Appendix C 



Iceberg Demolition Experiments 



Donald L. Murphy and MSTl Duyane Alexander, USCG (ret.) 



Introduction 



All ice is brittle, especially that in bergs, and it is wonderful how little it takes to accomplish 

 their destruction. A blow of an ax will at times split them, and the report of a gun. by- 

 concussion, will accomplish the same end. Ensign Hugh Rodman, USN in 1890' 



The shocking sinking of the Titanic made the menace that icebergs pose to shipping 

 horribly evident. Icebergs are a clear and present danger to mariners traversing the North Atlantic 

 Ocean in springtime. They are the enemy. Why not just destroy them? In the early 20*^ century 

 it is unlikely that very many people shared Ensign Rodman's optimism on how easy this would 

 be, especially in light of Titanic 's fateful collision, but destroying threatening icebergs seemed to 

 be a reasonable thing to try. For nearly half a century, the Coast Guard International Ice Patrol 

 did just that. The following sections describe Ice Patrol's iceberg-destruction attempts, which 

 were sometimes spur-of-the-moment and other times involved extensive planning. 



Gunfire 



\n April 191 3. U. S. Revenue 

 Cutters Seneca and Miami began taking 

 turns conducting iceberg-scouting 

 patrols in the vicinity of the Grand 

 Banks. On 26 April, less than three 

 weeks after beginning these regular 

 patrols, Miami fired a shot from her 6- 

 pounder gun against the vertical wall of 

 an iceberg. The result was far less 

 dramatic than Ensign Rodman would 

 have predicted since the shot "had no 

 other effect than to shake down a 

 barrelful of snowlike dust."' While this 

 was hardly a concerted or even mildly 

 promising effort at iceberg demolition, 

 it marks the beginning of the 

 International Ice Patrol's experimentation with iceberg destruction. 



In the years that followed, Miami and Seneca fired their 6-pounder guns at icebergs 

 sporadically, partly for diversion and partly for experimentation. Mianus efforts on 26 May 1914 

 involved firing twelve 6-pounder shots at an iceberg southeast of the Tail of the Banks. The 



Figure 1. Seneca's crew conducts target practice with the 

 type of gun used in iceberg demolition attempts. 



44 



