A San Diego State University researcher and his graduate student were nearly crushed last month by a four-story iceberg which split apart and fell their way while they were on a dive in the northern Arctic.
Biologist Forest Rohwer and student Steve Quistad were rescued by a service boat from the Russian ice breaker Polaris, which was on a scientific expedition to Franz Josef Land, a chain of brutally cold islands. Rohwer and Quistad recently returned to campus after 40 days at sea.
“We heard a loud noise; I thought our ship had hit an iceberg,” said Rohwer. “I thought, ‘crap, this is the last place I’d want to be on a shipwreck.’ But the sound was from the iceberg cracking. We were underwater at the time. When we surfaced we could see that it was doing a slow roll and was coming right at us. It was a ‘death-berg.’ ”
Quistad said, “I kicked hard and put my hand on my breathalyzer and mask because I thought it was going to fall right on top of me.”
Rohwer was able to grab on to the ship’s Zodiac service boat and climb out of the 28-degree water. Quistad followed, just as the 100-foot long iceberg continued to roll toward the bottom in 40-feet of water. The Zodiac also plucked several other divers out of the water and darted to safety.
The August 20th incident occurred during an expedition that Rohwer and Quistad say was, by turns, magical, odd and insightful. They were exposed to everything from blood-red glaciers that seemed to vault into the sky to fuel barrels left to rust on a beach to gregarious colonies of flatulent walruses. They tried to sleep while ice scraped against the hull of the research ship and trekked across an island where the soil was like quicksand.
The researchers travelled to Franz Josef Land to collect samples from water, land and ice that will help them understand the nature of a largely pristine environment. They also collected fecal samples left by polar bears and from walruses, an animal Rohwer adores.
“They’re very personable creatures,” Rohwer said. " They’re scared of you when they’re on land. But they come up to you in the water. They’re not aggressive; they’re curious.”
Quistad said the animals “look at you, like they’re saying, ‘What are you doing? Then they follow you with this, ‘Oh, don’t leave look.’ ”
Rohwer said, “And they fart a lot. It’s really loud.”
Quistad smiled and said, “Yeah, it really is.”
During part of the trip, they encountered so-called “blood glaciers,” the term given to areas of glaciers that are turned red by the presence of algae. They also photographed empty fuel barrels and other debris that was left behind at Hayes Island, which was abandoned by the Russians during the fall of the Soviet Union.
On other occasions, they moved around in the Zodiac, gazing up at glaciers as tall as a 10-story building.
“The thing you notice most is the light,” Rowher said. “The whites are whiter, the blues are bluer and the blacks are blacker. It makes things weird and odd and beautiful.”