[ExI] towing an iceberg

[William Flynn Wallace]

Why isn't more money spent on desalination tech?  bill w

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 2:21 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *Sherry Knepper via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] towing an iceberg
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> >…Spike, can you get what you wrote to someone with ability to make it
> happen? Sherry
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> 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.
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> But don’t worry.  If I do, I will say nice things about all of you in my
> memoir.
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> Suggestions welcome on who to contact.
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> Sherry do tell us something about Sherry please.  I don’t recall seeing
> your posts hitherto.
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> spike
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> Cool!  A few days ago, this huge iceberg was formed when A-76 broke off
> the Ronne Ice Shelf.
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> 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.
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> Sooo… by that reckoning, this is a bunch of cubic km of ice.
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> 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.
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> OK so how the heck do we haul a chunk of ice that size?
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Any chance either scheme could work?  If so, there is a buttload of money
> to be made.
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> spike
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