Iceberg haul
Massive icebergs could be wrapped in insulation and towed 1,200 miles from Antarctica to provide water for drought-stricken South Africa, claims marine salvage expert Nick Sloane
Cape Town suffered a severe drought earlier this year, leaving the capital city only weeks away from running out of water. To prevent the dire situation happening again, one marine salvage expert – and native South African, Nick Sloane has come up with a solution.
Sloane wants to tow an enormous, 91 million tonne iceberg from Antarctica to the South African city to provide much-needed fresh water supplies. The outlandish mission, which the marine salvage expert acknowledges ' sounds crazy', would involve a 1,900 km tow trip across open water.
South Africa has declared a national disaster over the drought that hit its southern and western regions this year. The crisis follows record droughts in the nation in both 2015 and 2016. Melting a 91 million tonne iceberg towed from Antarctica could provide South Africa with 150 million litres of usable water every day for a year, claims Nick Sloane.
' The idea sounds crazy,' the maverick salvage expert admitted in a recent interview. 'But if you look at the fine details, it is not so crazy.' Mr Sloane was the mastermind behind the idea to refloat capsized Italian passenger liner Costa Concordia back in 2014. He now hopes to drag huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of litres of water.
Cape Town-based Sloane is a director at the US marine salvage firm Resolve Marine. He claims his existing Southern Ice team would be capable of towing huge icebergs back to the coast of South Africa using an underwater net.
Wrapping a passing iceberg in a fabric skirt would also stop the iceberg melting before it reaches South Africa since the specialist geotextile could help to stop evaporation, Sloane adds. However, despite this precaution, the team admits the berg is likely to shrink by almost 30 percent on its journey northwards.
The iceberg would be carefully selected by drones and radiography scans. Ideally, it would be about 1 km in length, 500 metres across and up to 250 metres deep, with a flat, tabletop surface. Large tankers would be used to guide the blocks into the Benguela Current that flows along the west coast of southern Africa.
'The project is crazy – no question,' said Olav Orheim, a Norwegian glaciologist with four decades of experience who is working on a similar project for Saudi Arabia. He added that it was no longer unrealistic 'because we know so much more now than when we started this kind of research 40 years ago'. 'It is a high risk project, but also (one) which may have a very high reward at the end.'