Ice, Ice, Baby

A Frozen Gift to the Sea

It’s early June in Twillingate, a place whose name sounds like poetry. The temperature has reached an unseasonably warm 28°C (a summery 82°F for those in the U.S.), an unusual heatwave for this northern outpost on Newfoundland’s coast. To the north, the once-reflective shell of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean is rapidly retreating, revealing the dark, heat-absorbing water beneath.

A thick fog clings to towering shards of Greenlandic ice that have drifted south on the Labrador Current. This is what locals call a “thick ice year,” and tourists dot the shores, drawn by the spectacle of these ancient giants. The icebergs hiss, pop and scream as they melt, releasing tiny bubbles of air trapped long before smokestacks and engines reshaped the atmosphere.

It feels as if we’ve left the fridge door open in our planetary kitchen—the food-producing, climate-stabilizing engine of Earth. As the ice melts, I know it will fertilize the sea, jump-starting the marine food web. But the deeper concern lingers: without the natural coolants of our planet, we’re all in trouble.

To most people, icebergs are little more than hazards—floating wrecking balls best known for sinking the Titanic and claiming 1,500 lives. But they are also life-givers. As they drift, they churn the ocean and shed nutrients carried from distant lands. In their wake, marine life flourishes. Tiny ecosystems bloom around them, fueled by phytoplankton that soak up carbon, die, and carry it to the sea floor.

I watch a weary iceberg in a cove groan and break, a slab of its front shearing off and crashing into the sea with a thunderous splash. The remaining mass rocks, tilts slightly, and begins to settle—its prow rising in the wave’s wake. Then silence, save for the faint fizz of gas escaping from deep within the ice. Ancient air, breathing out into a changing world.

Though it appears formidable and ancient, this iceberg began its life as something far more fluid—a river of ice. It was born from snowfall accumulating over centuries atop Greenland’s rocky spine, gradually compacting into a glacier that inched its way toward the sea. With each passing day, windblown dust and airborne particles settled onto its surface, becoming entombed by fresh layers of snow like tiny time capsules preserved in ice.

As the glacier broke free into the ocean, it carried with it a rich cargo. Iron and other minerals embedded in the ice act like fertilizer dumps, seeding the surrounding waters and fueling blooms of plankton. This in turn draws in fish and marine mammals, all converging on this cold-water banquet of life. Bottom dwellers such as anemones, sponges, and halibut will eat plankton and in turn, feed other fish. Some of the plankton that drifts to the bottom will become a carbon sink while the living plankton produces oxygen – about fifty percent of what every person breathes each day.

The iceberg isn’t just a floating relic—it’s an ecosystem and a force in motion. Sometimes plunging tens of meters below the surface, it acts like a slow-moving battering ram, displacing and stirring layers of seawater and plowing through the sea floor like an earthworm as it travels, disturbing the ocean’s delicate stratification and leaving a trail of dynamic turbulence in its wake. The iceberg’s death breathes life into marine ecosystems. What appears as vanishing ice is also a quiet act of renewal, nourishing the ocean and sustaining life far beyond its frozen origins.

And so, as the iceberg drifts beyond the headland, trailing a silver thread of mist and memory, I watch it dissolve into the very sea it came to nourish. It is vanishing, but not without offering something back. In its melting, it writes a final letter to the world: a tale of ancient snow and slow persistence, of fracture and flow, of life fed by loss. This frozen gift to the sea reminds us that even in decline, there can be grace, and even in endings, a beginning.