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UAE To Drag Iceberg From Antarctica To Solve Water Shortage Set To Last 25 Years (express.co.uk)
schwit1 quotes a report from Daily Express: The UAE, which is among the top 10 water-scarce countries in the world, hopes to help ease the stress of a drinking water shortage by towing an iceberg from the freezing Antarctica in order to create more drinking water. The National Advisor Bureau Limited's (NABL) managing Director Abdullah Mohammad Sulaiman Al Shehi says an average iceberg contains "more than 20 billion gallons of water" which would be enough for one million people over five years. Up to four-fifths of an iceberg's mass is underwater, and due to their vast density, they would theoretically not melt in the boiling climate of the Middle Eastern coastal line. Mr Al Shehi says it could take up to a year to drag the huge body of ice up to the UAE, and the project is set to begin in 2018.
".. and due to their vast density, they..."
Uhhhh, Icebergs are *less* dense that's why they float. I think the author means mass.
Dialectician. Archology.
Australia proposed exactly this suggestion about 25 years ago.
Then they started looking for ships powerful enough to move such a drag
Project died.
Surprise.
There is more detailed info here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/uae-icebergs-drinking-water-from-antarctica-towed-united-arab-emirates-a7715561.html
They plan to tow multiple icebergs over the course of time and state that icebergs have microclimate effects, including increasing rainfall. As to how they will extract the water:
"Blocks will be chipped off the iceberg above the waterline and then crushed into water, before being stored in large tanks and filtered through a water processing plant."
Ain't no shortage of rag-heads proudly wasting water in the United Ayrahb Emirates.
http://chartsbin.com/view/1455
UAE - 916.1 m3/year/capita
USA - 1,550
Let's compare with some 3rd world shitholes like
Sweden - 285.6
Denmark - 120.9
Finland - 309.3
How fucking retardedly stupid are you? You're from redneck america, aren't you?
Funny how someone might become aggressive and full of contempt when faced with a simple mistake - I'm used to the acronym in another language since, like you, I'm not American.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The UAE contributes _nothing_ to global warming, pollution, and waste production, when compared to f.ex. the U.S., the biggest glutton and waste-producing PoS on the face of the planet. You don't get to talk or have any say when it comes to what the UAE wants to drink.
No. Only a small part of an iceberg is generated by freezing of seawater; most of the water arrives in the form of snow. Even the freezing of seawater is a natural salt-removal process involving the behavior of crystal lattices.
Nope. You're thinking of sea ice, which forms in salt water. Icebergs are formed by glacial calving or ice sheets that originate on land.
But even sea ice is less saline than seawater, because the freezing process expels brine. But because sea ice is flat like a pancake it has a larger surface area to volume ratio.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It was one of the ideas pitched to Montgomery Brewster (Richard Pryor) in the movie Brewster's Millions, execpt the guy wanted to tow it from the Arctic.
You forgot to subtract the fraction of ice which would melt during that 1 year journey.
And we're doing desalination plants wrong. Right now they're usually reverse osmosis using electric pumps to generate the pressure needed force water through the filters. This is because the electric cost of reverse osmosis is less than the electric + heating cost of distillation. Water has a very high specific heat, so it takes a lot of energy to evaporate it.
We need to be adding desalination to power plants. Nuclear and fossil fuel power plants generate heat as a waste product. They get rid of it by heating up seawater or river water, or by evaporating water in big cooling towers. Instead of throwing that heat away, using it to distill seawater ends up being cheaper than reverse osmosis.
I just did some googling, looking for more information about their plans and found this which is quite interesting. It puts the plan in a somewhat different light, and answers many of comments made here.
A key reason for this iceberg towing plan is specifically local environment modification. All those desalinization plants are pumping bring into the coastal waters, and the icebergs are going to be allowed to melt in open water to counteract the increased salinity and restoring the ecological balance in those coastal waters. And through feedback effects they anticipate that is will modify the local climate, creating a cool air layer (basically an artificial inversion effect) and increasing rainfall.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj