But this is no bunch crackpots or chancers. Only, not as far as the Gulf. The tow needed to be done within a reasonably narrow latitude and in relatively cold waters.
The EU "seriously considered" the possibility of hauling icebergs to the parched Canary Islands, although the proposals were ultimately rejected Credit: Getty Images. In , the gang — Wadhams, Mougin and Orheim — reformed. The same material is used on ski slopes in the Alps to stop snow from melting. The model which included one strong mid-Atlantic storm showed that the iceberg could be successfully delivered in days, at an average speed of 1.
The iceberg would reduce from 7. Wadhams and Mougin approached the EU to fund the tow for real. It was seriously considered, claims Wadhams, but no one wanted their name attached should it go wrong. The interest from the international press, and potential for ridicule, would be significant. And days is a long time for something to go wrong. Despite a background in fossil fuels as a gas consultant, his passion is the environment.
Compared to that, towing icebergs from Antarctica was an easy option. Alshehi informs me that a feasibility study showed that the project has potential. It is privately funded, Alshehi says, but still requires government approval — to achieve that, his team first have to perform a trial run.
The government of the UAE has also examined the possibility of using icebergs as a water source Credit: Alamy. However, few other experts are optimistic. Sloane is world-renowned in the field of marine salvage, having led the team who re-floated the Italian Costa Concordia wreck in When BBC Future speaks to him, he is off the coast of the Philippines salvaging a wrecked lift boat — a huge sea-crane the size of a storey building.
Towing large unwieldy objects in rough seas is what Sloane does. And he is convinced that he can tow an iceberg to the Cape.
There they hope to pick up an million-tonne iceberg — twice the size of the UAE mission, and 10 times that of the Tenerife proposal. Central to the plan are the natural currents that converge around Gough Island: the Circumpolar Current, which runs like a ring road of icebergs around the Antarctic, and the Benguela Current, which runs in an arc from Gough Island to the cape and up the west coast of Africa.
The tugs would only need enough brute force to change tracks — other than that, the currents would do the delivery job for them. Even the destination point near the Cape, where the iceberg would be pinned into place using oil rig anchors 40 km offshore, remains in a cold current, reducing the melt-rate.
Now that his models have provided an estimate for the optimal size of a water-bearing berg, researchers can figure out how many ships, and what sort of ships, might be capable of dragging it. The vessels would need to overcome winds and ocean currents while barely moving at a consistent speed of half a knot. Higher speeds can create vibrations from ocean waves that fracture the rigid ice and cause it to break apart. Of course, Condron says, if we could come up with a way to insulate the iceberg and slow melting, then it could be much smaller and thus more towable.
But even if the scheme proves both possible and relatively affordable, another big question looms: How would towing a massive iceberg across the Southern Ocean affect marine ecosystems? Michelle Shero , a WHOI biologist who studies Weddell seals and other marine mammals in Antarctica, is hesitant to speculate on what iceberg towing might mean for the wildlife she studies. But she says that large icebergs that drift naturally from calving events, like the A68a iceberg currently making a bee-line for the South Atlantic island of South Georgia, can cause problems.
One such event happened in , when an iceberg bigger than Jamaica known as Iceberg B calved from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and made its way into Weddell seal territory. Researchers from Montana State University investigated the impacts and found that female seals had fewer offspring during the five years when the iceberg was in their territory. Presumably, with enough planning and information, ship operators could minimize impacts on wildlife in Antarctica. But there is still potential for trouble at the end of the journey: How might vast amounts of freezing fresh water affect marine ecosystems farther north, where habitats are warm and salty?
Condron says this is among the chief environmental concerns that would need to be addressed before a long-distance tow ever happens. If an iceberg ever sets sail from Antarctica for warmer climes, the experiment would provide an unprecedented look at the dynamics of iceberg melt, something researchers have thus far only been able to model.
It would yield valuable information about a subject that is likely to become increasingly important as the climate warms, and it would be a good test of existing models. Not to mention it would be a pretty amazing spectacle. He uses techniques that span isotope geochemistry, next generation DNA sequencing, and satellite tagging to study the ecology of a wide variety of ocean species. He recently discovered that blue sharks use warm water ocean tunnels, or eddies, to dive to the ocean twilight zone, where they forage in nutrient-rich waters hundreds of meters down.
Born in New Zealand, Simon received his B. With much of his work in the South Pacific and Caribbean, Simon has been on many cruises, logging 1, hours of scuba diving and hours in tropical environs. He has been a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution since Gregory Skomal is an accomplished marine biologist, underwater explorer, photographer, and author.
He has been a fisheries scientist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries since and currently heads up the Massachusetts Shark Research Program. For more than 30 years, Greg has been actively involved in the study of life history, ecology, and physiology of sharks. His shark research has spanned the globe from the frigid waters of the Arctic Circle to coral reefs in the tropical Central Pacific. Much of his current research centers on the use of acoustic telemetry and satellite-based tagging technology to study the ecology and behavior of sharks.
It almost seems we were there -- that we shared the terror of that unhappy night in Now recall a terror that hasn't visited you yet, but one that will someday -- sooner or later. You man an offshore oil rig somewhere in the Northern seas.
Out of the gloom drifts an iceberg. This time you are stationary. The ice moves toward you -- very slowly -- maybe one mile an hour. And you have no way to elude it. At first it's more beautiful than terrifying. Then you measure its size. It can weigh 20 million tons -- fifty times more than any ship on the sea. It moves like vapor, but it could crush you like an egg.
And it's just as dangerous in bright sunlight as it is in night fog. What can you do? Somehow, it has to be towed off its path. But how do you grasp an iceberg? Tie a rope around it?
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