Iceberg Mover

Following the Titanic disaster, a strange kind of job was formed…that of an iceberg mover. This was something I had never heard of, and it seems rather strange. I am aware that icebergs are chucks of ice, and obviously that they float, but to have the job of actually keeping track of an iceberg’s location so that you can go out to move it out of the shipping lanes is a really odd job, if you ask me. Still, the icebergs floating in the oceans, were a serious danger to the ships. Even if other ships were in the area and had seen the icebergs, that doesn’t mean other ships couldn’t fall prey to the icebergs. Many of those ships shut down their radios overnight…the most dangerous time for icebergs.

The job of the iceberg movers was to keep track of the icebergs and if they moved into the shipping lanes, to go in and move them to a different location. Now, that makes me wonder how heavy the icebergs were, and how hard it would be to move them. I also wonder how dangerous it would be, since icebergs have an uncanny knack for flipping over. Of course, iceberg movers are in a boat. Still, it’s hard to say what things can go wrong when an iceberg flips over. I really don’t think this would be a job I would want.

It seems like they might have had trouble hiring people to do this job, or maybe they just needed a more stable crew of men for the job. Whatever the case may be, The International Ice Patrol (IIP), was founded a year later. The IIP is operated by the US Coast Guard. The IIP tracks the location of icebergs and provides safe routes around them. If an iceberg is in a particularly unsafe area, it might become necessary to move it. Then, the iceberg will be towed out of the area. There is no way that they will be able to stop shipwrecks from happening, but if we can remove the dangers created by icebergs, maybe we will see a few less shipwrecks in the future. Since Titanic, there have been five ship that went down after hitting an iceberg. Lives were lost in the first two following Titanic, but in the last three, everyone was saved. The last one was in 2007.