Some scientists frown on the relocation of water trapped in icebergs to drought-hit areas, but others see it as a huge opportunity.
Melting from an iceberg just 1,000 km from the North Pole, Svalbarði’s chilled water tastes like “catching snowflakes with your tongue.” Bottled in Longyearbyen, a small metropolis in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, Svalbarði water is transported by air to luxury areas in London, Sydney, Florida and Macau. “Try the North Pole to save the North Pole!”
This price is too high for most people in the world to reach, including one in four without access to safe drinking water. In his book In Search of Icebergs, expert in law, culture, and humanities Matthew Birkhold speculates whether the world’s thirst could be quenched by two-thirds of the world’s fresh water, which is trapped in glaciers and glaciers — “trapped in the poles to gigantic ice castles,” according to him.
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Some people already do this – and it’s not just Svalbard-drinking Epicureans. In Newfoundland, Canada, Birkhold interviews Ed Keane, an “iceberg cowboy” who hunts icebergs from the cold sea to sell water to cosmetics companies and breweries. Birkhold notes that in Kaanaak, the northernmost city in Greenland, the public water supply consists of filtered and purified iceberg melt.
By some estimates, about 2,300 cubic kilometers of ice breaks off from Antarctica each year. According to the 2022 UN report, more than 100,000 Arctic and Antarctic icebergs melt in the ocean each year. Burkhold said a relatively small iceberg weighing 113 million tons could be pulled from Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa, supplying 20% of the city’s water needs for a year.
For example, paleoclimatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson, who led nine expeditions to Antarctica and six to Greenland to extract ice cores, expressed strong skepticism about the idea. The author of the Cape Town plan, senior sailor Nick Sloane, is less skeptical. Using satellite data to find the best iceberg, his “team of glaciologists, engineers and oceanographers” plans to capture it in a giant web and lure it into the mighty Antarctic Peripheral Current and from there the Benguela Current, which flows north into South Africa. .
Sloan estimated that if the iceberg doesn’t melt at sea or break apart on the way, the cost to melt the ice and divert freshwater to land is $100 million plus an additional $50 million. In various interviews, Cape Town officials were not particularly enthusiastic.
Sloane’s plans have yet to bear fruit. Meanwhile, Berlin-based company POLEWATER has been working on a similar plan for nearly a decade to bring frozen freshwater to the west coast of Africa and the Caribbean, where the company plans to distribute it to those in urgent need. It will also use satellites to find suitable icebergs, but after moving the icebergs, the plan is to pump the meltwater from the ponds above into easily transportable giant sacks.
Then there’s the Iceberg Project in the UAE, Emirati inventor Abdullah Alshehhi’s dream to bring an Antarctic iceberg to the shores of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. In the animated commercial, polar bears and penguins, species from opposite poles, pose sadly on an iceberg. Alshehi said it would be “cheaper to bring in these icebergs” than desalinating seawater, which is the most common method in the Middle East.
Desalination provides at least 35 trillion liters of drinking water worldwide each year. Berkhold notes that it is very expensive in many places. The process also uses fossil fuels for energy and pollutes the ocean with excess salt. But it offers limited information on possibly more efficient alternatives to iceberg pulling, such as recycling urban wastewater or using brackish water to irrigate crops. It offers no data on more esoteric water sources, such as mist harvesting, used by remote communities in Chile, Morocco, and South Africa. It also does not take into account initiatives to reduce water waste or increase usage efficiency.
Berkhold believes that if the iceberg harvest is successful, it may not be left to the Quixote-like entrepreneurs – larger, water-hungry businesses can step in with their “deep treasure and profit-oriented approach.” The race is largely unregulated: there are few national laws regarding the use of icebergs, and no international agreements defining who can extract and sell these freshwater resources. The author concludes that if we are to make fair use of them, “we must decide who, how, and how much to use the icebergs – in such a way that that use is just and equitable.”
Birkhold speaks candidly about possible pitfalls. But if the initiative is successful, large volumes of fresh water that would normally melt in the ocean could be delivered to sun-scorched areas.
Previously Focus He wrote that Europe is on the verge of a catastrophic drought. Groundwater reserves are rapidly being depleted, with shortages causing problems in agriculture and electricity production, including nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.
Source: Focus
Ashley Fitzgerald is an accomplished journalist in the field of technology. She currently works as a writer at 24 news breaker. With a deep understanding of the latest technology developments, Ashley’s writing provides readers with insightful analysis and unique perspectives on the industry.