The day an iceberg appeared off the NC coast — startling fishermen in a frigid winter

In 1940, not far from Atlantic Beach, an iceberg floated past the North Carolina shore like an intruder from a frozen planet — startling the fishermen with its island-sized frostiness.

A local WPA worker named Gene Willis spotted it bobbing off Salter Path and quickly reported it to his supervisor, sending the meteorological rarity onto front pages across the state.

A glacial slab drifting past a Southern beach town seemed so unlikely — even in an era that predated the global warming conversation — that some newspapers barely concealed their skepticism.

“Seeing Things,” wrote the Times-News of Burlington in a headline over Willis’ discovery.

But in this week of weather-watching, with the groundhog’s grim pronouncement still fresh, it’s worth remembering this coastal anomaly dating back 83 years nearly to the day.

Reid Wilson, secretary of the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, thinks so, too.

“That iceberg wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance given current weather patterns,” he tweeted last week.

The iceberg that reached Bogue Banks rose 6 feet above the waves, a fact that prompted the N&O in 1940 to quote Beaufort merchant Rufus Sewell, who for reasons mysteriously left unexplained had made “several trips” to the Arctic.

The iceberg’s total mass, Sewell calculated, must have extended at least 50 feet below the surface as it floated gently westward.

But the general frigidness of North Carolina’s coast in 1940 still gets described in grandiose terms.

Bogue Sound froze thickly enough that seagulls were landing on it, the cultural resources department reported on the iceberg’s 80th anniversary, and the Harkers Island ferry had to chip through the ice to make its run.

Frozen fish from the water

More chilling still, a Beaufort man pulled frozen fish from the water, left them sitting while he retrieved a knife and came back to find them flapping — thawed and still alive.

Not far away, the superintendent at Lake Mattamuskeet stooped to hand-feeding all the ice-bound birds.

And despite all this, the cold set no records.

As far as I can tell, this marks the Tar Heel state’s last iceberg appearance. I did find news of one floating off Florida in 1954, of which the Associated Press wrote, “Nobody will believe this.”

But lines on the ocean floor, documented by the U.S. Geological Survey, show these glaciers once made a regular run past the Outer Banks.

“Over 30,000 years ago,” the USGS noted last year, “towering bright white chunks of ice drifted south from the Hudson Bay in Canada, pass Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and all the way to the Florida Keys! ... These icebergs were enormous. Measuring about 300 meters, they were similar in stature to the Eiffel Tower.”

Perhaps, when ages pass and the Earth spins on without us, what remains of the NC coast will once again draw massive frozen islands to its waters, and some lucky observer with the future’s equivalent of eyeballs will raise its head to note the iceberg’s passing, giving a friendly wave.