TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE AND IT WAS

from http://www.cargolaw.com/images/Singles.iceberg.GIF

June 17 2005 Update - After this photo was posted for 6 days, our reader

Adrian Round pointed out the sad truth -- this photo is a hoax!

As we are now told, "Global Marine Drilling does do work in the ocean off Newfoundland; there are Rig Managers involved; and icebergs really are towed in the offshore industry - but this 'photo' is really a composite of 4 separate images, put together in 1999 by underwater photographer

Ralph A. Clevenger. It's probably best known from its use on a motivational poster put out by Successories

, a company that produces posters and other materials with inspirational mottoes for use in business settings. Icebergs off Newfoundland may weigh as much as several million tons, but not 300 million tons as stated (though they do occasionally reach that weight in other parts of the world)."

According to the website,

TruthOrFiction.com underwater photographer Ralph Clevenger

, who has written:

"I created the image as a way of illustrating the concept of what you get is not necessarily what you see. As a professional photographer I knew that I couldn't get an actual shot of an iceberg the way I envisioned it, so I created the final image by compositing several images I had taken. The two halves of the iceberg are 2 separate shots, one taken in Alaska and one taken in Antarctica (neither is underwater). The only underwater part is the background taken off the coast of California. The sky is the last component. It took a lot of research on lighting and scale to get the berg to look real."

See the original "photo" at

Successories