Of the ten thousand icebergs calved in Greenland each year, about one-tenth crossed the latitude of 48 degrees north; half that number made it to the latitude of 46 degrees; few of these would make it past the tail end of the Banks at the latitude of 43 degrees. Because Newfoundland was roughly between 46 and 51 degrees north, it was smack in the middle of the latitudes of melt. Every year, icebergs drifted down the Labrador Current to ground in the island's coves and bays.

”I'll tell you something important, girl. It's this: if we live long enough, we circle around to what we were.”

....until now he had never had a son whose grave was the sea. Louis's death shredded Francis's heart until it hung in such tatters that no amount of mending could ever make it whole.

Though I had been watching icebergs drift through the latitudes of melt for years, I had never viewed them with much interest. I had been brought up with the hard fact that icebergs were, as Francis put it, a frigging nuisance, the way they fouled up fishing nets and traps. … I had never thought of ice as an archaeological deep-freeze or that it held a future from which both artefacts and water could one day be retrieved.