Richard Davenport-Hines:
“…Down to the Sargasso Sea the Labrador Current carried the iceberg that Henry Stengel likened to the Rock of Gibraltar. Its glassy pinnacles pointing at the sun were dissolved by warm rays. Some icebergs develop waterfalls or ponds as they melt. While they rend and fracture, they emit loud noises, like shots from a rifle, as if hurling protests at the sun. Remnants of dead creatures and plants lie fixed in the ice, and as the iceberg dissolves, the stench of decay becomes rank over the ocean. In the Sargasso Sea, at the Labrador Current’s confluence with the Gulf Stream, ridges of Greenland stone and detritus lie on the ocean floor, where they have sunk from melting icebergs. On the surface, at the confluence, sea mists make it an eerie stretch of midocean.
The water is suddenly warmer in the Sargasso, and the iceberg that had sunk the Titanic and was already razed by the sun melted faster. Its pinnacles had receded, the uppermost exposed shape of ice turned sloshy and dripped down into the ocean, the subaquatic bulk, with its deadly protuberances, invisibly dissolved into seawater. The berg dwindled until it was not big enough to sink a canoe. Soon it was a shard of ice giving no sign of its murderous history. The ice turned to water, became formless, then void, deepening the blue Sargasso Sea.”
(‘Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From’, 2012)
