Jane Mergenthaler, age 9, of Levittown,

Is there any salt in an iceberg?

Many years ago, Andy was on a ship when the thudding engines came to a sudden stop  It was a cold, raw morning and a heavy, white fog rested on the grey waters of the North Atlantic  Later, a few sunbeams poked their fingers through the fog and it blew away in frothy, white scarves and billows  Then everyone could see why the ship had stopped her engines, On every side there were icebergs, big ones and little ones  Andy used his eyes to count 126 of them  A drifting ship was safe  A ship steaming full speed ahead certainly would have crashed into one or more of them and sunk 

Each iceberg looked for all the world like a lumpy chunk of frozen sea water, But it was not  It was a chunk of greenish  grey ice, broken from a huge glacier far to the north  Most likely it came from where the thick glaciers of Greenland meet the sea, There the pounding waves break off great mountains of ice, especially in early spring, The broken chunks fall into the sea and drift down into the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic Ocean 

A glacier forms from dainty snowflakes and snowflakes form from water vapor floating in the cold, cold air, We cannot say that there is absolutely no salt in the air at all  For the restless sea tosses its salty spray into the air and/few fine particles of salt dry out arid go floating away with some of the dried up moisture  But these few fine fragments are far too small for our eyes to see, They hardly count at all 

A lacy snowflake is made from crystals of ice and pockets of air and once in a great while the air might,  just might, contain a particle of salt  So we are fairly safe in saying that a snowflake is made from fresh water

This fresh water forms a glacier when piles of snow pack together in masses of solid ace  The edges of the glacier break off to form icebergs which go floating along on the ocean currents,

An iceberg, then, is a great chunk of fresh‑water ice  However, it is not like the clean, sparkling ice cubes from the refrigerator  The glacier rolls along the dirty ground, gathering dirt arid stony gravel  All this grime is frozen into the ice  When it gets to a certain size, the glacier begins to move, it may glide slowly down a slope  It may spread out from the center of a flat ice field  The edges of the glacier melt and run away in icy streams and if a few fine fragments of salt were trapped in the snow and ice, they are now washed away 

The icebergs Andy saw were grimy‑grey because the dirt from the glacier was still frozen inside them  But there was no salt in the ice  When they melted, they dumped a load of fresh water into the salty sea.