It was, as they say, just the tip of the iceberg—although, in this case, that’s rather hard to picture. The day dawned with great anticipation on the ship. We had set sail from the southernmost reaches of Argentina, headed for Antarctica. The crossing on the Drake Passage, a body of water infamous for its turbulence, had been unusually calm, with our ship, the Sapphire Princess, running with the wind over a 9-foot swell.
But this morning, as we slowly made our progress through Antarctic waters, the weather turned on us, just a little bit. Lying snug in my bed, I could hear the polar wind whistling outside. I stayed like that, warm and sleepy, for a few extra minutes, before curiosity beckoned me to my balcony window. What wintry wonder would I see out there?
As I threw open my curtains, it turned out to be: absolutely nothing. A typical sight when you reach the end of the world, either at the bottom or the top. Soupy. Socked in. Nothing but fog.
But soon enough the captain took to the ship’s intercom to reassure all guests on board. I missed the beginning of his announcement, catching something about “scenes we have missed, and mists we have seen,” the phrase sounding especially poetic in his Italian accent.
“We are approaching the iceberg,” he said, with the confidence that comes with command. “We can see it on the radar.”
Bundling against the cold—the air temperature had plummeted to minus 10 degrees Celsius, with the wind chill—I braved the open decks.
“The weather outside is very Antarctic,” the captain warned over the loudspeakers. “The sea is ‘confused,’ and the wind is blowing up to 40 knots.”
I pulled my wool hat low and peered out. At first, the sight remained the same. Just a misty wall of white. But slowly, the scene began to change. Little chunks of ice floated into view, “bergy bits” and “growlers.” A portent of much bigger things to come.
The level of chatter on the decks started to rise. We could all feel it coming. Rumors filtered through the gathering crowds, reports of penguins, and whales.
And then, like an invisible hand had descended to open a curtain, the fog parted. The ice, shocking white and blue, stretched out of sight in both directions. The tabular shape looked like a line of sea cliffs, with what appeared to be a series of caves or porticoes, worn into it by the unrelenting waves.
This was the rather clinically named A23a—the world’s largest iceberg. It was almost unimaginably huge. It covers a surface area of about 1,500 square miles: I was told it’s more than three times the size of New York City. A trillion tons of ice. Forty miles across, at its widest. (Manhattan, by comparison, is just 13.4 miles long.) And, of course, more than 90 percent of its mass remained underwater.
Icebergs are tricky. They move and melt. It is a stroke of luck—and the result of expert navigation—that we found ourselves skirting along this immense, icy wonder.
A23a has a rather complicated history. Once part of the vast Filchner Ice Shelf, A23 separated and floated away back in 1986. Caught off guard, a Russian research station known as Druzhnaya I had to be hastily evacuated. In 1987, the Soviets sent a ship, which launched a landing party in a helicopter to gather up the expensive and potentially sensitive equipment they had left behind on the berg.
But the iceberg didn’t travel far, quickly running aground and remaining fastened in place for decades. In 1991, A23a broke off from A23 and became its own separate iceberg. In 2020, it started to move again, moving clockwise and picking up speed. The berg made its way across the Weddell Sea and eventually arrived here, near the South Shetland Islands, on the fringes of the Drake Passage.
Our time with A23a was limited—like everything in this part of the world—by the weather. I could hear the waves washing into those archways, and I marveled at the shape of it, how the iceberg’s cliffs and headlands looked like some island in an extraterrestrial sea.
