[ExI] towing an iceberg

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Sherry Knepper via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] towing an iceberg

 

>…Spike, can you get what you wrote to someone with ability to make it happen? Sherry

Such as Elon Musk?  No.  He lives and works nearby but I have never met the man.  I don’t know the kind of people who could make that idea happen, but if we could, everyone wins.  It would be a possible way for the USA to become carbon neutral.  We bring in fresh water from a melting iceberg that we managed to somehow herd into location, use that to irrigate otherwise barren land in California, those areas blossom, going from arid wasteland into verdant carbon-sequestering biomass, wildlife is handed a lush new habitat, humanity has new and interesting spaces in which to live and thrive, the atmosphere and the planet are saved, but most important of all, I make a cubic buttload of money.

But don’t worry.  If I do, I will say nice things about all of you in my memoir.

Suggestions welcome on who to contact.

Sherry do tell us something about Sherry please.  I don’t recall seeing your posts hitherto.

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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