Video

Naming icebergs

Dr Mike Williams from NIWA explains how icebergs are named and that icebergs can have siblings as well.

Transcript

DR MIKE WILLIAMS
The US National Ice Centre started naming icebergs, and they’ve sort of set the precedent of this sort of boring naming system. They divided Antarctica into 4 sectors, so A B C D, the first iceberg to calve from any of those sectors would have been B1, second one B2, etc, etc, and then as those icebergs break up we add another letter on the end. So for example when B15 broke up it broke up into B15 A, and B, and C, and D, and all the way down to K. So it had quite a large number of siblings.

Acknowledgement:
NZ Defence Force, Crown copyright

Rights: The University of Waikato
Published:21 June 2007