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Terminal Ice (Cont.)

DENNY CHRISTAIN, director of technical support for the Center for Cold Ocean Resource Engineering (C-CORE) in St. John's, is an iceberg guy. Whenever I asked around on the subject of icebergs, his name came up. C-CORE is a company that handles extreme-conditions research-and-development problems, many having to do with oceanic ice. Denny Christian has photographed icebergs, towed them, measured them, and done experiments on them. When he was younger he used to put crampons

Denny heard a noise, and the next thing he knew THE SCIENTISTS WERE CLINGING TO THE SIDE OF THE ICE THEY'D BEEN STANDING ON, 50 feet above the waterline. In a few seconds, the berg had gone over on top of them.

on his feet and climb on them. With other ice technicians he has landed on them in helicopters and shut the engines down and walked around; he told me he would never do anything so reckless today. A few years ago, against his better judgment, he ferried out two scientists who wanted to climb on a berg and helped them aboard. Then he stood off in his skiff and watched. He heard a noise, saw some of the iceberg come out of the sea, and the next thing he knew the scientists were clinging to the side of the ice they'd been standing on, 50 feet above the waterline. In another few seconds, the berg had gone over on top of them. By luck and quick boat-handling he was able to fish them out alive.

Denny Christian is tall, stoop-shouldered, snub-nosed, in his mid-sixties. His ancestors were Norwegian. When he strongly wishes to make a point, he widens his eyes with an attention-getting, Norwegian ferocity; other than that, his manner is laconic and mild. Usually he has the stoic patience you get from being around the unobligingness of nature. The only person he ever threw out of his office was a man who went on in great detail about a scheme he had to tow icebergs someplace or other with a submarine he planned to buy. Listening to crazy iceberg schemes is a recurring part of Denny Christian's job.

He and I sat in his office talking icebergs and going through folders of iceberg photos he has taken in his 20 years at C-CORE. The icebergs came in every category of shape and featured many natural parodies of architectural styles from caveman days to now. Some bergs suggested cliff dwellings, some castles; some were like fortresses, or space needles, or ultramodern Jetsons-type mansions in Beverly Hills. A striking iceberg that I had seen photos of before had two foothill eminences joined at the top by a soaring St. Louis Gateway Arch of ice. I stopped at a photo of a large tabular berg with men in red carrying chainsaws and clambering on it.

"These guys were some French environmentalists who wanted to carve a big iceberg in the shape of a whale with other endangered species riding on its back, and then send it down the East Coast of America to make a point about saving the environment," Denny said. "I helped them with the project, but I told 'em, 'You better wear these bright-red life jackets so we can find you if you fall in and die.'" His eyes went wide. "Fortunately the Gulf War came along about that time and their money ran out, and we never heard from them again."

Right now most of the work Denny does at C-CORE is for a group of oil companies that have drilling platforms in the North Atlantic about 350 miles east of St. John's. The oil drillers are worried about icebergs crashing into their platforms or sinking their tankers. Among other problems, C-CORE studies the likelihood of iceberg impacts, how damaging they might be, and how to avert them. Two summers ago Denny harnessed some small icebergs and smashed them into a steel panel rigged with instruments, to learn more about such collisions. Recently he has been studying the iceberg-tracking effectiveness of high-frequency radar that can see over the horizon out to about 250 miles. Every so often he charters a plane and flies out to check the radar's accuracy with his own eyes. When he told me he planned to take one of these "ground-truthing" flights in the next day or two, I asked if I could go along.

First we had to drive to Gander, about four hours from St. John's, to get the charter plane. Michelle Rose, a college intern at C-CORE who assists Denny sometimes, accompanied us. The wind was blowing hard when we reached the airport, but the charter pilots didn't seem to mind. Soon we were bumping and bouncing in a twin-engine plane through the updrafts over the North Atlantic, out of sight of land. Then the plane descended to a low altitude, the turbulence subsided, and we were cruising steadily 500 feet above the waves.

Denny had given the pilots GPS readings corresponding to places where the radar had indicated icebergs. The first one appeared on the plane's right side—a blocky berg with a line of dirt on it like a slash. Denny said that was glacial till that the glacier had scraped from the ground before calving. This next one, a pinnacle berg, had two bright-blue lines on it that formed a V. Blue lines, he said, are from meltwater that flows into glacial crevices and freezes there; ice from meltwater lacks the bubbles in glacial ice, and reflects blue. As we passed each berg, Denny photographed it and shouted data—shape, size, GPS coordinates—and Michelle Rose wrote it down on a clipboard. The distribution of icebergs did not seem to fit the radar picture very closely, but that slipped from everybody's mind.

Some icebergs we didn't get a good look at on the first pass, and so we swooped back for another. An iceberg like the Rock of Gibraltar caught the sun on a facet of its never-to-be-scaled white peak as we went by. A humpbacked berg nosed through the waves with homely persistence as if going somewhere. We checked out eight icebergs in all. Each was completely by itself in a sun-sparkled immensity of ocean, each had contours and particularities as distinctive as a face. The imitations they did of habitable places inspired a hopelessness that was almost sublime. Not much in nature makes you feel as lonesome as an iceberg does. Perhaps that's the reason we don't give them names: the uncomfortable parallel to our own diffusible selves.

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