U.S. Water News Online
GROTON, Conn. -- While Atlantic Coast meteorologists are now busy tracking tropical storm development as hurricane season begins, a group of Groton-based oceanographers have just wrapped up iceberg season.
And by all accounts it was a busy one.
This spring and summer, the U.S. Coast Guard International Ice Patrol tracked 877 icebergs wandering into the shipping lanes, as well as two large ``ice islands,'' enough to classify it as a ``severe'' ice season, The Day of New London reported.
Some of the biggest icebergs seen in 30 years ventured as far south as Philadelphia. The Ice Patrol, based at the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut, counted more than 925 icebergs as potential hazards to shipping. One of the so-called ice islands was as large as 30 football fields.
``The last couple of years have been very active,'' said Donald L. Murphy, an Ice Patrol oceanographer. ``One of the things we're trying to understand is why there is such great variability in the number of icebergs that we track, but we don't have any answers yet.''
For the first time since the 1980s the Ice Patrol ``tagged'' an ice island with a transponder dropped from its reconnaissance plane and tracked it for 14 days. Murphy said the data will allow the patrol to predict how icebergs will drift using computer models.
The ice season has officially ended as warming waters in the North Atlantic have melted most of the icebergs drifting out of the Labrador Sea before they can reach the shipping lanes.
Just a few icebergs were spotted during the first few weeks of the season, which began in February. But by mid-March, the patrol began spotting ``some of the largest icebergs seen in three decades made their way into the North Atlantic shipping lanes,'' the Ice Patrol said in its end-of-the-season assessment.
The Ice Patrol was established after the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. It is funded by 17 maritime nations and searches almost 500,000 square miles of ocean in the Grand Banks region to keep ships safe. The 16 members of the Ice Patrol crew are based in Groton, but they are flown by long-range surveillance aircraft out of Elizabeth City, N.C.
``The offshore oil and gas industry pays a lot of attention to the icebergs,'' Murphy said.
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