National Geographic | Volvo Ocean Race 2001-2002

The yachts in the Volvo Ocean Race, with their high-tech composite hulls, are tough, but not tough enough to take on an iceberg. So as teams make their way south of the southern tip of South America in Leg Four (map), the race will take on a whole new dimension of danger. Here there is every chance the sea will be, at least in places, littered with ice.

Chilling Effect

For most people the word “iceberg” calls to mind giants like the one that got the Titanic. But in the modern world such ice does not normally pose a threat to boats because it is carefully tracked by government agencies and is easily spotted with a radar system, which every Volvo Ocean Race boat has.

The real threats to Volvo racers are smaller chunks known as growlers, which are less than 15 feet (5 meters) long and stick no more than a few feet above the water.

“Speeding through the Southern Ocean at 17 to 20 knots at night, if there’s no moon and it’s pitch black—it’s quite scary,” says Tracy Edwards, who in 1989-90 skippered the first all-female team in the Whitbread/Volvo race. “You know you will see the big ones on radar,” she says. “It’s the growlers that are the problem.”

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Most icebergs form in Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica. In Greenland (illustrated above), several years’ worth of accumulated snow compresses into ice, forming massive terrestrial ice sheets (Figure 1). As ice sheets expand, their edges push into the ocean. Wave action and gravity cause these edges to shear (Figure 2), and an iceberg is born.



Icebergs drift in the Gerlache Strait of Antarctica’s Palmer Archipelago. Photograph by George F. Mobley		Pancake ice, an early stage of ice formation typically found near the leading edge of an ice sheet, gathers on the Southern Ocean, Antarctica. Photograph by Maria Stenzel