When you think of icebergs, you probably think of those large white objects you see in movies and pictures. In rare situations, they can also be seen in a different form. When the iceberg gets flipped upside-down, it looks like a giant shiny piece of ice that’s the color of the surrounding water.
That’s what photographer Alex Cornell came across last month while sailing through the Drake Passage to Antarctica. After days of staring at ordinary white icebergs, the boat came across an iceberg at Cierva Cove that had just flipped over in the water.
Cornell and some others then hopped onto a little Zodiac cruiser that allowed them to get close to the strange-looking iceberg.
“We were lucky to see a massive iceberg flip; when this happens, the color is a surreal, alien blue. They don’t flip often, so it was a pretty rare sight to see. It’s hard to tell scale, but this was an epic iceberg.”
It was “the 90% you always hear about below the surface” that causes flips to be quite rare, Cornell tells us. “It was amazing to see the interior. There were air bubbles and flowing water throughout. It looked like an alien artifact.”
He ended up shooting quite a few photos and some footage of the iceberg using his Canon 5D Mark II and a 16-35mm f/2.8 lens.
Image credits: Photographs by Alex Cornell and used with permission
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.