[ExI] towing an iceberg

[Sherry Knepper]

Spike, can you get what you wrote to someone with ability to make it happen?  If necessary it could be modified to fit current available parts and mechanics.

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  On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 2:28 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:   <!--#yiv0723361647 _filtered {} _filtered {}#yiv0723361647 #yiv0723361647 p.yiv0723361647MsoNormal, #yiv0723361647 li.yiv0723361647MsoNormal, #yiv0723361647 div.yiv0723361647MsoNormal {margin:0in;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri", sans-serif;}#yiv0723361647 span.yiv0723361647EmailStyle19 {font-family:"Calibri", sans-serif;color:windowtext;}#yiv0723361647 .yiv0723361647MsoChpDefault {font-size:10.0pt;} _filtered {}#yiv0723361647 div.yiv0723361647WordSection1 {}-->
 

  

Cool!  A few days ago, this huge iceberg was formed when A-76 broke off the Ronne Ice Shelf.

  



  

  

A-76 has been measured at about 4300 square km, and since about 10% of an iceberg is above water, then the volume of ice is the product of square km of visible ice times the average altitude above sea level of the surface of the ice times ten.  

  

Sooo… by that reckoning, this is a bunch of cubic km of ice.

  

California (and the US in general) is going into another damn drought.  What if… we could somehow haul A-76 up and park it about 50 km out at sea, then build a pipeline out to it which would bring fresh water from the melting ice over to the mainland.

  

OK so how the heck do we haul a chunk of ice that size?

  

Good chance we can’t do it with the little bit of force we can exert with ships, but if we had some kind of anchors which sit still on the sea floor and exert steady force through cables, might that move the ice into the current that flows north along the west coast of South America.

  

Once we hit central America, the current that once helped us is now going hack the other way, so I can imagine two ways from there.  One is to break off pieces of perhaps a cubic km and try to haul them against the current or… park the ice off the west coast of Columbia and pipe the fresh water up thru Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico to the USA.

  

Any chance either scheme could work?  If so, there is a buttload of money to be made.

  

spike
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