated by the place. There were no icebergs at the time, but we saw moose crawling around on their knees grazing in the picnic areas; we saw beavers swimming around in the little pond they had made and a lynx on the other side of this very pond also watching them with keen interest; we saw birds way out over the water swooping and playing and could hear every word they said owing to the unimaginable silence.
Then, tragically, my contract ran out, and I had to return to reality where I was a lab instructor in Halifax for a while, followed by a divorce, and then a return to British Columbia. I fixed projectors for a while followed by a brief period of self employment before the siren call of Newfoundland rang out again when a friend told me about the Fisheries Observer program in which inspectors were sent out on foreign fishing boats from Spain and Russia and Japan and other exotic regions to oversee their catch and practices. And so I packed up yet again and returned to Newfoundland with images of moose and beavers and the seafaring life dancing in my head.
Within a month of my return, the Fisheries Observer Program was suspended, so I filled my long summer hours with creating and distributing resumés and loafing around the bays and beaches looking for whales and puffins and such.
Finally a small science and engineering research group specializing in cold ocean problems took me on as their field store manager. However there really was not so very much managing the field store needed, and major field trips only went out every few months at most, so I devoted myself to slowly worming my way into various research projects and in the end got included on some field trips (which I packed for) which took us to places like Labrador, Baffin Island and the Beaufort Sea.
These excursions mostly involved sea ice rather than icebergs, but on one of them I got to sidle up close an actual iceberg. It was so BIG. It was so clean and white. Except for the many tiny blue refrozen cracks that criss-crossed it. Its surface was sculpted in places like folded marble, in places like hammered metal. And in places absolutely smooth. I was besotted. The ice experts rolled their eyes, but I was in love.
Icebergs are the largest moving things on earth. A small iceberg weighs 1,000,000 tons. [the Brooklyn Bridge, by contrast, weighs a mere 15,000 tons; the Sears Tower 225,000 tons) A large iceberg can weigh upwards of 100,000,000 tons. They make noises. They are beautiful. They are majestic. Sometimes they carry around their own private fogbank. They have seagulls which rise as one when they roll. They roll with thunderous calving and a boil of water and ice.
As soon as I met that first iceberg, I knew they had to be studied. By me. Others had already nailed down work on drift, source, age, longevity, shape, seabed scouring, and more. And so every weekly meeting, technical discussion, workshop, or gossip session I attended I listened through the filter of “How does this relate to icebergs?” Sadly, mostly it didn’t, but I finally discovered that nobody knew how cold an iceberg is, and it could be argued that this property could influence both the damage potential as well as the most effective means of destruction.
And before you know it I was haring off around the bay in a rubber boat borrowed from the zoology department, a van borrowed from tech services, and a couple of assistants who came along for the lark. Sometimes there was a helicopter. We crawled around on them with crampons and ice screws and ropes. We augered holes in their sides. We dodged through the rubble fields left after a calving event.
I measured iceberg temperatures for 2 happy years. I could have gone on indefinitely since the object of the exercise was to get out to the bergs, but ultimately there were suggestions from on high that it was time for a report, so one gloomy day I sat down and started making plots and schematics and equations. I struggled with this since heat transfer is a complicated business and my training, such as it was, gave no hints as to how to go about this.
Nevertheless as the howling winds and driving sleet gave promise of spring to come, I finally had my answer. I didn’t tell anybody for several days because I wanted it all to myself for a while, to know that I knew something that nobody else knew. It was a surprisingly exhilarating feeling.
Then I turned in my report, submitted a paper to a technical journal and discussed it at conferences and the world knew too. Nothing changed, of course. The Nobel Committee was uninterested, the world continued to spin on its axis, but I had had my moment.
There is a mathematical construct called a drunkard’s walk which describes a stepwise progress in which the direction of each successive step bears absolutely no relation to its predecessor. I came to icebergs through just such a process.
It all started right here in Burton Hall where I discovered a passion for paleontology. Then I changed my mind, lured by the romance of marine biology, in pursuit of which I took off for grad school in British Columbia, because there was an ocean there but largely because it was as far as I could get from my family.
About a year into it I left the master’s program and got a job as technician culturing phytoplankton. After an exquisitely tedious year in this job I crawled back to the University to resume my studies.
I chose a project that would allow me to spend the summer in my family’s summer house in Vermont. This led to a happy summer spent playing house with my newly minted husband and studying pitcher plants on Snake Mountain.
Upon return to British Columbia, I finally completed my master’s degree and we moved to Nova Scotia where I waited on tables for a while before finding work with the Canadian Wildlife Service analyzing phytoplankton in Newfoundland. I was captivated by the place. There were no icebergs at the time, but we saw moose crawling around on their knees grazing in the picnic areas; we saw beavers swimming around in the little pond they had made and a lynx on the other side of this very pond also watching them with keen interest; we saw birds way out over the water swooping and playing and could hear every word they said owing to the unimaginable silence.
Then, tragically, my contract ran out, and I had to return to reality where I was a lab instructor in Halifax for a while, followed by a divorce, and then a return to British Columbia. I fixed projectors for a while followed by a brief period of self employment before the siren call of Newfoundland rang out again when a friend told me about the Fisheries Observer program in which inspectors were sent out on foreign fishing boats from Spain and Russia and Japan and other exotic regions to oversee their catch and practices. And so I packed up yet again and returned to Newfoundland with images of moose and beavers and the seafaring life dancing in my head.
Within a month of my return, the Fisheries Observer Program was suspended, so I filled my long summer hours with creating and distributing resumés and loafing around the bays and beaches looking for whales and puffins and such.
Finally a small science and engineering research group specializing in cold ocean problems took me on as their field store manager. However there really was not so very much managing the field store needed, and major field trips only went out every few months at most, so I devoted myself to slowly worming my way into various research projects and in the end got included on some field trips (which I packed for) which took us to places like Labrador, Baffin Island and the Beaufort Sea.
These excursions mostly involved sea ice rather than icebergs, but on one of them I got to sidle up close an actual iceberg. It was so BIG. It was so clean and white. Except for the many tiny blue refrozen cracks that criss-crossed it. Its surface was sculpted in places like folded marble, in places like hammered metal. And in places absolutely smooth. I was besotted. The ice experts rolled their eyes, but I was in love.
Icebergs are the largest moving things on earth. A small iceberg weighs 1,000,000 tons. [the Brooklyn Bridge, by contrast, weighs a mere 15,000 tons; the Sears Tower 225,000 tons) A large iceberg can weigh upwards of 100,000,000 tons. They make noises. They are beautiful. They are majestic. Sometimes they carry around their own private fogbank. They have seagulls which rise as one when they roll. They roll with thunderous calving and a boil of water and ice.
As soon as I met that first iceberg, I knew they had to be studied. By me. Others had already nailed down work on drift, source, age, longevity, shape, seabed scouring, and more. And so every weekly meeting, technical discussion, workshop, or gossip session I attended I listened through the filter of “How does this relate to icebergs?” Sadly, mostly it didn’t, but I finally discovered that nobody knew how cold an iceberg is, and it could be argued that this property could influence both the damage potential as well as the most effective means of destruction.
And before you know it I was haring off around the bay in a rubber boat borrowed from the zoology department, a van borrowed from tech services, and a couple of assistants who came along for the lark. Sometimes there was a helicopter. We crawled around on them with crampons and ice screws and ropes. We augered holes in their sides. We dodged through the rubble fields left after a calving event.
I measured iceberg temperatures for 2 happy years. I could have gone on indefinitely since the object of the exercise was to get out to the bergs, but ultimately there were suggestions from on high that it was time for a report, so one gloomy day I sat down and started making plots and schematics and equations. I struggled with this since heat transfer is a complicated business and my training, such as it was, gave no hints as to how to go about this.
Nevertheless as the howling winds and driving sleet gave promise of spring to come, I finally had my answer. I didn’t tell anybody for several days because I wanted it all to myself for a while, to know that I knew something that nobody else knew. It was a surprisingly exhilarating feeling.
Then I turned in my report, submitted a paper to a technical journal and discussed it at conferences and the world knew too. Nothing changed, of course. The Nobel Committee was uninterested, the world continued to spin on its axis, but I had had my moment.