KEY POINTS:
With An Inconvenient Truth in the cinemas and climate change the flavour of the political month, it is no wonder the country was agog over icebergs this week.
The last time fragments of Antarctica floated as far as the New Zealand coast, 70 years ago, global warming was still waiting to be discovered.
Not that scientists have blamed these monsters on greenhouse gases; on the face of it their survival so long in a northward current would seem to argue against a rise in the temperature of the Southern Ocean, but you never can tell.
Climate change explains storms as well as droughts and the more the ice caps shatter, the more bergs there may be to surprise us.
The south has certainly made the most of these ones. One Invercargill operator began offering scenic flights when they were 100km away and this week a swarm of helicopters went out from Dunedin when the icebergs drifted to within telescope range from high points of the city.
By then they were melting by the day, ending a journey that started six years ago in the Antarctic region below the Falkland Islands. They began as an iceberg 167km long and 32km wide, which had drifted far below Africa and Australia and shattered into a flotilla of thousands by the time these pieces were caught by a northward current and carried up to the South Island's east coast.
By the time the two biggest ones arrived off Otago they had shrunk to a mere 300m and 500m in length above water and one of them had a shard standing 100m above the ocean. And yet 90 per cent of their mass was below the waterline.
They were startlingly beautiful. They brought something mysterious and splendid to the week.
