Canadian iceberg hunter on the trail of white gold

It's midday and Edward Kean, a Canadian fisherman who now scours the North Atlantic for icebergs that have broken off from Greenland's glaciers, is positively beaming.

Using his trusty binoculars, the rotund, 60-year-old captain of the fishing boat 'Green Waters' has spotted his next prize -- it's several dozen meters tall and floating just off the coast of Newfoundland.

"It's a very fine piece of ice," Kean proclaims.

Every morning at dawn, Kean sails out with three other crew members to hunt what has become his own personal white gold: icebergs.

For more than 20 years, he has hauled in the mighty ice giants and then sold the water for a handsome profit to local companies, which then bottle it, mix it into booze or use it to make cosmetics.

Business has soared in tandem with the warming of the planet, especially quick in the Arctic, meaning that more and more icebergs find their way south.

But it's a tough gig. The days are long and the "harvest" isn't easy.

For this particular prize, which he first picked up using a satellite map, Kean has to sail about 24 kilometers (15 miles).

To kill time, the crew members swap jokes in the colorful local dialect -- English with a Scottish and Irish lilt.

"Even I struggle to understand them sometimes," laughs the captain, who lives in St John's, the capital of the eastern province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Arriving at the foot of the massive wall of floating ice in Bonavista Bay, which opens into the Atlantic, he shoulders a rifle and blasts away in the hopes that some of it will break off.

One, two, three shots ring out. The air shudders with the noise and the crew hold their breath. But the ice does not split.

"Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't," said Kean.

- Race against the clock -

As summer gets under way, time is of the essence in harvesting the icebergs.

"They come here and they melt so fast," noted the captain, adding that once they are floating off the coast of Newfoundland, it is a real race against the clock.

"In Newfoundland, it's like a fallen leaf. They're going to die in a couple of weeks and be gone back to nature anyway," he said.

"So we're not here hurting the environment, we're not taking nothing away -- we're just utilizing the purest water we can get."

Two members of his crew set out on a motorboat, circling the iceberg, even brushing against it, to find blocks of ice that may be bobbing next to it.

Armed with a pole and net, they laboriously wrap up the precious fragments, each one weighing a ton or two, and fasten them to a hook at the end of a crane on the fishing boat's deck, which winches them aboard.

Kean then hacks the blocks up with an ax and puts the pieces into 1,000-liter (265-gallon) containers to melt over the coming days.

In the high season, from May to July, the crew can gather 800,000 liters of water, which they then sell to local merchants for a dollar a liter.

Those businesses in turn market the iceberg products as made from some of the purest water money can buy.

- Niche market -

Dyna Pro, one of Kean's clients, sells the water in glass bottles for Can$16 (US $12) each. They are targeting a wealthy clientele and have hopes to expand their business abroad.

"We're probably a lot bigger today than we ever were with iceberg water shipping overseas -- Europe, Singapore, Dubai," said the company's manager, Kerry Chaulk.

"We just picked up clients from the Middle East with our glass bottles."

The popular Auk Island Winery, in the tourist village of Twillingate, makes wine from wild berries and iceberg water -- and sells it for Can $10-90 a bottle.

"We use iceberg water because it is the clearest, cleanest water that we have available on the planet, really, says employee Elizabeth Gleason.

"It will give you a very clean, very pure taste of whatever it is paired with."

US tourist Melissa Axtman, who has family roots in Newfoundland, said she was "enjoying all the things made out of iceberg water."

But she acknowledged "good things and bad things" about the increasing number of icebergs, a symptom of climate change.

Experts say the Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the planet.

Despite the success of the products, the crew of the Green Waters remains small and the tools they use for the harvest have barely changed in decades.

"Nobody wants to manually work at this type of work anymore," said Kean, who has trouble keeping crew members for long.

"Hopefully we can make it carry on for the coming years, but I'm 60, so time is running out for me," he said.

'Iceberg Corridor' sparks tourist boom on Canada's east coast
King'S Point, Canada (AFP) Aug 2, 2019 - At dusk, tourists marvel at the sensational collapse of an iceberg at the end of its long journey from Greenland to Canada's east coast, which now has a front row seat to the melting of the Arctic's ice.

While the rest of the world nervously eyes the impact of global warming, the calving of Greenland's glaciers -- the breaking off of ice chunks from its edge -- has breathed new life into the remote coastal villages of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Once a hub of cod fishing, the province now plays host to hordes of amateur photographers and tourists hoping to capture the epic ice melt for posterity. As winter ends, iceberg spotting begins.

"It keeps getting better every year," says Barry Strickland, a 58-year-old former fisherman who now takes tourists in his small boat around King's Point in the north of the province.

"We've got 135, 140 tour buses with older people coming into the town every season so it's great for the economy."

For the past four years, Strickland has taken visitors to bear witness to the death throes of these ice giants, which can measure dozens of meters in height and weigh hundreds of thousands of tons.

Winds and ocean currents bring the icebergs from northwest Greenland, thousands of kilometers (miles) away, to Canada's shores.

In a matter of weeks, ice frozen for thousands of years can quickly melt into the ocean.

- 'Incredible' rise in tourism -

Strickland's boat excursions are often fully booked during the high season from May to July, with tourists coming from all around the world to King's Point, a village of just 600 inhabitants.

The villagers keep track of the icebergs on an interactive satellite tracking map put online by the provincial government.

"There's not much in these small outport towns anymore to keep people around, so tourism is a big part of our economy," said Devon Chaulk, who works in a souvenir shop in Elliston, a small town of 300 on "Iceberg Corridor," as the coastline is now known.

"I've lived here my entire life, and the increase in tourism around here in the past 10 to 15 years has been incredible. It's not surprising to have thousands of people here over the next couple of months," said the 28-year-old.

Last year, a total of 500,000 tourists visited Newfoundland and Labrador, a number roughly equivalent to the province's total population.

Those visitors spent nearly Can $570 million (US $433 million), government figures show.

- Melting ice -

The tourism boom has helped offset the decline in the region's traditional fishing industry, which is in crisis because of overfishing at the end of the last century.

Some are even marketing "iceberg water" as the purest on Earth -- and selling it as a high-end luxury item. The melt is also used in vodka, beer and cosmetics.

But beneath the shiny surface of economic success is the dark truth that the area is in part profiting from accelerated global warming in the Arctic, and that the industry is precarious at best.

In the village of Twillingate, employees at the Auk Island Winery -- which makes its product from iceberg water and locally picked wild berries -- have already seen that business can be unpredictable.

"We see the difference in the number of tourists from year to year, depending on the amount of icebergs in the area," says Elizabeth Gleason, who works at the winery.

"This year was a good year. Last year, we had almost none."

The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the world. In mid-July, record temperatures were recorded near the North Pole.

In recent years, the icebergs have drifted further and further south, posing a threat to shipping on this busy route between Europe and North America.

For now, tourists are enjoying the view and the experience while they can.

"The prevalence of icebergs has good things and bad things about it," says Melissa Axtman, an American traveler.

Laurent Lucazeau, a 34-year-old French tourist, says seeing an iceberg was sobering.

"It is a concrete image of global warming to see icebergs making it to these places where the water is warm," he told AFP.

"There's something mysterious and impressive about it, but knowing too that they are not supposed to be here makes you wonder, and it's a little scary."

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