Hauling icebergs to Africa: could a bizarre plan to get drinking water actually work?

Chasing Icebergs: How Frozen Freshwater Can Save the Planet Matthew H. Birkhold Viking (2023)

The flavour of chilled Svalbarði-brand water, melted from an iceberg just 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole, is described by the company as “like catching snowflakes on the tongue”. Bottled in Longyearbyen, a tiny metropolis in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, Svalbarði water is airlifted to luxury locales in London, Sydney, Florida and Macau. “Taste the Arctic to Save the Arctic,” its website croons, promoting the supposed carbon neutrality of the water, which sells online for €99.95 (US$107) for a 750-millilitre bottle.

That price is far out of reach for most of the world’s people, including the one in four who lack safe drinking water. In Chasing Icebergs, Matthew Birkhold, a scholar of law, culture and the humanities, considers whether it’s possible to slake the world’s thirst with the two-thirds of global fresh water that is locked away in ice caps and glaciers — “stuck at the poles in gigantic fortresses of ice”, in his words.

Some are already at it — and not just epicureans quaffing Svalbarði. In Newfoundland, Canada, Birkhold interviews “iceberg cowboy” Ed Kean, who wrangles bergs from the frigid sea, selling the water to cosmetics companies and breweries. In Qaanaaq, Greenland’s northernmost town, Birkhold notes, the public water supply includes filtered and treated iceberg melt.

There’s more where that came from. By one estimate, some 2,300 cubic kilometres of ice breaks off from Antarctica every year. More than 100,000 Arctic and Antarctic icebergs melt into the ocean annually, according to a 2022 United Nations report. A relatively small, 113-million-tonne iceberg, says Birkhold, could be towed from Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa, to supply 20% of the city’s water needs for a year. What’s not to like?

Quite a lot, perhaps. “To write this book, I have talked to dozens of scientists,” Birkhold writes. “They are uniformly dubious.” Palaeoclimatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson has led nine expeditions to Antarctica and six to Greenland to extract ice cores. “Make sure you write that I am skeptical of iceberg towing,” she instructs him.

Less sceptical is master mariner Nick Sloane, the brains behind the Cape Town plan. Using satellite data to find the best berg, his “team of glaciologists, engineers and oceanographers” plans to catch it in a giant net and pull it by tugboat into the mighty Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and thence into the north-flowing Benguela Current towards South Africa.

Sloane has estimated the cost at a cool $100 million, plus an extra $50 million or so to melt the ice and funnel the fresh water to land, if the iceberg hasn’t melted into the sea or fallen apart en route. In various interviews, Cape Town officials have expressed themselves as less than enthused.

Sloane’s plans have yet to materialize. Meanwhile, POLEWATER, a Berlin-based company, has been working for almost a decade on a similar plan — to haul frozen fresh water to the western coast of Africa and the Caribbean, where the company intends to give it away to those in dire need. It, too, will use satellites to locate suitable bergs, but once it has relocated them, it plans to pump meltwater from pools on top into easily transportable gigantic bags.

Then there’s the UAE Iceberg Project, the dream of Emirati inventor Abdulla Alshehhi to import an Antarctic iceberg to the Fujairah coast of the United Arab Emirates. An animated promotion features penguins and polar bears — species hailing from opposite poles — posing dolefully on the iceberg. Alshehhi has said that “it will be cheaper to bring in these icebergs” than to desalinate seawater — a common technique in the Middle East.

Desalination provides at least 35 trillion litres of drinking water globally every year. Birkhold notes that it is prohibitively expensive in many places. It also relies on fossil fuels for energy, and pollutes the ocean with excess salt. But he offers limited information on other, perhaps more effective, alternatives to iceberg towing, such as recycling municipal wastewater or tapping brackish water for crop irrigation. He offers no data on more esoteric sources of water, such as fog harvesting, used by remote communities in Chile, Morocco and South Africa. Nor does he address initiatives to reduce water waste or increase efficiency of use.

Birkhold speculates that if iceberg harvesting succeeds, it might not remain the province of quixotic entrepreneurs — bigger, water-hungry enterprises might muscle in with their “deep coffers and profit-driven approach”. The race is largely unregulated: few national laws address iceberg use, and no international agreements clarify who can capture and sell these freshwater resources. If they are to be exploited fairly, the author concludes, “we need to decide who gets to use icebergs — and how and how many — in a way that is just and equitable”.

Birkhold is engagingly honest about potential pitfalls. But if the enterprise could succeed, enormous quantities of fresh water that would otherwise melt into the ocean could be delivered to parched regions. Kudos to the author for diving in — whether or not it is ever realized.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.