🧊 Somebody had to land on each one of these

Every line is the path of a single iceberg, recorded by a GPS beacon that a field team placed on it by hand, stepping off a helicopter onto the ice. 224 of them between 1997 and 2024. The colour says when.

🛰 Why bother, when satellites can see ice? Satellites tell you where an iceberg is. A beacon tells you where it is going, every hour, through polar night and storms, until the ice it sits on finally breaks apart beneath it. Some of these beacons reported for over four years.

🗺 Watch the route. The tracks are not scattered. They funnel out of the Canadian Arctic, squeeze down between Greenland and Ellesmere, and then run south along the Baffin coast towards Labrador. That is the current doing the steering, and it is the same corridor that carries ice into the shipping lanes and offshore installations of the Northwest Atlantic. This is why these campaigns are funded.

🏔 The thickest bundle of tracks comes from the ice islands: slabs calved from the floating tongue of the Petermann Glacier and from the Ellesmere ice shelves, large enough to be named and followed for years rather than weeks.

⚠️ One important caveat, and it is on the map itself. This is not a survey of Arctic icebergs. It shows the icebergs somebody went out to tag, so what you are watching is as much a map of research campaigns as of ice. Thousands of bergs drift unrecorded every year, most of them for a few weeks before they melt.

⬇️ For contrast, our previous piece followed Antarctic icebergs tracked by radar from orbit: hundreds at once, no fieldwork, one position a day. Two hemispheres, two completely different ways of knowing where the ice goes.

📊 Data: Iceberg Beacon Track Database, Canadian Cryospheric Information Network