Can icebergs be towed ?

The formidable reservoir of fresh water constituted by icebergs has forever fascinated the imaginations of navigators. In the 18th century, did not the extremely famous James Cook, who was exploring the South Pacific, remove more than twenty tons of fragments from the icebergs that were found beyond the Antarctic circle to replenish his water supply?
Does not the Antarctic stock in its fleets of icebergs what is reckoned to be a third of the planet's annual need for water? At a time when, for certain arid countries the need for water poses real problems, would it not be logical for certain particularly adventurous minds to give thought to towing these giants?

IN 1977, PRINCE MOHAMMED AL FAISAL OF SAUDI ARABIA CREATED A COMPANY THAT WAS DELEGATED TO STUDY THE FEASIBILITY OF TOWING AN ICEBERG CONTAINING 100 MILLION TONS OF SOUTHERN WATER TO THE PORT OF JEDDAH, OR A DISTANCE OF 14,000 KILOMETRES…

It was in the fifties that serious speculation began about towing icebergs, it was the oceanographer John Isaacs of the Scripps Institution in Jolla (California) who was one of the first seriously to envisage towing icebergs coming from the Antarctic. He had in effect calculated that a fleet of six powerful tugboats could, in a few months, haul an iceberg from 65° degrees latitude south that measured thirty or so kilometres in length.

Twenty years later, two other American scientists, John Hult and Neil Ostrander, went even further in their imaginative processes: to tow not just one iceberg at a time but to join them up, to carve them so that their front part resembled the bow of a ship and would thus move more easily through the water, and so to constitute a train of icebergs and to tow the whole thing with the aid of nuclear-powered tugboats.

In the saga of iceberg towing, there were also the somewhat crazy dreams of Prince Mohammed al Faisal, one of the sons of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. The idea came to him after having compared what the towing of an iceberg, such as conceived by Hult and Ostrander, would represent and the cost of a giant plan to desalinate seawater. In 1977, the Prince created a company that was delegated to study the feasibility of towing an iceberg containing 100 million tons of southern water to the Saudi port of Jeddah, or a distance of 14,000 kilometres! The sensation caused by the Prince is still remembered today when he offered, during one of his conferences of the towing of icebergs, (the one that was held on the campus of Ames University in Iowa) ice cubes coming from a two-ton iceberg that he had had specially hoisted by helicopter to the open sea off Alaska.

On the other side of the world, Australian glaciologists had imagined, one day, towing Antarctic icebergs as far as the arid areas of their southern towns, such as Perth or Adelaide. Although they thought about it with all the necessary seriousness, these projects were never successfully concluded because of the multiplicity of problems posed by any possible towing: the ridiculously slow speed of the convoy, (less than 2kph), the tendency of icebergs to turn in on themselves and dislocate themselves, the melting of a part of the iceberg along the way and insulating it, the approach to the port areas and the reception of the iceberg, the transformation of its ice into water, etc etc. For the moment, then, even if some still maybe believe in one or other of these crazy projects, scientists and financiers are unanimous in their admission that an operation of this kind will certainly never see the light of day.