Martin Bailey photographs icebergs the way an architect looks at buildings. In his series of polar ice, shared through the Offset image library and featured by Feature Shoot in July 2014, floating blocks become pyramids, arches and palaces, glowing white or deep blue against dark water.
Martin Bailey’s ice palaces
Bailey is a nature and wildlife photographer based in Tokyo. He has run his own photography business since 2005, leads tours and workshops, writes about technique and is one of the early photography podcasters. His work has been licensed by clients such as Canon and Popular Photography.
According to Feature Shoot, his portfolio includes ice around Vernadsky Station on the Antarctic Peninsula as well as Iceland’s Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon. Some of the ice is streaked with dark layers of ash from old volcanic eruptions, and the colour shifts from bright white to intense blue depending on how much air is trapped inside.
Why some icebergs are white and others blue
An iceberg is a piece of freshwater ice more than 15 metres long that has broken off a glacier or ice shelf and drifts in open water. Glacier ice starts as snow, compressed over centuries. Ice full of tiny air bubbles scatters all colours of light and looks white. Dense, bubble-free ice absorbs the red end of the spectrum and lets blue through, which is why freshly exposed or long-submerged surfaces glow blue. Algae can tint ice green, and volcanic ash or rock picked up by the glacier draws dark bands.
Only about a tenth of an iceberg shows above the surface. Glacier ice has a density of around 920 kg/m³ and seawater about 1,025 kg/m³, so the rest of the mass sits hidden below, which is where the phrase “tip of the iceberg” comes from.
From growlers to giant tabular icebergs
The International Ice Patrol sorts floating ice by size:
- Growlers: less than 1 m high and under 5 m long.
- Bergy bits: 1–5 m high and 5–15 m long.
- Icebergs: small, medium, large and very large, the biggest rising more than 75 m above the sea.
Antarctica’s ice shelves tend to calve flat-topped tabular icebergs, while Greenland’s glaciers produce more irregular, pinnacled shapes. Some Antarctic bergs are enormous. B-15, which broke from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, covered about 11,000 km². The largest ever recorded, sighted in 1956, measured some 335 by 97 km, larger than Belgium. The U.S. National Ice Center names and tracks every Antarctic iceberg longer than 10 nautical miles, using a letter for the quadrant where it calved and a running number.
Over time, waves, sun and warmer water carve tabular bergs into the shapes Bailey loves: arches where the sea has bored through, towers, ridges and smooth, wave-polished hollows.
How to see Antarctic icebergs yourself
Most visitors reach Antarctica by expedition ship during the southern summer, from November to March. Many cruises sail from Ushuaia in Argentina, and the Antarctic Peninsula is by far the most visited region. Around 124,000 cruise visitors made the trip by 2025, up from fewer than 15,000 in 1999–2000. Tour operators that belong to IAATO follow strict rules: normally no more than 100 people ashore at once, and ships carrying over 500 passengers may not land anyone.
Vernadsky, near where Bailey photographed, sits on Galindez Island in the Argentine Islands off the peninsula’s west coast. It began as the British station Faraday and was sold to Ukraine in 1996 for a symbolic one pound., and visitors who land there can still send postcards from its small post office.
For photographers, an overcast day often shows blue ice at its best, while low sun at the edges of the day picks out texture. Shoot from the ship’s rail as well as the landing boats, and keep a long lens ready for details.
Explore the wider setting in our McMurdo Sound feature, and read about a plan to drift with the ice in Alex Bellini’s Adrift expedition proposal.
Related reading
- Blood Falls, Antarctica: Iron-Rich Brine at Taylor Glacier
- Gentoo Penguins at Neko Harbour: When a Glacier View Changes Scale
- West Antarctic Glacier Retreat: What the 2014 Research Actually Found
- Striped Icebergs: Blue Bands and Dark Layers in Antarctic Ice
- Antarctic Condition 1 Weather: The View through a Station Door
- Antarctic Icebergs in Motion: Drift, Collapse and Meltwater
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