Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Icebergs Work

Episode Date: August 31, 2019

Icebergs: floating chunks of ice. True, but whoa there. Scientists are learning that there's a lot more to icebergs. Appropriately enough, we've only come to understand the tip of the iceberg and recent research shows there's plenty more to uncover. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi everyone, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, it's how icebergs work. It's a good straight ahead stuff you should know up based on a Grabster article, so you know it's quality.

At any rate, kick back and joy, maybe put on a sweater, a little scarf, give yourself some hot cocoa, maybe a little of those marshmallows. Maybe treat yourself and get the colored marshmallows that are in the shapes of stars and moons and stuff. That might actually just be lucky charms, I'm thinking. At any rate, enjoy this episode.

Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this stuff you should know. How's it going everybody? It's a joy stay, Josh.

Oh yeah, how so? Oh, I don't know, it's just, it's been a joy stay, don't you think? I'm very glad you think it's been a joy stay. What do you think? You haven't had a computer, so you don't care. I know, my laptop's been apparently too full of data to operate, whatever that means.

Yeah, he stuffed it up with 250 gigs of shady stuff. That's right, yeah. It's called research. I guess so. Every single bit of that was hard facts, buddy. Yeah. And songs. Yeah, those two.

El Chippo videos. Well there you go, videos tend to stop stuff up. Yeah, especially high res ones. Yeah. That's probably what it was. I would imagine so, on your work computer no less. Well, what am I gonna do, carry on to computers? Why are we talking about this?

I don't know, you started it. Let's hear the intro. Chuck. Yes. I'm quite sure that you'll think I'm kind of stupid for mentioning probably the most famous ship ever to be sunk by an iceberg, but humor me. Of course we all know the wreck of the William Carson,

which in 1977 went down off the coast of Labrador. Yeah. It had a number of cars on board, but more importantly, 109 souls, right? Which is what they call you when you're on to sea, a soul. Yeah, like 109 souls lost. I never really have heard that or paid attention to. Really?

Yeah. Really? I thought they would say lives lost, they say souls. They say souls a lot, or they used to old time UIs. Gotcha. Before Kennedy and the separation of church and state I guess. Right. Yeah, I guess now they call them lives

before they were souls, all souls lost. That's sad. Yeah, it makes it even sadder. It's like the saints crying. Right, right. Under certain circumstances. But luckily 109 souls were not lost. Zero souls were lost in the William Carson,

as everybody knows. The cars went down though, which is a tragedy for the insurance companies covering those cars. But as I said, every school child knows the story of the William Carson. Did you know that there were other ships that have hit icebergs? I was not aware of any.

It's true. The Lady of the Lake. Okay, yeah, I didn't know about that one. Went down in the Grand Banks. Did they make a movie about that? No. No, you're thinking of Excalibur. Okay.

The Lady of the Lake went down in the Grand Banks on its way to Quebec with 70 people on board. 70 souls. 70 souls. The SS Hushedtoft, Hushedtoft. Okay. Yeah, off the coast of Greenland in 1959 on her maiden voyage.

Can you believe this? That makes it so much worse that it's a maiden voyage. 95 people dead. All because of icebergs. I mean, there's been other ships that have hit icebergs, but all because a chunk of floating ice took out an entire ship. Souls and souls and souls were lost.

Yeah, you know we have a young fan named Shelly Stein right now that is about to throw her iPod through a window. Is that the person who always wants to hear about that? That other ship sinking. Yeah. She's been begging for like two years leading up to the anniversary. That's right.

Anyway, what's crazy is that all of these ships were lost. As a matter of fact, between 1882 and 1890, 14 passenger liners went down in a place called Iceberg Alley. But it was only the last 25 years that we started tracking icebergs. What's even more amazing though, is that we have learned a tremendous amount

in those 25 years and are still learning and we will dispense with the learning forthwith. That's right. This was interesting. That's the Grabster? Yeah. Boy, he puts together a nice article, doesn't he? He does.

He knows what he's doing. He's a professional. I never feel bad about his. I bet we were headed with his. You feel bad about some of them? Yeah, like the ones I write. Yeah, sure. The ones you write, they're very adventurous.

They were for the adventure channel, right? Well, yeah, at one point. So Chuck, I think people there sitting at home thinking right now, like they're talking about icebergs. And it's just a chunk of floating ice. You're absolutely right. It is just a chunk of floating ice. Not just a chunk.

There's so much more to it. Sure. For example, iceberg. Salt water? Nope. Fresh water? Yep. Why?

Well, I learned virtually everything I've ever known about icebergs within the past 48 hours. Same here. By the way. It is ice, but it is not sea ice or pack ice, like when you see deadliest catch in their motor and through that sea ice, those aren't little chunks of iceberg.

No. That's salt water. Right, that's frozen sea water. Frozen sea water. And iceberg is a piece of a glacier that has busted off or calved? Calved. Calved?

Like having a calf. Like giving birth to a calf. So it's calving? Calving. Calving. Calving? Yeah. Man, I had it until you threw me off.

Well, saying I thought it would be calving. Calving. Calving, yeah. Away from a glacier. I wonder how many times we just said calving. In a glacier, let's talk about glaciers for a second. Glaciers are packed snow, basically. Well, yeah, but I mean, they're a little more interesting

than that. Well, yeah, that's the base route, though. Right, in certain latitudes, it never gets warm enough for snow to fully melt all the way. In the summertime, sure. So what you have is an accumulation of that snow that builds up over and over and over again. Over the centuries, over the eons.

As old as 10,000 years old sometimes. Right. And that's a glacier. But glaciers are also additionally interesting in that they become so heavy that they, over this freezing thaw cycle and the accumulation of layers, all of the air bubbles are pressed out of them. So glaciers are blue, which is the color of frozen water

with no air in it. And they also move under the force of their own weight. They move downward, downhill, toward sea level, because sea level is as downhill as it gets, right, until you hit the sea. That's right. And so because of this, they are this ultra-dense form of ice.

Yeah, so it slips down, floats out into the sea, tidal motions eventually will cause little cracks in fissures, and then a piece of the glacier will break off and boom, there's your iceberg. That's an iceberg. It's a piece of a glacier. Yeah, freshwater glacier chunks. Right, and it's freshwater because it's made of snow,

not sea water. And when you said that it floats out into the sea, that's called an ice shelf. And up north, in northern latitudes, the biggest ice shelves are found on the western coast of Greenland. Those are Arctic or northern icebergs that are formed up there off of those glaciers.

Down south, in Antarctica, where there are penguins, but it's not the only place there's penguins, I want to make sure everybody knows I know. And no polar bears. No. Only a fool would say that. Yes. Pretty much the continent of Antarctica

is ringed with ice shelves. And there's a lot of open sea, so the icebergs can get really big. Yeah, they tend to stay. They can keep extending, extending, extending, but then like you said, yeah, they break off, and then you have an iceberg. You want to talk about ice?

Yeah, this is fascinating. Like I went over this again and again and again until I finally got it, and I feel like I got it. Oh, it's so easy, though. I was making a lot of it, yeah. Ice, as we all know, is the solid phase of water. You have liquid solid gas. Ice is the solid phase.

32 degrees Fahrenheit for fresh water. Or zero Celsius. Yep. Salt water is going to need to be a little bit colder, because there are basically salt molecules getting in the way of the ice forming. Well, they move faster, I believe, than water molecules. And it takes a lower temperature to slow them down.

And also, it's greater density if you're talking salt water. Right, which is important. Very important. But ice also is peculiar, meaning unique, in that it's the only solid phase of any substance, I believe, that is less dense than the liquid phase. So ice is less dense than water. And then sea water is denser than fresh water.

So, Priscilla. Well, and it's easy to remember that ice is less dense, because when you put a little ice cube in your little chardonnay this summer, if you're a redneck, it'll float. Because there's little ice forms in a crystalline shape, so that leaves area for gaps, I guess. And so, what is that air in there? Yeah, I'm sure there's air.

Or it's just less dense. It's just the, it's less dense. Basically, if you take water and freeze it, you can think of it as spreading out. Sure. So it gets bigger, it has a larger volume, but it'll weigh the same as that lesser amount of water. Right.

Right? And when you put something, say, ice in water, it's buoyant in that the amount of water it displaces has to equal the weight of the ice that's displacing it. Yeah. But since there's more ice than an equal weight of water, there's some leftover that floats, and that is what we call the tip of the iceberg.

Then when do you get confused? Yes, the tip of the iceberg. That is the part that sticks out. And it's about, depending on the iceberg, about 1.6 to 1.9. And I'm sure everyone's seen those awesome pictures on the interwebs of the top of the water and under the water of the iceberg. It's pretty cool.

Right. You seen those? I have. It's very nice. And the reason there's variation between how much iceberg is showing is because of the variation in the concentration of salt in seawater, any particular part of seawater.

And also, some icebergs are denser than others, as Morrissey said. Just like people. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned earlier that glacial ice is blue. That is true. During different melting and freezing cycles, though, they will turn white because the air gets

trapped in there. And then sometimes, these really old icebergs that have formed at the bottom of these thick Antarctic ice shelves that have been around for thousands of years might actually have a greenish hue because it's just soaked up organic matter under there over the years. Right. And then, so which is kind of a dirty yellow-brown.

But icebergs have the tendency to roll over without warning, which is one reason why you wouldn't want to camp on an iceberg. No, they're dangerous to be around. They are. And actually, there was one that floated down to New Zealand. And some helicopter charters were selling flights to go check them out.

And one of them landed on the iceberg. And they realized pretty quickly they shouldn't do that anymore. That's a good idea. Did they get in trouble, did it? No, they made it out OK. But when they got back and told people, I'm sure, some scientists was like, wait, what did you just do?

Right. Don't ever do that again, TC. But the iceberg will roll over. And so you've got the green part up with the light reflecting up through the blue part. And you get this brilliant emerald green. And that's some old ice right there, buddy. Yeah, it is.

Bubbie? Yes, Bubbie. I've never said that before. Oh, stop, you should know. Come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted

Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The life cycle of an iceberg is pretty interesting, too. We mentioned they can be as old as 10,000 years before they ever reach the ocean.

And this is like centuries of compression. So that's why it's so dense. That's why it's blue. And then once it calves off, though, and from the glacier, you've got about three to six years on average. Right. If it stays, like say it's up in the iceberg alley and never strays below the 48th parallel, which is apparently

where the water starts to get a lot warmer. 40th parallel goes for Americans through the tip of Minnesota and the upper peninsula of Michigan. People below that are like, it's still pretty cold. Yeah, I imagine. So ones that stay up there and never come back down can float around for like 50 years. Yeah, and just kind of melt away slowly and quietly.

Right. Ones that make it further south, like one made it to Bermuda once, which I'm sure was quite a surprise. Yeah, I'm sure. Those go away fairly quickly. Yeah, and I enjoyed this. One account of this expedition, what was the guy's name? Dr. Gregory Stone, witnessed and wrote about in his book

Ice Island, which I believe the largest ones are called Ice Island sometimes. Yeah, right. His quote is, and this iceberg basically became destabilized and it sounds like it exploded, like right in front of his face. Yeah, he said that there was an ice debris field across two miles. Yeah, and he said it was like shards of crystal shattering.

Right, but if you think about it, that's what happens when you put an ice cube in water. Yeah, you hear that noise. Right, it's called thermal shock. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And it's also because ice is less dense than water. As it's liquefying, it shrinks, because think about it, it's contracting, and it's pulling apart the outer, warmer layer

from the inner, colder layer, and this cracks form and the ice cube essentially explodes. It sounds like that's the same thing that happened. Yeah, so when you pour that 12-year-old Scotch on top of your single cube of ice, if you're into that. I don't know if you should be doing that, but OK. I'm not a neat guy. I like it a little cold, and I'm not so hardcore with the

single malt, so to remove that bite just a bit is good for me. So you don't like to get neat through your nose? No, it's not the way to do it. Yeah, you drink it with ice through your mouth? Yeah, I know Scotch pure scoff at me, but scoff away. Whatever, just do what you like. Exactly. That was very supportive.

I meant you as people in general. Oh, OK, so that wasn't supportive. Let's talk about some factoids. And this is, to me, the fact of the show is that there are actually six official classifications for their size. And the first two, it sounds like they were having a lot to drink when they had the naming party.

And they sobered up a bit, because the smallest ones, about the size of a car, maybe a little smaller, called growlers. And then the next one, maybe about the size of your house, is called a burgy bit. I put the emphasis on bit, like a burgy bit. A burgy bit? Either way, it's pretty cute.

It is very cute. And then they got, I guess, sobered up or got bored or ran out of whiskey. And then they said, all right, then the next ones are small, medium-large, and very large, which is really boring compared to burgy bit. It is. But the very large ones are kind of interesting, and they

just keep going and going. The largest one ever recorded is the B-15 iceberg. Broke off of the Ross Ice Shelf down in Antarctica. Apparently, it was about the size of Jamaica. Yeah. I think it's broken apart into smaller pieces since. But I think the original area was about 6,800 square miles. That's a big chunk of ice.

Yeah, and in order to be, I mean, that's the upper limit. Like, it can just be as big as they're going to get. There's no, like, cap or anything like that to call it super extra large, but very large. You have to be about 24 stories tall and a little longer than two football fields, 670 feet, to be classified as very large. Yeah.

That's big, man, if you think about that. Yeah. It's huge. I'm sorry, it's very large. Or it's huge. Huge. The other two classifications that icebergs can fall in are equally boring as the last four size names.

They really could have done better than this, if you ask me, but the two shape classifications are tabular and non-tabular. And tabular is basically just like a, well, it looks like a table or a tablet, a writing tablet, and it's back. And it's tall with steep sides and a flat top. It's like a floating plateau. And those tend to come off of the ice sheets down in the

Antarctic, I believe. Yeah, I think they have to have a width five times greater than their height to be tabular. And then non-tabular have, I think, five different classifications. You got blocky, flat top, steep sides. They sound like Dick Tracy characters. They do.

Wedged, flat with a steep surface on one side and a gradual slope on another. So it's like the high right haircut. Yeah, the gumby. The gumby. The dome, which is round and smooth, pinnacle, which means it has at least one big, tall spiral sticking up. And then the ones that deteriorate to where they

form a big canyon, and it looks like two different icebergs, but it's really connected underneath, those are dry docks. So that means they have two tips sticking out, but they're connected underwater. It's like mind-blowing. It's pretty mind-blowing. It's pretty neat, at the very least.

So we've got northern icebergs, southern icebergs. And there's plenty of icebergs like elsewhere, but for the most part, northern icebergs, like we said, form off the western coast of Greenland. Because Greenland, apparently, I read this, that Greenland and Antarctica are the only place where there's ice sheets. Oh, really?

Glacial. True glacial sheets. Glacial sheets. Boy, that's a tough one. That was. It surprised me, too. I wasn't expecting that. And in Greenland, there's about 20 glaciers that

cap the majority of the icebergs. Yeah, that was, I thought, pretty cool. I thought it was cool, too. Roughly 40,000, medium to large, cap from Greenland glaciers each year. Is that right? And they are about 10% as strong as concrete, which I thought sounded not super strong, but apparently that's

like way harder than your freezer ice. Oh, yeah. Like this ice is different than the ice you put in your scotch. Right, which is why when icebergs run into one another, it tends to break it up into smaller icebergs. They're very much subject to wave motion, storms, other icebergs, land.

When they run into things, they break up. And it's one of the things that has a big deletrious effect on their lifespan. But it's part of the iceberg life cycle. Are we still going with deletrious? Yeah. OK, good. They are pretty slow.

But to give you an idea, a fast-moving iceberg goes about 2.2 miles per hour. And that's hauling. Oh, I'm glad you bring this up, because that raises a very important point. Because we see the tip of the iceberg, and because we're so anthropocentric, we assume that when it drives icebergs, you'd be dead wrong in assuming that, since most of the

iceberg is under water, it's currents that drive icebergs. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. And so that's how icebergs can be trapped in the Antarctic, because they're trapped in that current, or up north in the Labrador current. They kind of stay trapped up there. But it also makes them subject to wave motion currents

from other far, far off storms. And I guess getting hung up on things underwater. Yes, as well. It's another good point, is they apparently strike the bottom of land a lot. Yeah, and they can wreck the seafloor, can't they? Yeah. But if you think about it, there's plenty of parts of

North America, where glacial movement carved geological features out of the land. The icebergs do the same thing when they're dragged along by the current, and say, once 1,000 feet tall underwater, and it hits a patch of sea that's less than 1,000 feet, it's going to strike hard. New York City. And fast.

Go to Central Park and look at the rocks there. Oh, yeah? Yeah, they got all those little grooves cut out. That's ice. That's ice, ice baby. Nice. No, that was not nice. The ecology, this was sort of surprising to me, because I

just figured they're just floating along. Maybe they melt a little bit. What's the big whoop? But I didn't really consider the fact that it's melting this glacial freshwater, a lot of it at times, depending on the size of the iceberg, all around in the sea water. And that's got to have some sort of ecological effect. Yeah, and I couldn't find anything anywhere that said

like there's a lot of life that's adapted to living in freshwater, even though it's home is seawater, and they live around icebergs. I couldn't find anything like that. But apparently, it has little effect on these animals, because icebergs are basically like floating time released nutrient capsules. Yeah, it's like teeming with life around it.

So they must love it, these little krill and plankton. It's like a lot of small stuff, generally. Well, there's a definite, what's that chain called? Food chain that icebergs support. They bring a lot of iron-rich nutrients from the land as a gift to the sea. And as they melt, they slowly release this stuff. This supports algae, so there's a lot of algae that grows

on there. Krill, these little tiny shrimp-like things, eat the algae. And then all these other animals eat the krill. And then the birds prey on the other fish that are eating the krill. So this whole food chain develops around this iceberg. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

But even something that I think they've only recently begun to figure out is that icebergs are, there is sign of climate change, like everybody's worried about all the icebergs melting and sea levels rising, and for good reason. But they're also figuring out that they also aid in carbon sequestration in the ocean. That makes sense.

So this algae and all this stuff as they're eating this iron, there's a transfer of carbon from the land to this life that eventually will die, fall down to the bottom of the sea, and keep the carbon trapped with it. So algae that wouldn't be there is soaking up carbon and then being eaten and passed along in this undersea food chain. And they found that the carbon absorption around an

iceberg is twice what it is elsewhere. Because this algae wouldn't be there if it weren't for the iceberg. Wow. So it's soaking up the CO2. That's crazy. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade

of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it

back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week

to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. They also take it away, what icebergs give it, and not just boats and ships, like the Titanic. There I said it. OK. They can actually, like I said, they can clog up shipping lanes.

They can, in the case of B-15, I think, it actually had a pretty deleterious effect on emperor penguins. Yeah, in March of the, March of the Penguins. I just haven't seen that yet. And they, so, you know, what happens in that sad movie, I guess, what, do they have to walk around it? Yeah, and there's a, they really have a tight schedule.

So when they hit an iceberg that's, you know, taller than them, penguins don't fly, remember? Yeah. And is really wide, they have to go around it. Boy, they should learn to fly. Yeah. That would just solve a lot of problems. That really would.

So, yeah, it can have negative effects on the little penguins, the cute little penguins. And it can rake the sea floor and just destroy it, basically, over the course of many years. Yeah. No good. No. Another cool thing.

OK. And this, I don't know, I couldn't find if they're actually moving on this. But the United States military called up the Rand Corporation and said, hey, boy, these things are huge chunks of awesome drinking water. Totally safe to drink. Because it's like from the water, boy.

Yeah, like a little glacial, oh, really? I never saw that all the way through. That's pretty good. They called the Rand Corporation and said, hey, can we study these things? And how viable is it to? I know it sounds crazy. But how viable is it to get one of these icebergs over here

and provide fresh drinking water for people who need it? Right. And it sounds like it's not the most ridiculous idea in the world. Their study said that a system allowing a 10% yield could provide water for 500 million people at a cost of $8 per 1,000 cubic meters. Which is not too bad.

I mean, it's way more expensive than it should be, I think, than we pay for water now. But our water is artificially cheap. So as water becomes more expensive, if there's any icebergs left, we may want to go do that. And they say, I guess they just nudge it through the water closer and closer. And this is where it gets a little hinky.

It says in the article, using massive insulating sheets to slow the melting. I don't know what that looks like. It looks like mylar, like you used to reflect the sun on your car. That's what they would use? Sure. That's all it'll take.

You know, like those sun blankets or whatever? Yeah, yeah. Just something to reflect the sunlight, radiation. Well, it's also moving into warmer water, though. It's not going to melt it from below, or? Yeah, it'll melt it from below, for sure. But I mean, you protect what you can, I guess. I guess if you're harvesting icebergs, you're right.

They're not the only ones looking at this. I ran across an MIT proposal of building a pipeline from Alaska where there's plenty of glaciers to the Western US. Makes sense, but the author concluded it's like $487 billion to build this pipeline and keep it going. That just wouldn't be worth it. And canals, too. Another group studied that and suggested a canal.

Well, in the United States, if it's exactly hurting for water, it'd be nice if they did some of these studies and pushed it to where they don't have fresh water right now at all. Right. You know, it's been a little money for them, like life straws. Well, I guess we already went over. Well, Iceberg Alley is actually a little more interesting.

They started studying it. They formed the International Ice Patrol way later than they should have, I guess, but they probably didn't have the equipment they needed back in the day to do what they do now. The US Coast Guard administers it. And they warn ships. They kind of run it through their little program

and say, we think this is where it's headed. This is how big it is. If you're in this area, you might want to watch out for this guy floating your way. Well, they basically say, like, there's ice up here. Don't go above these coordinates. It's called the limit of all known ice. Wow.

And the Coast Guard also does some other stuff for the, I should say, the ice patrol. They do other things like bomb icebergs. Yeah, did you find out more about that? No, I looked it up on YouTube because I was like, surely somebody's video took somebody dropping a bomb on an iceberg. I couldn't find anything. Plenty of calving stuff.

And they also spray paint them with very bright paint, which it seems wrong to me. Just so you can see them. Yeah, that's like tagging like a new car or something. Yeah, a beautiful new car made by nature. That wasn't a good analogy. Or putting radio transmitters on them, which makes sense. But then when they start to break up,

it's like, well, there's a little chunk that has the radio transmitter. Three feet big. Yeah. So I got nothing else. I don't either. Oh, I've got something else. All right, what you got?

So I became interested in the idea of this article mentions a nautical mile. Sure. Well, like, why? Why is there a nautical mile and a mile? And I found out why. So a nautical mile is 1.1508 miles. And the reason why is because a nautical mile,

when going around the equator, takes into account the curvature of the Earth. A regular mile, or a statute mile is what it's called, goes from one point on the map to another through a straight line, which means that it's not taking into account the curvature of the Earth, which means that the nautical mile is more accurate and thus a little longer than the regular mile.

Interesting. From minute to minute along a degree. So a mile is really not a mile. So what you're saying, on land? No. No, it's not because it's like if you take the Earth, cut it in half at the equator, and turn it over. You've got the two halves, and you're

looking in the molten center. And you divide it into 360 degrees. Divide those degrees into minutes, and then measure a minute to a minute. If you do a straight line, it's not as accurate. If you do the curved line, it will be accurate. And a kilometer is just way out there. In 1791, the French Academy of Sciences

said, OK, we're going to designate a kilometer as the length, the distance from the north pole to the equator through Paris. Yeah, sure. Divided by 10,000. Pretty clever. So there you have it, nautical miles. I love it.

Thanks, man. I really went all out on this one, if you ask me. I think so, too. Kudos, sir. If you want to learn more about icebergs, you can type in that word, I-C-E-B-E-R-G-E-S, in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. I'll bring up this fine, fine article by Greg Bernowski.

And I said search bar at howstuffworks, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this one good email from a Chicago guy. The terrible title. Just yesterday, guys, I was finished reading a book Robin Dunbar wrote called Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language.

Her argument is that language evolved out of a need to keep up social relationships with group members, put in its most basic form over time. Our brains evolved to be larger, which made our average group size increase at the same time. Once our group size became large enough, today our average group size is about 150. We didn't have enough time in the day to groom one-on-one

with that many group members to keep up our social bonds with them so we evolved language. So we could use language as a way to verbally groom with more members at a time to keep the group strong. That's interesting. It was my understanding that our brains have actually decreased in size over the last 20,000 years. Oh, really?

Uh-huh. Because of group size, because it's increased, and we have to rely less on our instincts and run from thunder and stuff like that. I smell a cage match. Another interesting experiment I read about is this. Two scientists were studying vervet monkeys in their natural habitat.

They started recording the sounds of the vervets and making notes about what they were doing when they made the noise. After examining a large sample of noises, they found a correlation between the sound they made and what was happening when they made it. I believe the noises were difficult to distinguish by the naked human ear, but the pattern

was obvious when they compared large numbers of them together. The vervets made a different noise for when an air predator was spotted, when a ground predator was spotted, when approaching a dominant male, et cetera. It's not quite language or lack syntax, but it's still more advanced than I thought they were. And that's pretty much it.

I hope it wasn't too dense. But if it was, then that is revenge for the sun podcast. That is a listener right there. That's right. And that is from Matt Schunke from Chicago. Thanks, Matt. Schunke? Go Bears.

Yeah, seriously, go Bears. I guess I always like to hear about new books that I should be reading. Oh, sure. Like we have any time for that anymore. Yeah. Did you hear that? That was lament.

It was. Send us your book recommendations, suckas. You can turn it into SYSK podcast on Twitter. You could send it to facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Don't send it. I guess you posted on that. Or you can send us an email, good old fashioned electronic

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