[ExI] delaware to california

spike spike66 at att.net
Wed Jul 12 14:42:57 UTC 2017


 

 

The Larsen C ice shelf broke off last night or late yesterday; a Delaware
sized chunk of ice is now floating.  It's an idea so obvious it must have
been studied: could we haul it to California?  Why not?  We could get boats
which wouldn't exactly haul the thing, but rather would kinda steer it into
the natural currents.  We could use anchors and long cables: a ship could go
out about 10 km, drop an anchor, then serve as a float and fulcrum point of
sorts: its 10 km anchor chain would go down at about pi/4, then a catenary
cable would go back to the iceberg.  Since the cable back to the ice would
only be near the surface close to the ice and the ship, then other shipping
could pass over it.


	
		
 


In this sketch, the red thing is a surface ship, a retired aircraft carrier
perhaps.  There is no reason why we couldn't use multiple surface ships:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have we any ocean-current hipsters?  Is there a way to haul the ice to where
it would get in an ocean current that would carry it to California?  We
could try to haul it near Catalina Island, pull it toward land when the tide
is high with cables anchored on Catalina, then have free fresh water, ja?
What could we do with all that?  How fast would we need to haul the ice to
steer it into a current?  Would a couple hundred meters an hour be good
enough?  How much force would it take to haul something like that at a
couple hundred meters an hour?

 

spike

 

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