Posted on 09/08/2018 2:57:42 PM PDT by sodpoodle
A Dubai-based engineering firm wants to tow icebergs from Antarctica to Dubai in order to provide the city with a reserve of fresh drinking water.
The firm will use satellite imagery to select candidate icebergs. It's eyeing icebergs that are between 2,000 and 7,000 feet long, and weigh around 100 million tons.
But the plan is short on details: the firm doesn't know exactly how it will get the icebergs to Dubai, or how the icebergs will be stored.
What do you do if you're a fast-growing city in the desert with lots of thirsty people and little freshwater reserves? Park an iceberg off the coast
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
I think we covered this a few months ago.
Montgomery Brewster did this and made a lot of money on it.
During World War II we were going to build unsinkable aircraft carriers out of a mix of ice and wood shavings called Pykrete.
Graphene is about to cause a break through in desalinization that will render this idea meaningless.
Have they consulted with Al Gore? How about Leonardo DiCaprio - he’s another expert on Earth science.
PDI — Public Domain Icebergs are just piles of money floating around in the ocean!
Salvage 1 used that as a plot point a time or two.
A 7,000 foot long iceberg would be difficult to tow, and by the time it arrived in Dubai would probably fit into a styrofoam cooler.
That movie is criminally underrated and under appreciated these days. Some of Richard Pryor’s and John Candy’s best work.
True that!
Great post, been watching that development as well
Yeah that melting thing does cut into profits.
Up to four-fifths of an iceberg’s mass is underwater, and due to their vast density, they would theoretically not melt in the boiling climate of the Middle Eastern coastal line. Mr Al Shehi says it could take up to a year to drag the huge body of ice up to the UAE, and the project is set to begin in 2018.
“Have they consulted with Al Gore? How about Leonardo DiCaprio - he’s another expert on Earth science”
Strap a million or so democrats to it and let them swim it down.
Any way, I remember directed-iceberg proposals in the latter 1960s.
[As for Wilbur Smith, he lost his mind somewheres in the 1990s or thereabouts.
The last time I read one of his books (late 1990s) it featured global warming, don't remember the publication date, and I haven't bothered to read him since.]
Ice was harvested in New England, packed in straw lined ships and sold in India for a very nice profit in the 19th Century. The loss from melt would probably be much less than 1% of the mass during transit of a giant iceberg.
The potential for hazard to navigation presents new vistas in admiralty law.
I rally liked that show
Every few years for the past couple centuries, even before the large-scale cultivation of marijuana, this idea occurs to someone: What if we towed an iceberg from the poles, where there are no people, to some dry, populous place and then melted it into freshwater?
Maybe they’ll put it in a really really big Yeti cooler.
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