Steve Mandel’s Split-Level Iceberg Photos: Antarctica Above and Below

Steve Mandel's split-level photographs show an Antarctic iceberg twice in one frame: the snowy, sunlit ice above the sea and the vast blue mass hidden below it. He made them on a trip to Antarctica in late 2015 with a camera on the end of a 7-foot pole, fired remotely from a small Zodiac boat.

Who is Steve Mandel?

Mandel is a Californian photographer best known for two very different subjects: the night sky and wildlife. As an amateur astronomer he runs the small Hidden Valley Observatory in Soquel, California, published the book Light in the Sky in 2006 and in 2008 received the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Amateur Achievement Award. He also coined the term "integrated flux nebulae" for faint clouds of dust lit by the combined light of the whole galaxy.

His wildlife work, collected in his photography portfolio, often uses remote and robotic camera setups to reach angles a photographer could not hold in person. The iceberg series grew out of the same idea.

How the split-level camera rig worked

According to PetaPixel's report, published in December 2015, the setup looked like this:

• A Canon 5D Mark III inside an underwater housing.
• A custom-machined bracket on a heavy-duty monopod head, fixed to the end of a 7-foot (about 2.1 m) metal pole.
• Legs on the pole so the rig could rest on the side of the Zodiac while Mandel stood inside the boat.
• The CamRanger app on an iPad Mini strapped to his wrist, used to compose and fire the camera from seven feet away.

The result was a lens sitting half in and half out of the water, without Mandel ever entering the near-freezing sea. Behind-the-scenes pictures by Brandon Harvey show the rig in use.

What lies beneath an iceberg

An iceberg is a freely floating piece of freshwater ice more than 15 metres long that has broken off a glacier or an ice shelf. Smaller pieces have their own names: a bergy bit stands 1 to 5 metres high, and a growler less than 1 metre.

The split view makes a basic piece of physics visible. Pure ice has a density of about 920 kg/m³ and seawater about 1,025 kg/m³, so by Archimedes' principle only about one-tenth of an iceberg's volume floats above the surface. The rest stays out of sight below, and the split frames finally show it. Below the waterline, ice free of air bubbles can glow deep blue or turquoise, while snow keeps the exposed upper surfaces white.

Many Antarctic icebergs that break off great ice shelves such as the Ross or Filchner–Ronne are tabular: flat-topped, steep-sided blocks more than five times as long as they are high. The largest icebergs on Earth form this way.

Drones and photography in Antarctica

Mandel also shot from a surface camera and a drone, and combined all three viewpoints in a 3.5-minute video. The drone flights were made under a permit linked to his work with scientists studying elephant seals. "Recreational use of drones is now banned in all of Antarctica and these images were all taken under permit," he explained.

For other ways of seeing blue and white ice, explore David Burdeny’s iceberg photograph and the Ferryland iceberg story.

Related reading

• Nine Glacier Comparisons from Montana: Reading the Historic and Repeat Views
• The Ilulissat Calving Sequence in Chasing Ice
• We Went Camping On Alpine Glaciers To Capture The Beauty Of The Starry Skiesd
• An Iceberg Rolls near Argentina’s Upsala Glacier

Sources