Black iceberg spotted off Labrador could be result of an asteroid strike
The picture first surfaced last month after a fish harvester from Carbonear, N.L., took a photo of it while fishing for shrimp last month.
Hallur Antoniussen, 64, was working aboard the Saputi, a factory freezer trawler operated by the Qikiqtaaluk Fisheries Corporation, off the coast of Labrador in mid-May, when he spotted the black berg.
'I have seen icebergs that are rolled, what they say have rolled in the beach with some rocks in it,' he told CBC Radio's Labrador Morning show. 'This one here is completely different. It's not only that he is all black. He is almost … in a diamond shape.'
He took his picture from about six kilometres away, estimating the size of the visible portion at about three times that of a bungalow home. That would mean a submerged portion equal to about 27 more bungalows.
'It's something you don't see very often, and a camera is not something I run around (with) when I'm working,' Antoniussen told the CBC. 'So I just ran to my room and took my phone and snapped this picture.'
Comments peppered his Facebook post, suggesting that the colour was toxic gas trapped in ice, or perhaps a rare mineral. Once the photo began circulating more widely — news organizations in Britain, Israel, India, Italy and elsewhere have written about it — the theories grew wilder.
A story Monday in Vice magazine opened with the headline: 'That Ominous Black Iceberg Probably Isn't a Sign From the Aliens,' clearly not willing to rule out extraterrestrials entirely.
But the truth could actually be in a similar vein. Dr. Lev Tarasov, a Memorial University physicist and glacial earth systems modeller, told the CBC that the berg's hue likely came from the glacier from which it calved picking up rocks and dirt on its way to the sea.
'There's parts of the ice that are actually flowing up to 20 kilometres per year, which would mean that … the ice is moving maybe a few metres every hour,' he said.
They pick up rocks and dirt along the way. Some of that debris could have come from volcanic ash from an eruption in Greenland or Iceland. And some could have come from outer space.
Back in 2018, scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks using ice-penetrating radar discovered a 31-kilometre impact crater in northwestern Greenland, formed by an asteroid strike. It would have been relatively recent in geological terms, perhaps 11,000 years ago, or as far back as a few million.
Tarasov estimated some some of the ice in the berg is at least 1,000 years old, but that it could be much more ancient, perhaps as old as 100,000 years. Either way, the dirt that gives it its colour probably hasn't seen the 'light of day for hundreds of thousands of years.'
Icebergs are generally paler in colour, and Antoniussen's picture handily contains a more normal specimen off to one side. Most icebergs look white because they contain tiny air bubbles and ice-crystal edges that reflect all wavelengths of visible light. There are others that look blue or even green, but black is out-of-this-world rare.
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According to NASA, about once a year a car-sized asteroid enters Earth's atmosphere but burns up before it can touch down. One expert told Live Science that while it's impossible to know for sure how many asteroids hit Earth each year, he estimated "about 6,100 meteorite falls per year over the entire Earth, and about 1,800 over the land." Most of these go undetected, but occasionally they'll capture the public's attention, like Hodges' meteorite. For instance, in 1992 a 26-pound meteorite landed on a red Chevy Malibu in New York, and in 2013, one exploded over Russia. There has also been evidence of a meteorite killing a man and injuring another in 1888. Meteor Crater, which is almost a mile wide, in Arizona shows the impact a large meteorite can have. Prondzinski told Business Insider that in the years since Hodges was struck, her story remains popular, and people have contacted the museum about using the story in movies, plays, and even a graphic novel.
