This was a funny little iceberg sidelight to our trip. When glaciers and icebergs are formed, gasses sometimes get trapped in the ice. The gasses stay in the ice until eventually the ice melts down. When an iceberg gets rather small, the gasses start being noticeably emitted. We never noticed this until we got into the Antarctic Sound and then the Weddell Sea. In these locations, our ship was moving very slowly due to the large quantities of icebergs. While we were out on deck, we started hearing “popping” noises and occasionally smelling some odd smells, like maybe some rotten eggs.

They called these little icebergs with escaping gasses by the name of “bergy seltzer”. It’s like having a giant “alka seltzer” go floating by you. It pops and fizzes and sometimes smells bad.

These three photos are not in sequence. It was hard to get good pictures of this phenomenon as our ship was moving and the bergy seltzers were moving as well. At any rate, while the photos aren’t that good, you will notice some gas bubbles around the small icebergs – bergy seltzer.