Icebergs may seem beautiful objects to study and observe. But for cruise ships icebergs are a huge danger.

One of the worst disasters occurred on the night of April 14, 1912, when the Titanic hit an iceberg, killing 1513 people.

An iceberg is ice that broke off from glaciers or shelf ice and is floating in open water. The edges of some icebergs are broken or smoothed by waves. A significant underwater part of them remains under the surface of the water, which unexpectedly floats to the surface in the form of icebergs.

The sizes of the icebergs are different. Often there are icebergs with a diameter of more than 100 meters. Individual ice mountains reach 1000 meters in diameter.


The density of the iceberg is about 90% of the density of water, so only 1/9 part of this ice mountain is above the surface, and 8/9 are hidden under the water. Therefore, if an iceberg is about 45 meters high above the water surface, it goes 200 meters deep inside. It's hard to imagine how much ice such a mountain contains. Some of them weigh 180 million tons.

Since the main part of the iceberg is under water, its movement is influenced not by the wind, but by sea currents. Icebergs gradually reach warm latitudes, where they melt.