THESE WERE VISIBLE FROM THE HILLS AROUND WHERE I LIVE :eek:
Iceberg sightseers paying $500 a seat
17 November 2006
By JOHN HENZELL
Dozens of people decided $500 was a price worth paying to join New Zealand’s newest sightseeing activity – iceberg spotting off the Otago coast.
Helicopters spent yesterday ferrying people 100km east of Dunedin to spot the first flotilla of icebergs to appear off the coast of the South Island in more than 50 years, but there was no repeat of Wednesday’s tactic of landing on one.
“Quite a big piece has broken off the one I landed on yesterday (Wednesday),” Helicopters Otago managing director Graeme Gale said.
“I didn’t land today. The risk factor has turned around a bit.”
On Wednesday, those who landed were equipped with full-immersion suits and harnesses ready to be winched from the water if the iceberg suddenly became unstable, as happens when they enter relatively warm waters.
Yesterday, although the collapsed section was on the far side of the iceberg from the landing site, it was purely sightseeing for Gale in his seven-passenger helicopter, which began operations at 8am and continued until near dusk.
“We’ve had elderly people and schoolchildren and everyone in between,” he said.
"It’s a pretty unique sight. It’s just like Antarctica has come to us.
“You just couldn’t get a better day. You just don’t get days like that out at sea.”
Conditions on the iceberg were changing so rapidly that it was difficult to estimate how long the newfound sightseeing industry would last, he said. The nearest iceberg had moved about 7km further out to sea since Wednesday’s flight.
While people were happy to pay $500 a seat to look at an Antarctic oddity, glaciologists and amateur observers were debating the origin of the icebergs.
Gateway Antarctica senior lecturer Wolfgang Rack said it was likely the icebergs were remnants of one of several 90km by 30km tabular icebergs that broke off the far side of Antarctica eight years ago.
“It’s very difficult, or even impossible, to continuously track such comparatively small icebergs, but the chance is indeed high that they originated in the Weddell Sea region,” he said.
The icebergs were likely to fall apart and melt “within some weeks”, and researchers would try to keep track of them using satellite images, he said.
Rack’s theory was challenged by John Dunbier, of Christchurch, who used public-access satellite records to track what he says is the iceberg flotilla’s origins on the the Ross Ice Shelf, near New Zealand’s Scott Base, in 2002.
He contended that the iceberg was part of C19a, which broke away from the Ross Ice Shelf and drifted north to the coast of Victoria Land. He tracked the teardrop-shaped iceberg – at about 18km by 7km, under the threshold to be given an individual identity by iceberg researchers – as it drifted north this year on a direct path towards New Zealand.
Around Macquarie Island, the iceberg began to break up into the small chunks that are now off the Otago coastline, Dunbier said.
