Strange idea of pulling Antarctic ice to save the city
It was a crazy plan when the situation was desperate - towing icebergs from Antarctica to Cape Town (South Africa) to provide fresh water to the city in a severe drought.
Earlier this year, during a state of emergency, the city of Cape Town was forced to cut off water supplies to households and forced residents to queue up to receive their water rations at public water points.
The water cuts were only eased when the autumn rains arrived and residents continued to take steps to reduce their water use. But the threat of water shortages is expected to return to the South African coastal city next year and beyond.
To deal with this, South African-Zambian rescue expert Nick Sloane had an idea that sounded crazy but was also highly feasible: “towing an iceberg to the city”.
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| Towing ice from Antarctica to Cape Town is considered a crazy idea, but more or less feasible. Illustration photo. |
Sloane plans to wrap the iceberg in a giant bag of insulating material to prevent it from melting, then use a supersonic aircraft and two tugboats, using ocean currents to pull the iceberg 2,000km to Cape Town.
Also according to Sloane's idea, the iceberg would be carefully selected by drones, it could be 1km long, 500m wide and up to 250m deep. After the iceberg is towed to the city, the hot water from the iceberg, and the crushed ice would be collected every day through collection channels to create 150 million liters of daily drinking water within a year.
Sloane's plan would be divided into several stages, the first of which would be to tow the giant iceberg north, to South Africa's St Helena Bay, where the water is around 0 degrees Celsius. The iceberg could then be anchored in an old submarine channel, and the water from the melting iceberg would be collected each day, pumped into tankers and transported back to Cape Town.
But according to many of the world's leading experts on ice, is the iceberg structurally sound enough, or will it break apart during the towing process? Will it melt over a long distance?
However, besides the efforts of the Cape Town government, such as finding more underground water sources and desalinating seawater, the "crazy" plan to pull icebergs is also one of the potential and worthy solutions to the frequent scarcity of domestic water in the beautiful city of Cape Town.
