There was a report out a couple of months ago about striped icebergs. I saw it listed in Snopes where someone has suspected it was a joke. Not so. The London Times carried a report saying that it might be beautiful, but it’s created from dirt, animal excrement and fragments of dead bodies.

Keith Makinson, of the British Antarctic Survey, said that icebergs that seemed to show stripes were quite common in southern waters, but it was the first time that he had seen brown stripes. They are believed to be created when ice crystals form under the water and, in a process described as “inverted snow”, rise to stick to the bottom of the ice shelf. As the ice crystals form a new layer at the bottom of the ice shelf, which later fragments to float away as icebergs, tiny particles of organic matter are trapped.