An iceberg is a piece of ice that broke off from glaciers or shelf ice and is floating in open water. It is generally larger than 15 m in size. Technically one-tenth part of iceberg is visible and rest part is hidden under water. This makes the iceberg a silent killer of large ships if not get detected at right time. There are also smaller chunks of floating glacially-derived ice, called glowlers" or "bergy bits". The famous tragedy of Titanic is related to iceberg. Due to the danger they posed to international communication through ships, it is an important part of safety measures to locate the position of icebergs and calculate their size. This is where mathematics plays it’s role. There are two basic shape classifications, one tabular and two non-tabular. The non-tabular icebergs are further divided into five sub-classifications. An iceberg with steep sides and flat top having a length-to-height ratio greater than 5:1 are classified as tabular icebergs. Many of these show horizontal banding. This type of iceberg can be quite large. Icebergs that are not tabular shaped are called non-tabular icebergs.. This category is further subdivided into dome, pinnacle, wedge, dry-dock and blocky icebergs. If no other description applies, the iceberg is simply referred to as a non-tabular. We can calculate the volume of tabular icebergs considering it as a sum of two cones join together at base, the upper cone which is visible has 1/10th of the total height while the hidden part is inverted cone with same base but height equals to 9/10th of the total height of iceberg.
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