[ExI] towing an iceberg

[BillK]

On Fri, 21 May 2021 at 19:25, spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> 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?
>
<snip>
>
> spike
> ______________________________________________


You can't tow an iceberg that big!  There is already a lot of
expertise in this. Smaller icebergs have to be towed all the time in
the Arctic to move them away from oil rigs. 70 to 80 a year.
A recent study is here:
<https://www.whoi.edu/news-insights/content/can-icebergs-be-towed-to-water-starved-cities/>

Apart from how to do the tow, other interesting problems to consider
are the amount of melting that will happen during the very slow towing
procedure and then how will that amount of ice affect the marine
environment and wildlife of wherever it ends up?




BillK