The Iceberg Cometh. The U.S. Coast Guard Icebreaker Westwind seems like a toy boat beside this huge tabular iceberg. The floating island is three-quarters of a mile long, one-half mile wide, 80 feet high above the water line and another 560 feet below. Since the luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg on her 1912 maiden voyage, with a loss of 1,517 lives, an international ice patrol, begun by the Coast Guard, charts the annual flow of icebergs and warns ships of the danger. This year’s invasion of icebergs and field ice broken from the Greenland ice cap is considered the heaviest is more than half a century.