Resolved to prevent the repetition of such a tragedy and to meet 

 the almost universal demand for a patrol of the ice zone to warn 

 passing vessels of the limits of danger from day to day during the 

 ice season, the United States Navy scout cruisers Birmingham and 

 Chester were ordered to inaugurate such a service that was to con- 

 tinue until the end of the ice season of 1912. Very opportunely, 

 radio had been developed and brought into use by this time, so that 

 much more information could be gathered and disseminated by a 

 ship on patrol in 1912 than would have been possible even a few 

 years earlier. During the season of 1913 the patrol was undertaken 

 by the Treasury Department and performed by the Coast Guard 

 cutters Seneca and Miami. 



At the International Conference on the Safety of Life at Sea, signed 

 at London on January 20, 1914, the high contracting parties provided 

 for the inauguration of an international service of ice observation, ice 

 patrol, and ocean derelict destruction in the North Atlantic. The 

 Government of the United States was invited to undertake the man- 

 agement of this triple service, the expense to be defrayed by the high 

 contracting parties in a fixed proportion. The proposition was 

 favorably considered by the President, and on February 7, 1914, he 

 directed that the (then) Revenue Cutter Service begin as early as 

 possible in that month the international ice-observation and ice-patrol 

 service. Each year since then, with the exception of the years 1917 

 and 1918, a patrol has been maintained by the Coast Guard. Two 

 of the largest and best equipped of the United States Coast Guard 

 cutters have been ordered from their home stations and detailed to 

 keep close watch on the ice so as to be able to warn shipping promptly 

 and effectively of the position and movements of the menacing bergs 

 and floes. The cutters inaugurate the patrol very early in the spring, 

 as soon as the ice begins to push south along the eastern edge of the 

 Grand Banks, and one of the two always remains on duty in the ice 

 area until summer time conditions so melt back the limits of ice that 

 it no longer constitutes a serious menace to the trans-Atlantic lane 

 routes. 



The three southernmost pairs of tracks between North America 

 and Europe (see fig. 1, United States Coast Guard Bulletin No. 17) 

 carry the fastest as well as the largest amount of traffic and are the 

 lanes that the ice patrol strives particularly to guard. They are laid 

 down well to the south of the usual limits of field ice, so the patrol 

 does not have to contend with that sort of ice itself or to warn the 

 United States-Europe traffic of it to any great extent. The ice patrol's 

 great problem is berg ice from the Greenland ice cap. The solid, 

 massive bergs persist in the ocean much longer and extend to far lower 

 latitudes before they melt than does the field ice. For instance, about 

 1,000 miles east of the American coast in 1928 one berg drifted to the 



