Answers and new pictures about the marbled iceberg

The first picture of the striped iceberg

The "marbled iceberg", that courious striped iceberg we've already spoken about 4 days ago is arousing increasing interest. The experts have today explained the reason that are behind those strange colured stripes:

Normally an iceberg appears White as a result of the tiny bubbles trapped within which scatter light in every direction.
Blue stripes are created when a crevice in the ice sheet fills up with meltwater and freezes so quickly that no bubbles form.
When an iceberg falls into the sea, a layer of salty seawater can freeze to the underside. If this is rich in algae, it can form a Green stripe.
Brown lines are caused by sediment, picked up when the ice sheet grinds downhill towards the sea.

So there is nothing very strange about those coloured stripes except the fact that it's an incredibly rare coincidence that all those phenomenona have occured in a relatively small piece of ice.


A closer look to the stripes


In the meanwhile the research ship of the norwegian sailor Oyvind Tangen, the man that took the original pictures of the striped iceberg, is still encountering quite strange iceberg in the antarctic sea as showed in the pictures below:


another striped iceberg with a striking diagonal blue line through it, which towered about 30 metres above the ocean surface, was spotted a few days later


another unusual ice formation

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