Word: modoc
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...cutters, the Tampa and Modoc, alternate in patrolling the ice region for 15 successive days, and at the end of that time one patrol vessel is relieved by the other which rests in Halifax. The oceanographic staff, however, is obliged to spend over six months without sight of land, changing from one cutter to the other by lifeboat. The duties of this staff are numerous and consist of broadcasting radio reports to all vessels in the vicinity, making charts of the behavior of the bergs and of studying general oceanic conditions. The Green-Bigelow bottle, invented by H. B. Bigelow...
Last week two Coast Guard cutters, the Tampa, the Modoc, sailed north to play "I spy" with icebergs. They are to patrol steamship lanes, chart location of icebergs, figure the speed and direction of iceberg-drift, issue warning to Atlantic liners. Though equipped with mines designed to blow icebergs to pieces, they often find bergs which explosives can hardly injure. An iceberg may contain 36,000,000 tons of ice, eight-ninths of which are below the surface of the water. When dynamited, a giant berg merely loses a few large chunks, which then become small bergs, or "growlers...
...nobody followed icebergs, which drifted free, unchaperoned. One drifted into the liner Titanic, then the pride of the White Star Line. The Titanic sank with 1,513 people. Now, in April, 1927, with transatlantic travel reaching its spring height, with glacier-born icebergs drifting busily south, the Tampa, the Modoc sail northward, charged with preventing a repetition of the Titanic disaster...
...Tampa and the Modoc take turns patrolling the danger area, where the warm Gulf currents meet the Arctic flows at the "cold wall." Their duties are to spot the huge chunks of ice by their own lookouts or from the wire-lessed reports of other ships, to destroy such bergs by explosives if possible, otherwise to keep them ever in sight, reporting twice a day their whereabouts to ships which might be struck and to the U. S. hydrographic office at Washington. Fogs and other weather conditions too are radioed, and on this news the weather department partly bases...
...tons of ice, of which about 8/9 was. under water out of view. In such cases the guard cutter can only follow until the mass "calves," lets small chunks break off. These accompany the "mother" as "growlers." Then eventually all disappear into slush. The Tampa or Modoc is free to find another...