Rare black iceberg spotted off Labrador coast could be 100k years old

126 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by pseudolus

61 Comments

tickerticker

8 hours ago

The exposed portion of the berg is roughly spherical. The submerged portion must be enormous and approximately symmetrical to hold that sphere in such an upright position.

Frummy

7 hours ago

So the tip of the iceberg is just the tip of the iceberg

lucyjojo

4 hours ago

Indeed, that tautology is a true statement.

Retric

5 hours ago

With just one photo we can’t really say if the exposed portion is roughly spherical. However, the guy taking the photo who presumably got a better look seems to think it was “diamond shape.”

tantalor

11 hours ago

Check around it for Super Samples!

jvanderbot

5 hours ago

I wish I didn't think this immediately as well.

creaturemachine

3 hours ago

Wait until the Democracy Officer hears of this lack of faith!

bee_rider

12 hours ago

Do black Labrador icebergs also have webbed feet, to swim better?

bregma

11 hours ago

No, but golden Labrador icebergs are the friendliest of all the icebergs and can make a great addition to any family.

burnt-resistor

3 hours ago

The vet bills and cleaning up after them is really ridiculous.

scoot

8 hours ago

Is this just of passing interest, or something that "ists" (scientists, geologists, climatologists etc.) would gain potentially valuable data by taking samples from it?

morkalork

11 hours ago

Will the icebergs broken off get older and older?

cess11

9 hours ago

As long as we keep pushing CO2 into the atmosphere and don't run out of ice, yeah, most likely.

dylan604

11 hours ago

After reading, I'm less interested in a black iceberg as much as now wondering what a fish harvester is as it's not a term I've seen before. Have we changed the term to reflect the vast quantities of fish that fisherman is inadequate?

ahazred8ta

9 hours ago

There's a union or collective bargaining guild that has trademarked the term Professional Fish Harvester in Canada. #PFHCB

serial_dev

9 hours ago

It could be to make fishermen gender neutral, but I think it is to hide the fact that you are essentially killing the fish by the thousands, letting them suffocate. Fish harvesting sounds innocent and PG 13.

tanseydavid

10 hours ago

I am guessing that it is a translation artifact.

creaturemachine

10 hours ago

Newfoundland is predominantly English-speaking, so it's unlikely this reporter used anything else when preparing this story.

soperj

8 hours ago

>Newfoundland is predominantly English-speaking

That's quite generous of you to say.

margalabargala

7 hours ago

For anyone wondering, over 98% of Newfoundland's population speaks only English.

https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/society/language.php

dylan604

6 hours ago

Yeah, Newfies speak English just like Scottish speak English. Those words might be English, but it's the phrasing that makes no sense.

mc3301

5 hours ago

What're you at 'der b'y?

grovesNL

5 hours ago

Yes b'y, Newfoundland English is best kind sure.

fooster

5 hours ago

Newfoundlanders you mean.

brailsafe

5 hours ago

Fairly sure Newfie is broadly used as a colloquial term of endearment in the rest of Canada, by Newfoundlanders and non-Newfoundlanders. There's just too many syllables

creaturemachine

4 hours ago

How about Newfoundland-and-Labradorean? It's funny that the only ones insulted by Newfie are the non-newfies.

fooster

4 hours ago

I am a Newfoundlander and I don’t appreciate that term.

fooster

4 hours ago

It is not. It is insulting and derogatory. Don’t use it thanks.

tejtm

4 hours ago

Curious that.

The English did force the French population out of there and down the Mississippi to become Cajuns.

And the children of the native Abenaki population were sent to English Schools.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians


   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system

margalabargala

2 hours ago

Well sure. Lots of shitty things were done that caused the current state of affairs to come into being.

I was just describing the present day, not defending whatbwas done to create it.

HPsquared

6 hours ago

It makes sense in the context of fish farming. Not sure if that's what this is, though. Harvesting doesn't sound appropriate for catching wild fish.

kkylin

8 hours ago

Might one say fish harvesters capture "exponentially more fish"? (Sorry, couldn't resist...)

dan-robertson

10 hours ago

I think it might be a gender-neutral version of fisherman. Not something like a factory ship.

xeromal

9 hours ago

It's a horrible alternative lol

blipvert

7 hours ago

Wait until you have to deal with the horror of gender specific icebergs!

“It's not only that he is all black. He is almost ... in a diamond shape”

IncreasePosts

8 hours ago

Fisherman: catches fish

Fish harvester: might catch fish, but might also be the one that cleans/processes them and isn't actually involved in pulling the fish out of the water

m3kw9

12 hours ago

When are these going on sale in drinks?

IncreasePosts

8 hours ago

Wouldn't this melt "quickly" due to solar radiation based on how dark it is? That is to say, I wouldn't it most likely be closer to 100 years old than 100,000 years old?

burnt-resistor

3 hours ago

That's for new soot depositing on ordinary, existing glaciers with previously high albedo. That causes a spiraling feedback effect of more forest fires and accelerating glacier melt,

It's probable that these dark glaciers are mostly sludge with only a bit of ice. We won't know until some field researchers go out there and gather data and samples.

malfist

7 hours ago

I'm sure you know more about iceburg ages than the professor of oceanography that dated it.

dotancohen

6 hours ago

To be fair, the guy who just dated it likey knows the least about it. It's the guy who broke up with it that knows the most.

IncreasePosts

2 hours ago

I was literally asking about the range that the oceanographer provided. I didn't assert anything

tromp

11 hours ago

> He guesses the ice in the berg is at least 1,000 years old, but could also be exponentially more ancient — even formed as many as 100,000 years ago.

That's not exponentially more (which would be a preposterous 2^1000 or 10^1000 years old). It's just 100 times more. Should I stop being annoyed at how media use the word and just accept their alternative meaning of "a lot" ?

Scarblac

11 hours ago

It's two numbers. It's a constant increase, you can fit a line between them, but also a degree 10 polynomial or an exponential curve.

Yes, it just means "a lot".

burnt-resistor

2 hours ago

High variance/confidence interval. Probably needs some C14 / O18 dating to narrow it down by field researchers gathering samples rather than us speculating from afar.

escapecharacter

8 hours ago

I agree, you can also say exponential if there's 4 or more numbers.

jhrmnn

11 hours ago

This is how language develops, I’m afraid. But imagine that the age is 10^k where k is something like “age class”. Then indeed the age grows exponentially :)

serial_dev

9 hours ago

It still doesn’t grow exponentially, it is just orders of magnitude older.

Possibly, because if I read between the lines, their answer is “huh I dunno”.

parineum

8 hours ago

Orders of magnitude is an exponential measure.

1*10^n

SAI_Peregrinus

9 hours ago

1.0116^10000 ≈ 100000

Journalists tend to just think of it as "a lot more", but since they didn't specify the base of the exponential we can at least find a way to make the article technically correct. There are fun classes that admit incomparable values, such as the Surreal games. If they'd said "the game {1 | -1} is exponentially more than { | }" then it'd be impossible to find a base to make the statement true. There's lots of fun to be had with this sort of math, as you know.

mekoka

10 hours ago

If we want to express ourselves using exponents, consider that 1000 years (1×10^3) and 9000 years (9×10^3) would be of the same "degree" of ancestry, while 100,000 years (1×10^5) would be of completely different (exponential) significance.

Frummy

8 hours ago

1000^(5/3)=100 000

ghssds

9 hours ago

1.01158^1000 ~= 100000

Exponentially more!

readthenotes1

11 hours ago

10^2 in exponential form...

At least he didn't say logarithmically more

fuzztester

8 hours ago

it's not only the media.

it's just a figure of speech, (used like some people (ab)use "literally"), which I am sure you know, considering your profile, or even otherwise.

other people than the media use it too:

e.g. this Rob Pike post about Go (the programming language, not the game you like):

Less is exponentially more

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

pestatije

9 hours ago

any exponential can reasonably be approximated to a linear in the right range