A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
growler
A growler is a small piece of floating glacial ice, less than about three feet above the water and under about fifteen feet across, usually broken off a larger berg. It is the most dangerous ice size there is. Most of it is submerged, it is often dark and clear rather than white, and it is small enough to be lost in the wave clutter on a radar screen while still being hard enough to hole a hull.
Etymology
The name is for the sound. Growlers make a low rumbling and hissing as air trapped in the ice under pressure for thousands of years is released when the ice melts at the waterline, a noise sailors call bergy seltzer. Ice terminology is unusually blunt and mostly onomatopoeic or descriptive: bergy bits, brash, pancake ice, nilas, frazil.
Notes
The size categories are formal, set by international ice services and used in reporting. Above a growler is a bergy bit, and above that an iceberg proper. Because dark clear ice is nearly invisible in a chop and radar returns poorly off it, the standard practice in growler water is a lookout on the bow and a reduction in speed rather than any instrument.