Martha Stewart has brushed off critics who took issue with her using fragments of an iceberg to chill her drink while aboard a luxury cruise.
Taking to her Instagram stories Wednesday, the 82-year-old shared a link to an article published by The Washington Post in which experts roundly dismissed some social media users' concerns.
"Martha Stewart put an iceberg in her drink. Experts say it’s no big deal," the article's headline read.
The outrage was sparked after Stewart shared a photo of herself showing off a beverage in a tumbler with the wilds of Greenland behind her. Captioning the image, she revealed that she had been sailing aboard a Swan Hellenic cruise off Greenland's east coast and had "captured a small iceberg for our cocktails tonight."
Some slammed Stewart as "tone deaf" while others accused her of "contributing to global warming."
Weighing in on the matter, glaciologist Eric Rignot, a professor in the Earth System Science department at the University of California at Irvine, explained that plucking a fragment of ice out of the sea was no big deal.
"It is not like she went to a glacier and carved a piece of ice off it," Rignot wrote in an email to the Post. "Icebergs float at sea already and slowly melt. Whether they melt in the ocean or in your glass does not make a difference."
Glaciologist Ian Allison, a professor at the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, agreed, saying that the environmental impact of the fossil fuels used to power the cruise ship was significantly greater than that of Stewart putting ice in her glass.
"Popping a bit of ice into a drink is no worse than taking a glass of water from a river," Allison wrote in an email to the Post.
There was one concern that Allison raised though — Stewart's cocktail-iceberg pairing. As he noted, Greenland's ice sheet is formed when layers of snow compress over time, trapping and pressurizing air bubbles within the ice.
"If Martha’s piece of berg had once been buried to depths of hundreds of meters, it would gently effervesce in her drink as it melted," Allison said.
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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