A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
iceblink
Iceblink is a white or yellowish glare on the underside of low cloud, produced by light reflecting up off a large area of sea ice or an ice sheet below and beyond the horizon. It is a way of seeing ice you cannot see. Its opposite is water sky, a dark streak on the cloud base marking open water, and a navigator reading the sky can map the ice edge for many miles ahead of the ship.
Etymology
The word came into English from Dutch or Danish, arriving with Arctic whaling and exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Blink in the northern languages carries the sense of a gleam or a glitter rather than the eyelid movement, which is the older sense in English too and survives in the word blinkers and in the sea usage.
Notes
Before radar and before satellites, iceblink and water sky were the working instruments of ice navigation, and the logs of Arctic ships record them constantly. They still work, and they are still taught, because they show conditions at a distance no radar reaches. A crow’s nest was put on a masthead partly to get an observer high enough to read the sky.