The rest of the story. Greenland was actually green once upon a time. That is, before it started snowing.
Today, Greenland is little more than a vast snow slab two miles thick.
What land there was is now mostly below sea level, submerged by the sheer weight of all of that snow.
A 3,000 years ago, there was a blizzard on Greenland. The snowfall of subsequent seasons compressed
the snow from that one blizzard into a river of ice, a glacier. It was one September long past
when a gigantic chunk of that glacier fractured and tumbled into the Jacob Schaden ice fjord.
Its destination was the open sea. There were about 10,000 such icebergs swarming up in Baffin Bay at the
time. Better to understand them all, we shall stay on the trail of this one iceberg in particular.
It observed very closely. It was not especially large compared to its brethren, about 100 feet tall
and 300 feet long, at which was visible anyway. Because most of it was beneath the water, reaching 500
feet down. It was very heavy. It weighed a million or more times. Yet the statistics do not do
justice to the phenomenal beauty of this floating ice mountain. It was not merely white, but appeared
brilliantly crystalline in the sunlight, refracted through a billion ice-bound air bubbles.
Scientists retrospectively tracking this particular iceberg note that Captain William Adams was
in the vicinity. He was homeward bound aboard his wailing ship. Surely they say he cast his eyes upon
that frigid majesty. Before making his way southward, the iceberg would have to embark on a grand tour
of Baffin Bay, first northward along the western coast of Greenland. All the way to the mouth
of Smith's sound then south along the eastern coast of Baffin Island swept relentlessly by the
current. That is a journey that would have to take many months. Each mile of the way the iceberg
sang, it squealed and creaked and grown, as icebergs do. It also became a living zoo, seals nested
in its crevices. Bohead whales hid themselves in its shadow. Among the scientists who studied this
one individual iceberg is marine biologist Dr. Richard Brown. He wrote a book about its voyage.
Through that iceberg's eyes, the author witnessed the various dramas of that time in that region,
the extinction of the Bohead whales, the hardships of the Eskimos. Dr. Brown follows the beautiful
iceberg until it lasts it travels ever southward into warmer waters, it diminishes to the size of
a coffee table, then disintegrates in a bubble of foam off Bermuda. This was the fate of the snow
that fell on Greenland three thousand years ago. This was the way that beautiful peripatetic palace
of ice passed from us. But before it did it sank the Titanic. Thus did a distant age reach into
the 20th century to disturb the destiny of so many people. Now I know what the history books say.
The Titanic was sunk by an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, April of 1912.
But you know, you know that the Titanic was really lost in a snowstorm 10 centuries before the
birth of Christ, because now you know the rest of the story.