Thread: Lasso That Iceberg!

How about this idea... tow an iceberg to, say, Saudi Arabia or the Canary Islands to use for drinking water?

How to Tow a Building-Sized Iceberg | Wired Science | Wired.com

In WWII the Brits considered building an aircraft carrier from ice.

In the long run, probably cheaper and more efficient to build a desalinization plant. Icebergs are very heavy and most of it is underwater. it would take a long time to tow and be hard to manage in the open ocean and it would be melting all the time.

This is an old idea actually.

The article mentioned the old calculations as to practicality, and the adjustments to calculations more recently. The article left me with the impression that "best thought" as to practicality has swung in favor, or at least possibly neutral, toward whether it would be worthwhile towing icebergs.

I remember reading a good deal about Prince Mohammed ibn Faisal's plan in the Saudi press in the early 1980s. It could be done, all right, but it was only worth doing in some quite unrepeatable circumstances, which soon changed.

Saudi Arabia was enjoying an oil boom or unprecendented dimensions, and couldn't expand their domestic infrastructure quickly enough to make domestic use of all the money they had. Energy was relatively cheap to anybody, but particularly cheap to them. But things changed a lot in the next few years. They constructed enormous seawater desalination plants, most gas fired, and the length, size and pumping requirements of the pipelines required to take water to the inland cities is such a large part of any project to supply the latter, as to iron out much of the advantages of sending iceberg water along them. Idebergs weeping chilled water could have disastrous effects on an important fishing industry, especially on the Arabian Gulf side, where the water is mostly too shallow to bring icebergs within many miles of shore.

They also now have more than double the native population and far more roads, education, health services and everything else governments need money for. There also aren't the unspoken but very real fears there were in the 80s, about the policitical risks of relying on water from the Iraqi rivers. It is difficult to see it becoming worthwhile to tow icebergs to Arabia in the future.

The Canary Islands are certainly short of natural water supplies, but they are Spanish, and Spain is both in worse economic trouble than it likes to admit, and exceptionally short of domestic energy supplies. If they had it, I think they would use it for desalination.

Project Habbakuk in the Second World War was also an ingenious and valid attempt to solve a problem that went away. The plan was to create an immense motorised and steerable floating platform for launching aircraft, from ice reinforced with wood fibre and named Pycrete after its inventor, Geoffrey Pyke of Combined Operations.. It would have had its own refrigeration system, and should have been almost indefinitely maintainable in mid-Atlantic. It should be noted that this was a far smaller service department than the Admiralty etc., and with less leverage. The material was both far stronger than ordinary ice, and melted less easily due to its self-insulating properties. The structure would have been so enormous that it could have been torpedoed as often as anyone pleased, and craters in the runway could simply have been filled and allowed to freeze.

It would indeed have been a valuable asset, for sealing the gap in air cover for Atlantic convoys. A smaller-scale pilot project was carried out in northern Canada, but meanwhile the project had largely been solved by means of Liberator maritime patrol aircraft from the Azores, and Germany had lost its U-boat war due to this and numerous cheaper technical innovations. The project is memorable chiefly for a meeting in which Lord Mountbatten, a member of the Royal family and head of Combined Operations brought in blocks of Pycrete and ordinary ice, and fired into them with his revolver. The test was a striking vindication of Pycrete, but Mountbatten's bullet ricocheted and hit the US Admiral King in the leg. It was at most a very slight wound, and he was extremely good about it.

Regardless if they haul that stuff to the desert to melt, they sho-nuff lasso those things that threaten the oil platforms.

Watched an extremely interesting documentary on the subject - Discovery Channel, most likely - a few years ago.

From what I remember they just haul them into a current that'll take them out of harm's way and cut 'em loose.

The tugs they use are freakin' enormous! I'm sure if somebody started delivering water, in the form of ice, at those prices, they go right on drinking oil... like they're doing now...

Towing icebergs was thought impractical until about two years ago. From the article...

[Towing icebergs was thought to be impractical...] until 2009. He discovered a French technology firm called Dassault Systèmes which creates 3D worlds and algorithmic simulations to design and test future products. Mougin could now test his various theories on iceberg-towing virtually, to see whether his idea would be feasible.

Those computer simulations allowed Mougin to answer a number of questions. By mapping the heat exchanges of the iceberg under the blazing sun, he could anticipate the amount the iceberg would melt in transit. Another simulation can show how the iceberg would crack and break up over time.

He also used meteorological and oceanographic data from satellites to track currents, and decide how to tow an iceberg from Newfoundland to the Canary Isles. This gave him all the data he needed to figure out how the journey would happen.

According to Mougin, an iceberg of several million tons can be towed several thousand kilometers to the Canary Islands, in 141 days, using just one tugboat. The ‘berg would lose 38 percent of its mass during the trip, and a skirt made from non-woven geotextile strips could keep it from breaking apart.

Richard Pryor had an iceberg towed to saudi arabia 25 years ago

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