Alongside the black rubber zodiac boat, Southern Ocean water lapped around an iceberg. The water carved a tight, nipped-in skirt where it met the ice; it was kissing and leaving.

To officially be an iceberg, it must be at least sixteen feet across, which this one was. We were surrounded by them in the protected bay, their surfaces covered in sweeping thumbprint-sized indentations (were the owner of the thumb the size of a yeti). The bergs are like malformed ducks on the surface, floating along with no head.

Far more numerous were smaller bits of ice that bumped the edges of the boat. Occasionally, a piece would slip underneath crunch through the propeller. These fragments broke off from icebergs which calved from glaciers which formed from snow packed in the mountains. The ice was in a boxing match with the wind and the waves and it was losing against both. The smallest form of that battle was visible that day in the bay, but a larger one is happening all across the Antarctica.

Had I looked left out the airplane window when we landed, I likely could have seen a casualty of the fight. The world’s largest iceberg broke off an Antarctic ice sheet around a year ago and drifted into view in the opening between the end of the Antarctic continent and the South Shetland Islands. Our plane landed on an Argentinian military base on one of those islands.

I only found out a few weeks after we returned that I could have seen it. Maybe. I stared at my computer monitor with my hand over my mouth and a sigh escaping through the cracks of my fingers because we had been there, on a ridge of islands that offered a view directly into the iceberg’s travels. If only I had the eyes of a hawk.  If only the clouds hadn’t been as low we could have seen it.

The window of possible observation was so narrow – now, even just a few weeks later, it’s further out. It is being pushed by the currents and the wind and It is being reduced by the constant waves. It will never be again what it was on December 8th when I landed on that dirt runway. Had I looked left, there was the smallest chance I could have seen it.

Not that my seeing it would have meant anything to anyone other than me. The iceberg certainly doesn’t care, having been cast adrift and now out there on its own. Maybe it’s happy to not be so crowded in with all the other frozen droplets. Maybe it’s lonely, having become accustomed to stacking next to its brethren. Maybe the whole ice sheet knew when that crack rent down the middle that this day would come.

I was there and I missed it. Am I glad I know? Yes, because now I might pay more attention. What else have I missed? Should I reconsider everything I’ve seen so far under the lens of what I didn’t see rather than what I did?

And while I’m reconsidering, iceberg A23a is drifting to sea. Past the point where I could have seen it had I been looking. Into the swirl of the Atlantic. Getting smaller, maybe turning over once its unbalanced enough. Changing color. A solo traveler shedding bits of itself to the ocean and the wind as it drifts with the circumpolar currents. Becoming not the largest iceberg in the world.   

Some of the icebergs have the texture of tissue, the internal body kind. But also the thin paper kind, the one that dissolves within seconds of contact with anything wet, cold or strong. But tissue – it holds us together. It’s the connector. It’s fragile as gossamer. It’s one of the components of the thin line between here and not-here.

A gust of wind will remove it and whatever’s underneath will be revealed. Maybe it will take hundreds of gusts or years of them. But what lays beneath will dissolve, whether we are looking left, right, or dead center.