# Why do you never hear of city sized icebergs hitting other coastlines & wreaking havoc?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [November 3, 2011, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720 "2011-11-03T06:55:19Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2011, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/1 "2011-11-03T06:55:19Z")
In looking at this news article below I wondered why I had never heard of a huge iceberg hitting the coastline of another land mass and causing massive destruction. Is there something that keeps them away from land once they separate from their original land mass?
[NYC-sized iceberg being born on Antarctica](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45138155/ns/us_news-environment/)
> [@](#):
>
> 18-mile-long crack along unstable ice shelf spotted by NASA scientists
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### Author:  [@scudsucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scudsucker)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2011, 8:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/2 "2011-11-03T08:49:32Z")
Most of an iceberg is below the surface of the water; the iceberg is unable to approach land as it would run aground fairly far off shore.
That article suggests that the resultant iceberg would be 1640 feet / 500m deep; assuming the commonly quoted fact that 90% is below the surface, the iceberg would bottom out in 1476 feet / 450m of water.
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### Author:  [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2011, 9:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/3 "2011-11-03T09:11:43Z")
I thought of continental shelves, too, but then I thought that an iceberg that runs aground is just going to lose its lowest bits and keep coming. My best guess is ocean currents: Icebergs go with the flow, and that seems to be parallel to land, not straight towards it.
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### Author:  [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2011, 9:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/4 "2011-11-03T09:56:55Z")
18 miles? Feh. That’s nothing. City sized? How about one that was the size of Jamaica?
> **[Iceberg B-15](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_B-15)**
>
> Iceberg B 15 was the largest recorded iceberg by area.\[Note 1\] It measured around 295 by 37 kilometres (159 by 20 nautical miles), with a surface area of 11,000 square kilometres (3,200 square nautical miles), about the size of the island of Jamaica. Calved from the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica in March 2000, Iceberg B-15 broke up into smaller icebergs, the largest of which was named Iceberg B-15-A. In 2003, B-15A drifted away from Ross Island into the Ross Sea and headed north, eventually breaki...
B-15 was 183 miles by 23 miles in size. If you look at B-15’s path, it mostly went parallel to the coast, as per Derleth’s post. Its breakup was caused by repeated grounding, though, with some help from storms. B-15 never wreaked havoc on the coastline of another landmass as per the OP, but it did wreak some havoc on the coast of Antarctica.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
This collision with the Drygalski tongue forced a redrawing of Antarctic maps.
[/QUOTE]
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### Author:  [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2011, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/5 "2011-11-04T03:01:11Z")
Probably another factor is that there are few densely populated coastal areas in the latitudes in which icebergs can long endure. If a huge iceberg crashes into the unpopulated coast of Ellesmere Island, it won’t wreak havoc because there’s really not much upon which havoc could be wreaked.
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### Author:  [@mac\_bolan00](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mac_bolan00)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2011, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/6 "2011-11-04T03:25:55Z")
let’s see, what’s left of my knowledge in fluids is a floating object caught in an unbounded current will invariably go to the edge of the current and stop dead in calm water. of course, in a bounded current (a river) it will keep going. my guess is it ends up in a calm portion of the atlantic or pacific well away from the continents where it eventually melts.
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### Author:  [@lisiate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lisiate)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2011, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/7 "2011-11-04T03:29:45Z")
In addition the [Antarctic Circumpolar Current](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Circumpolar_Current) and the prevailing means that nearly all Southern icebergs are just going to end up going around Antarctica.
A fragment of B-15 made it as far north as Timaru, but never came with in 60 kilometres of the coast.
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### Author:  [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2011, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/8 "2011-11-04T03:47:11Z")
> [@Derleth](#):
>
> I thought of continental shelves, too, but then I thought that an iceberg that runs aground is just going to lose its lowest bits and keep coming.
It is going to lose a lot of momentum, and keep sinking deeper, as it scrapes off its lower parts. By the time it makes it to shore, if it ever does, it is going to be a lot smaller and will not have much kinetic energy.
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### Author:  [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2011, 8:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/9 "2011-11-04T08:57:14Z")
Um, because icebergs follow ocean currents, and ocean currents don’t generally ram coastlines?
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### Author:  [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2011, 9:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-never-hear-of-city-sized-icebergs-hitting-other-coastlines-wreaking-havoc/601720/10 "2011-11-04T09:26:16Z")
Thanks for the link to the fascinating article on B15. I never thought of “individual” [icebergs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg), but it is a cool idea that an ice-island the size of Jamaica has roamed the oceans like the Flying Dutchman, or an icy, floating version of Atlantis.