A black iceberg was sighted off the labrador. The hypotheses on its nature range from glacial debris to volcanic ash, up to a cosmic origin.
A fisherman on board the fishing boat Knowingoff Labrador In mid -May, he immortalized a very rare show: a Black iceberg As a soot, almost in the shape of a diamond, which floated silently among the icy waters and its white cousins.
An out of the ordinary iceberg
Hallur Antononiussen, originally from the Faroe Islands, with over 50 years of experience between the waters of Greenland And Labrador, he admitted that he has never seen anything like this: “It is not only all black … it is almost in the shape of a diamond”. The shot became viral on social media, attracting thousands of reactions, between ironic comments and scientific questions.
Because it can be black
There are various hypotheses that explain how theiceberg it could become black. The first wants to be linked to glacial debris. Lev Tarasov, glaciologist of Memorial University, explains that i glaciers drag tons of pulverized rock and silt with rocky bed. When these materials are incorporated into the ice, which then detaches in the form of iceberg, they can give it a dark color. This is also possible because some glacial flows of Greenland move at rhythms up to 20 km/year.
A second hypothesis suggests that the color is due to Vulcanic ash or soot. Eruptions, even distant as those in Iceland, can deposit dark material on the ice which then remains trapped for centuries. The Canadian service etc. also indicates large forest fires as possible sources of coloring.
The “alien” hypothesis
A third hypothesis, rarer but fascinating, is that cosmic. Tarasov does not exclude that dark material can derive from a meteoric impact. “Let’s think about Hiawatha crater in north-western Greenland,” he says. “An event that dates back to tens of thousands of years ago, but whose material may have been trapped in a glacier and only now arrived at sea”.
A meteoric impact may have deposited dark material in depth in Greenish glaciers. Such uniform iceberg – according to scientists – indicates an ancient origin: between 1,000 and 100,000 years.
According to Tarasov, in fact, the homogeneous distribution of the material suggests a ancient icebergsurvivor of millennia of pressure, melting and reico cycles, and transport through the moving glaciers.
What is the most likely explanation?
To understand which hypothesis is correct, it will be necessary to spot another similar specimen and, ideally, take a scientific champion to analyze the composition of the trapped material.
Only then can we say with certainty what this really generated this Black icebergwhich became viral on the net and the object of global amazement.
