http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2018091 ... -to-africa 
these scientists on some serious WEED dred!
As South Africa faces ever more severe water shortages, some experts are seriously considering a proposal to harvest Antarctic icebergs and haul them to Cape Town. What are the chances it will succeed?
By Tim Smedley
21 September 2018
Future Now
Future Now
Future Now
If towing icebergs to hot, water-stressed regions sounds totally crazy to you, then consider this: the volume of water that breaks off Antarctica as icebergs each year is greater than the total global consumption of freshwater. And that stat doesn’t even include Arctic ice. This is pure freshwater, effectively wasted as it melts into the sea and contributes to rising sea levels. Does it sound less crazy now?
This untapped flow of water has enticed scientists and entrepreneurs for over a century.There were 19th-Century schemes to deliver by steam-boat to India, and to supply breweries in Chile. In the 1940s, John Isaacs of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute proposed towing an iceberg to San Diego to quench a Californian drought. In the 1970s, Saudi Prince Mohamed Al-Faisal wanted to tow an Antarctic iceberg across the equator to Saudi Arabia, and funded two international conferences on the subject. The EU received proposals in the 2010s to tow an iceberg from Newfoundland to the Canary Islands.
All these plans have one thing in common, however – none of them ever actually happened.
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Yet they still keep coming. The latest iceberg-towing schemes to emerge have come from Cape Town and the United Arab Emirates – two regions suffering from extreme and persistent water shortages. In the spring of 2018, Cape Town came ominously near to ‘Day Zero’ – the day the reservoirs dried up and a city of four million people would run out of water. Personal use of water was limited to 50 litres per day. When the rains finally came, Day Zero was averted, but perhaps only for another year. Meanwhile in the UAE, one of the world’s most arid states, the energy minister has declared water consumption a "huge concern" for the country, adding, “we are trying to find alternative solutions”. Could the alternative be icebergs?
(Credit: Getty Images)
It may be possible to harvest icebergs from Antarctica, which could be carried by natural currents to South Africa (Credit: Getty Images)
The latest iceberg proposals read like a heist movie. Most of the plans since the 1970s have involved the same names who, now in their 70s and 80s, are coming back for ‘one last job’. The potential bounty – a several million-tonne diamond of ice – is just too big for them to resist. But this is no bunch crackpots or chancers. They include some of the biggest names in glaciology: Professor Peter Wadhams, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, from 1987-92; Dr Olav Orheim, director of the Norwegian Polar Institute from 1993 to 2005; and Georges Mougin, the original French engineer behind Prince Al-Faisal’s scheme.
Peter Wadhams first became aware of Isaac’s 1940s proposal while working at Scripps at the start of his career. “Prince Faisal then cottoned onto this idea, and asked ‘can we tow icebergs to Saudi Arabia?’ Of course, the obvious answer is ‘no’ because you’ve got to get them across the equator and they melt, but nobody told him that because he had a lot of money to put in, and he funded a lot of research.” Two Saudi-funded conferences later – at Ames, Iowa, and the Scott Polar Research Institute, featuring plans by Wadhams, Mougin and Orheim – convinced a lot of people that it could be done. Only, not as far as the Gulf. The tow needed to be done within a reasonably narrow latitude and in relatively cold waters. The Saudi project failed on both counts, and the project was shelved in the early 1980s, says Wadhams, “but we continued to think about it and work on it, without significant funding.”
(Credit: Getty Images)
The EU "seriously considered" the possibility of hauling icebergs to the parched Canary Islands, although the proposals were ultimately rejected (Credit: Getty Images)
In 2010, the gang – Wadhams, Mougin and Orheim – reformed. Orheim admits that he hadn’t heard from Mougin for decades. “Normally in science, things done 40 years ago are not really relevant anymore because the science has moved on”, says Orheim. “But in this particular case, there was very little iceberg research done afterwards… We landed on and studied 24 [Antarctic] icebergs [between 1978-79] and the subsequent landings since that time have probably been no more than half of that.”
A geo-textile skirt would wrap around the iceberg and reduce its melt-rate
In 2010, Mougin enlisted a French computer-aided design (CAD) company, Dassault Systèmes, to use the latest satellite tracking and computer modelling to test the idea of a trans-Atlantic tow: a 3D-scan of a real seven-million-tonne iceberg, and the previous year’s weather data and sea currents, produced a computer model of a theoretical tow from Newfoundland to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. “The model was using one very powerful oil rig towing tug, about 6,000 horsepower, far more powerful than the tugs available in the 1970s and 80s”, says Wadhams. Other technological upgrades in the intervening years included live satellite tracking, and an insulating fabric mesh or “geo-textile skirt” – all 3km of it – designed by Mougin to wrap around the iceberg to reduce the melt-rate. The same material is used on ski slopes in the Alps to stop snow from melting. After fitting the ‘skirt’, the tug would tow the iceberg using a large fishing trawl net.
The model (which included one strong mid-Atlantic storm) showed that the iceberg could be successfully delivered in 141 days, at an average speed of 1.5km per hour (0.8 knots), consuming 4,000 tonnes of shipping fuel. The iceberg would reduce from 7.0 million tonnes to 4.08 million tonnes upon delivery – still a very large amount of water. “It turned out to be a credibly cheap and environmentally sound way of getting water to the Canary Islands”, insists Wadhams. “At the moment [the Canaries] are dependent on desalination plants, which are a complete disaster from the amount of energy they use and the saline water waste product, which then kills off coastal marine life.”
(Credit: Georges Mougin & Nick Sloane)
Sloane and Mougin aim to wrap the icerberg in a fabric mesh that could prevent it from melting (Credit: Georges Mougin & Nick Sloane)
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 141 days is a long time for something to go wrong.
While the EU said no, the next interested party came from the UAE. Abdulla Alshehi is the founder and managing director of National Advisor Bureau Limited, based in Masdar City – Abu Dhabi’s smart city and ‘cleantech’ hub. Despite a background in fossil fuels as a gas consultant, his passion is the environment. In 2015 he self-published a book called ‘Filling the Empty Quarter: Declaring a Green Jihad On the Desert’, which outlined his plans to convert the Arabian desert into lush, green pasture, by installing a 500km undersea pipeline to the Dasht river, Pakistan. Compared to that, towing icebergs from Antarctica was an easy option.
Alshehi informs me that a feasibility study showed that the project has potential. “Our most likely plan is to tow the iceberg to the eastern coast of the United Arab Emirates, as we cannot bring it to Dubai harbour due to the depth of the strait of Hurmuz,” he tells me. “Our expectation is to tow an iceberg 40 million tonnes in size.” That is more than five times bigger than the Tenerife iceberg, given that so much of it would melt due to the long distance and warm waters. It is privately funded, Alshehi says, but still requires government approval – to achieve that, his team first have to perform a trial run. “We expect that by second quarter of 2019 to start the first pilot run to Australia”, he says.
(Credit: Alamy)
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. “I have been on [his] advising committee”, confirms Wadhams, “but I suspect, even with the [melt] protection, that you still can’t really do a trans-equator tow.” The UAE has much the same problems as the original Saudi plan, with sea temperatures in the Gulf of between 24-32 degrees Celsius. Orheim describes Alshehi’s plan as “on the outer limits of what is realistic… You have the major challenge of melt all the way.”
A plan that might yet happen, however, is the Cape Town ‘heist’. This time
