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Engineering Firm Plans To Tow Icebergs From Antarctica To Parched Dubai (stuff.co.nz)
A Dubai-based engineering firm is planning to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to help provide fresh drinking water to the desert city's rapidly-growing population. Stuff.co.nz reports: The National Advisor Bureau (NABL), a private engineering firm, wants to schlep a glacial iceberg from Antarctica -- weighing approximately 100 million tons -- to Dubai, via an intermediate stop in either Perth, Australia, or Cape Town, South Africa. If the iceberg doesn't melt along the way, the firm will sell the water to Dubai's government. Dubai, which is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, is growing so rapidly that a solution to the city's looming water crisis must be found, according to the city's largest English-language newspaper, The Khaleej Times.
The company is beginning a pilot study in November to examine the feasibility of the iceberg-towing project. According to Alshehi, the firm will use satellite imagery to look for a suitable iceberg -- which he says should be between 2000 feet (609 meters) and 7000 feet (2.1 kilometers) long -- and then try and tow it to either Australia or South Africa. Once the iceberg gets to its first stop, it will be towed the rest of the way. Because icebergs are so heavy, the company will need multiple ships to assist with towing, and it will use the ocean's prevailing currents to their advantage. Alshehi told NBC that even if 30 percent of the iceberg melts on the journey, it will still be able to provide between 100 million and 200 million cubic meters of fresh water -- enough for 1 million people to stay hydrated for five years. Last month, Alshehi told NBC: "If we succeed with this project, it could solve one of the world's biggest problems. So if we show this is viable, it could ultimately help not only the UAE, but all humanity."
The company is beginning a pilot study in November to examine the feasibility of the iceberg-towing project. According to Alshehi, the firm will use satellite imagery to look for a suitable iceberg -- which he says should be between 2000 feet (609 meters) and 7000 feet (2.1 kilometers) long -- and then try and tow it to either Australia or South Africa. Once the iceberg gets to its first stop, it will be towed the rest of the way. Because icebergs are so heavy, the company will need multiple ships to assist with towing, and it will use the ocean's prevailing currents to their advantage. Alshehi told NBC that even if 30 percent of the iceberg melts on the journey, it will still be able to provide between 100 million and 200 million cubic meters of fresh water -- enough for 1 million people to stay hydrated for five years. Last month, Alshehi told NBC: "If we succeed with this project, it could solve one of the world's biggest problems. So if we show this is viable, it could ultimately help not only the UAE, but all humanity."
I did. Decades ago.
Seriously, I should drive my 4 cylinder car less than twice a week so others can have this???
This sounds a lot like something that would make actual climate change in a highly negative way. Disruption of the natural flow of hot & cold currents much?
Multiple ships towing an iceberg of this size multiple thousands of miles... belching carbon into our atmosphere.... this sounds like a horrible idea. How about instead we don't build enormous cities in deserts. And accelerating the melting of the iceberg will raise sea levels that much faster.
I'm skeptical that this will go anywhere near as well as planned. I suppose if it doesn't work out, they can always park what they do manage to haul all the way there off of the world islands.
a cool project :-)
https://www.igsoc.org/annals/1... has several interesting papers related to this subject.
The short summary is that we really don't have a good feel for the feasibility of this, so it seems like an experiment worth trying.
Brewster's Millions was a comedy - NOT a business think tank.
would be not only more cost effective but less risky of an investment
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty prohibits the exploitation of Antarctica's resources based on environmental concerns.
Now it does say -mineral- resources and I don't think ice counts as a mineral, but still, I'd imagine the environmental impact isn't negligible. Specially if done in large scale.
Have gnu, will travel.
I would love to see the energy estimate for the fuel required to tow this, compared to desalination of the same volume of seawater, for example. A giant 30 story iceberg isn't exactly streamlined.
A 100 million ton iceberg will provide pretty much exactly 100 million cubic meters of fresh water, if none of it is lost to melting en route. One cubic meter of fresh water weighs one metric ton. To get 200 million cubic meters of fresh water despite 30% melting away, you need a 286 million ton iceberg.
I saw that documentary Already. I seem to remember they spent 30 million to make 300 million but it wasn't easy.
What could possibly go wrong?
Terraforming is a pretty cool idea, but I think it should generally be reserved for planets that aren't already habitable.
I mean .... is it ?
No. It is an idiotic idea. Most of the water in UAE is used for subsidized agriculture. Wheat (the local staple) does not naturally grow in deserts, so it needs lots and lots of expensive water.
Instead of importing millions of tons of water, they should be importing thousands of tons of wheat from countries with rain.
Towing ice from Antarctica to the desert so a bunch of oil drillers can work more efficiently at extracting oil to burn and fuel their iceberg-towing machinery? Why not, it's not like we need icebergs or should stop burning oil.
ok you were modded down.
No, that's not racist, that's sensible. Per ton shipped, they'll get way more benefit from grain (because all the inefficiencies with regard to water have already passed earlier in the production) than bringing the materials and producing there.
IF they're growing grain with it, that is.
Well, that rain thing was this year extremely uneven distributed over the ares of the planet where you could grow wheat or rice ....
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah, this was a scam back then, and there's little reason to believe it's not a scam now.
Are they looking for investors?
Are they hinting at extremely large returns?
Would it be a monumental feat?
Two out of three should be enough to make you walk away. Three out of three, well, let's just say that those who lose money on this will pay the stupidity tax.
Because they already have a whole bunch of them. The majority of desalination in the world happens in Dubai.
It costs more and more to operate them, because they're increasing the salt concentration in the gulf.
They're still building more capacity.
Seriously, I would love to see us move something that large. It would enable a number of other actions. I will say, that it would be best to have a small 1-10MW nuclear reactor to power several electric motors to drive this forward.
Regardless, desalination is probably the better way. The reason is that multiple sites can be set up along the seas and have multiple continual sources of water vs. batching it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Desalination costs about $0.50 per tonne (one cubic meter).
If they can move a 100M tonne berg for less than $50M, then it is may be more cost effective to use ice.
Desalination cost is very dependent on electricity cost, which retails for about $0.06 per kwh in Dubai. The wholesale price is likely about half that. Electricity is cheap because much of it is generated from oilfield NG that would otherwise be flared.
What if on the way there it hits a ship and sinks?
Back in the day a task like this required rocket engines built from junkyard parts cobbled together with wire and duct tape ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Oh, yeah, Brewster. Monty Brewster. Made million$ doing this.
Well, that rain thing was this year extremely uneven distributed over the ares of the planet where you could grow wheat or rice ....
Wheat prices are a little above historic norms but not by much.
Buying wheat would be way cheaper than shipping ice 10,000 miles through equatorial seas. For every tonne of wheat, they need 4000 tonnes of fresh water. This is far above the world's average because of low humidity, high temperatures, and sandy soil. Nearly all of that needs to be supplied by irrigation.
Won't it melt before it gets there?
IF they're growing grain with it, that is.
Water use in UAE
From the citation: Irrigated agriculture is the primary water consumer, with an average of around 60% of total water use
Also from the citation: Irrigation water is generally used in a wasteful manner, mainly through traditional flooding and furrow irrigation techniques and for cultivating low-value, high-water-consumption crops.
So, after complaining for decades that the polar ice caps are melting, due to climate change, now we're just going to physically take the ice away? Good job.
Maybe we ought not be living in deserts. Seems hostile to me.
The problem with desalination is you have all this brine left over that you have to do something with. If you are in the desert I guess you can just pump it into a sand dune and have it evaporate.
Or, to paraphrase an infamous Sam Kinneson bit - maybe they should move to where there is water.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Yeah,
but what would they do then? Planting no wheat? So no green, no change in humidity? No change in micro climate?
So far we don't know what it costs to ship an iceberg so far. I hoped those desert countries simply would start a long term big "terraforming" project to make the deserts at least somewhat green again.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The best way to "green the desert", or at least slow down the browning, is to reduce CO2 emissions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sincerely your Professor Farnsworth from Planet Express.
WTF are we talking about "greening the desert"? I mean, it's the desert - it wasn't a lush rainforest before the industrial revolution/age of the automobile, so why are we trying to make it something it never was? It's a stupid idea, it was always a stupid idea, and nothing Al Gore has ever has or will put on a powerpoint slide is going to change that.
Is desalination really so hard?
Can't Dubai figure out a way to, you know, conserve water?
Ken
It costs more and more to operate them, because they're increasing the salt concentration in the gulf.
That's hysterical - it's like using a snow blower and you keep blowing the snow where you haven't cleared yet, simply adding to the snow yet to be plowed...
Why can't they divert the salt slur elsewhere?
Ken
I have heard about these plans 20 years ago. I hope they are moving forward, not just rehashing some old dream.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"letting all the white immigrants from Europe come over" - you're adorable, and you have a childish view of the hospitality of the native americans.
Ken
The water in the Gulf is 25% saltier than normal seawater. At some point it might be economical to bring in tankers of normal seawater to the existing desalination plants. At some point they will have to build a large pipe to somewhere that makes sense to build more desalination plants.
Futurama - Global Warming
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Unfortunately, it's done virtually everywhere.
Although California's almonds get a lot of the bad press, depleting the desert aquifers to grow hay and corn to feed slaughter cattle is similarly wasteful.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
it wasn't a lush rainforest before the industrial revolution/age of the automobile
No, but much of pre-industrial Arabia and North Africa was grassland. What is now the Sahara Desert was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
Desertification was driven partly by natural climate change over the millenia, but also by destructive agriculture and overgrazing. In recent decades, desertification has rapidly accelerated, and the most plausible explanation is AGW. The Sahara is expanding southward at a rate of 50 km per year. The Arabian Desert is also expanding and becoming dryer.
Good idea, but first make them release all the hostages their "justice" system has produced: the couple who kissed on the beach, the woman who was served one drink on the plane heading there, and all those Indian workers paid virtually nothing to build those towers for the elite.
RIght, because that region has never thought about desalination until you mentioned it. Oh wait: https://www.theguardian.com/gl...
Towing icebergs from the south pole to the middle east is still bullshit of course.
I mean .... is it ?
No. It is an idiotic idea. Most of the water in UAE is used for subsidized agriculture. Wheat (the local staple) does not naturally grow in deserts, so it needs lots and lots of expensive water.
Instead of importing millions of tons of water, they should be importing thousands of tons of wheat from countries with rain.
They should just try to attract immigrants who are really, really full. No wheat problems, nor any water problems.
A good-sized iceberg might measure 3,000 x 1,500 x 600 feet. An iceberg that size contains somewhere around 20 billion gallons of fresh water.
A supertanker carries about two million barrels, or, 84 million gallons.
Assuming no water loss during ice melt (improbable) and subsequent water collection in the Arctic Circle, that's fuel for 238 supertankers + whatever energy is expended during the collection process... if you can tow and harvest the water, including melt losses, with less fuel consumption per harvested gallon than harvesting in the Arctic and subsequently shipping it, that's a win.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Can't even keep your predictions straight ? Global warming is supposed to make the world wetter.
It hasn't always been a desert and the historical evidence is that it was human activity turned it into a desert.
Possibly not rainforest, but forest.
Yeah NO. Try again. Unless you want to credit human activity for the glaciers receding.
Hilarious. Why wait for them to melt? Let's tow one to a desert first. So can we now stop pretending that America is to blame for everything?
Jesus H Christ do you people just make this stuff up on the spot ?
The two researchers have looked into precipitation patterns of the Holocene era and compared them with present-day movements of the intertropical convergence zone, a large region of intense tropical rainfall. Using computer models and other data, the researchers found links to rainfall patterns thousands of years ago.
"The framework we developed helps us understand why the heaviest tropical rain belts set up where they do," Korty explains.
"Tropical rain belts are tied to what happens elsewhere in the world through the Hadley circulation, but it won't predict changes elsewhere directly, as the chain of events is very complex. But it is a step toward that goal."
The Hadley circulation is a tropical atmospheric circulation that rises near the equator. It is linked to the subtropical trade winds, tropical rainbelts, and affects the position of severe storms, hurricanes, and the jet stream. Where it descends in the subtropics, it can create desert-like conditions. The majority of Earth's arid regions are located in areas beneath the descending parts of the Hadley circulation.
"We know that 6,000 years ago, what is now the Sahara Desert was a rainy place," Korty adds.
"It has been something of a mystery to understand how the tropical rain belt moved so far north of the equator. Our findings show that that large migrations in rainfall can occur in one part of the globe even while the belt doesn't move much elsewhere.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2016-12-...
And for the general case in central Asia.
https://link.springer.com/arti...
Model results clearly show the early Holocene patterns indicated by proxy records, including both the decreased effective moisture in arid central Asia, which occurs in the model primarily during the winter months, and the increase in summer monsoon precipitation in south and east Asia. The model results suggest that dry conditions in the early Holocene in central Asia are closely related to decreased water vapor advection due to reduced westerly wind speed and less evaporation upstream from the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas in boreal winter. As an extra forcing to the early Holocene climate system, the Laurentide ice sheet and meltwater fluxes have a substantial cooling effect over high latitudes, especially just over and downstream of the ice sheets, but contribute only to a small degree to the early Holocene aridity in central Asia. Instead, most of the effective moisture signal can be explained by orbital forcing decreasing the early Holocene latitudinal temperature gradient and wintertime surface temperature.
But no wheat. Check it out. What they are growing are stuff like vegetables, fodder to produce milk, and fruit crops, all stuff that actually makes sense to produce locally since they don't ship that well, or are specialty items, not tonnage crops like grain.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Once the ice is in iceberg form floating on the ocean it's as good as gone anyway. It's just a matter of how fast it's going to melt.
True.
The worst travesty by far are the alfalfa growers in California, that only exist because of water rights written into law 140 years ago. The crop is worth less than the cost of delivering the water used to grow it, it consumes 22% of all of California's water (as much as all the cities in California combined) and 2/3 of the alfalfa is simply exported to Asia. Yes the California tax payer is paying to have 14% of the state's water exported to Asia at a financial loss so that a small number of industrial farm operators can pocket some money.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Those deserts are deserts since 1000 years or more.
CO2 level changes wont change that.
You have to plant stuff and distribute water.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
china transforms deserts to lush green lands
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The deserts there are all man made. Basically by cutting down the forests.
Anyway, we have the technology to make them green. So if a sheik want to make himself a name that will be remembered for the next millenia he could work on such a project.
Is desalination really so hard?
Yes and no. But what has that to do with my proposal?
Can't Dubai figure out a way to, you know, conserve water?
Ever been there? If a german would waste as much water as a dubaians does, he probably got hanged in public. Seriously, they don't have a "water problem", they have mental problems. They are rich, hence they waste everything to impress the guests/slaveworkers/neighbours with their riches.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Most climate models show that Global Warming will lead to higher humidity and more rain in the Sahara and Arabia. It will also make land in the Russian Siberia and Canadian Arctic more valuable. Global Warming will be bad for California and North Europe. So if greening the desert is the aim , the gulf countries should provide cheap oil to burn.
**Life is too short to be serious**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, but much of pre-industrial Arabia and North Africa was grassland. What is now the Sahara Desert was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
No it wasn't. The Roman breadbasket was the Mediterranean Maghreb which is about as fertile now as it was then. In 2003 Tunisia alone produced 2.3 million tonnes of grain.The total amount of grain needed to feed the million people of Rome was 300,000 tonnes.
The expansion of the Sahara is almost entirely to the west and south, not the north where the Maghreb its.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
No it isn't.
Wrong tense.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Why not? And in any case, someone else is the one fucking the bison in the ass.
They aren't growing wheat. They are growing vegetables, fodder to produce milk, and fruits - all stuff that kind of makes sense to produce locally as they don't store well. Not grains.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
You mean like this one https://www.waterworld.com/art...
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If they put a bag around the iceberg while it's still in chilly water, it doesn't matter how much melts; you just have to tow the bag to the point of use. The main issue is preventing the bag from sinking due to fresh water's higher specific gravity than salt water.
- If the bag reflects sunlight it might slow the rate of melting.
- A siphon at the bottom of the bag could collect meltwater for separate shipment in tankers.
- Or if necessary just let the meltwater drain away.
- Once the bag arrives at the shallow waters near Dubai, it's okay for the bag to sink to the bottom as the ice melts. Fresh water can be extracted via hoses, again from the bottom of the bag, below the sea water which will presumably float to the top of the bag.
// DevsVult: The Machines Will It
No no no no.... This thing melts, and he knows it!
I had a sucky sig.
Desertification in north Africa is not caused by human civilization. It caused human civilisation. the drying of central north Africa is what drove hominids into the Nile valley.
So much better than building a desalinization plant.
It would be too easy to do that in an area where there is a large body of saltwater nearby and tons of solar energy.
So now Internet Tough Guy thinks he's a historian.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
No, not really.
Basically the energy costs would not justify doing this as a long term solution. Think of iceburgs as âoefossil waterâ much like aquifer systems.
The Arab countries need to straight up freeze their birth rates, because you know imported water is going to be something only the rich will be able to afford, and the poor will continue to suffer.
Wait wait wait.... Let me get this straight.... You think that an iceberg that is floating in the water has not raised the level of the ocean (ever so slightly), but it will when it melts?
Did they teach any physics in your school? How do you think that iceberg is floating? *Hint*
displacement
If anything, removing the water, in the iceberg, from the ocean will drop the level of the ocean. Or do you think the ocean needs free-range icebergs?
No.
The iceberg will be melting the whole time. Most of the fresh water will escape into the ocean and become useless seawater by the time it's at Dubai.
How the hell is that different than what will happen anyway? Icebergs melt..... That's all they do... I take that back, sometimes they sink ships.... Sink ships and melt... That's all...
How the fuck do you plan to get them to stop reproducing? People want to reproduce.. For many it's a strong drive... Your plan include forced sterilization?
Yeah, that's a marvelous idea, let's give nukes to the state most likely to directly supply terrorists.
Right.. They let us in here....
Your level of delusion is amusing.
Besides, you only get to own something for as long as you can keep it. There is no moral problem here. They lost it... I'll feel bad for them when all the countries of Europe revert to their original settlers. Lands change hands... What's yours today may not be yours tomorrow. This has been happening for 20,000 years. Get off that liberal soapbox, you're likely to fall and break your neck.
We've been building nuclear powered ships for 60 years now. Go ask the Russians how they do it, they seem to be the experts on it now, with multiple nuclear powered ice breakers in operation today.
The US has far more nuclear vessels than the Russian Federation.... I guess you've got a point on Ice Breakers though? Or something?
Lands change hands... What's yours today may not be yours tomorrow.
Unless it's Israel, amirite?
Bible says that shit's theirs. Who are we to argue with the bible.
Not to mention one of the ideas suggested to Brewster in Brewster's Millions.
about 10 megajoule per m^3...While towing iceberg water may cost less energy by order of magnitudes for the same quantities, keep in mind that the total world desalinization plant output maybe 200 million m^3 per year, roughly the amount they expect to finally get non-melted at their goal port. 200 million m^3 of desalinization is 2.10^15 joules or about a 70 MW plant running 365/24, that is not even counting the replacement pieces. Assuming about 35 Mj/liter of fuel, if they consume with their scheme less than 570000 liter or about 715 tons of fuel, then they are energy positive.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Unfortunately, it's done virtually everywhere.
Although California's almonds get a lot of the bad press, depleting the desert aquifers to grow hay and corn to feed slaughter cattle is similarly wasteful.
Not as wasteful as towing it from Antarctica!
> Can't Dubai figure out a way to, you know, conserve water?
You cannot have Dubai and "Conserve" in the same sentence. That whole area, and few people owning it, have 0 intention to "conserve" _anything_, never mind water.
why do this, instead of filtering seawater, can't imagine that it would be more expensive or more difficult to do.
and it would be permanent, instead having to repeat this every 5 years.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Travesty means 'misrepresentation'.
I have heard about these plans 20 years ago. I hope they are moving forward, not just rehashing some old dream.
People have been bringing this idea up for at least 200 years. It's a romantic but thoroughly impractical (bordering on idiotic) idea just like flying cars, asteroid mining, etc that people keep bringing up because it seems plausible if you don't really understand physics and economics and don't think about it too deeply.
Scrooge McDuck did is successfully years ago :-)
But history suggests this is mostly just another way of extracting money from gullible investors.
This. Towing icebergs around the globe is an old snake oil idea that someone dusts off every couple decades to try to sucker some "investors" out of some cash. It's an idiotic idea if you give it any real thought and have even a passing familiarity with physics and economics. It's like flying cars. It sounds like a cool idea and seems plausible enough at first to credulous people but the reality is that it isn't practical or economic and there are better solutions already available to us.
I am quite confident there are no actual plans to do this. It's just an old scam that I've seen several times already in my life and I'll probably see again a few more before I die.
You think Donald Trump has destroyed the planet? How?
I dislike Trump about as much as anyone you'll find but no he hasn't destroyed the planed nor is he likely to unless ($diety forbid) he finds some way to start a thermonuclear war. He has done some damage and he'll probably do more but this is one of the cases where government moving slowly actually works in our favor because it limits the amount of damage any one administration can do in 4 or 8 years.
but what would they do then? Planting no wheat? So no green, no change in humidity? No change in micro climate?
Yes planting wheat in a hot desert climate where wheat doesn't grow well naturally without major ecosystem transformations is a stupid idea. There is basically no way to make wheat grow near Dubai for less money (and resource inputs) than it costs to grow it in a location where wheat grows more naturally and ship it to Dubai.
So far we don't know what it costs to ship an iceberg so far.
It doesn't really matter because we do know it would be more than building an equivalent desalination plant. Seriously, this iceberg shipping idea is at least 200 years old and it's been shown time and again to be an unworkable and foolish idea. Far more sensible to build desalination plants and ship in the wheat (or other stuff) from elsewhere.
I hoped those desert countries simply would start a long term big "terraforming" project to make the deserts at least somewhat green again.
Why do you hope that? Those regions aren't deserts simply to inconvenience humans. They became deserts because of some complex climatic systems that we should only tinker with very carefully. Just because we theoretically can make a desert green doesn't automatically make it a good idea to do so. Do you have any idea what the second and third order effects of greening a large area of desert might be?
A lot of slaves.
Californian farmers waste water because it's heavily subsidized. If they had to pay market value they would be more careful.
And here we have another example of how global warming confuses people who don't understand averages.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Because glaciers flow faster when they're not pushing against a massive floating ice shelf. And ice shelves melt faster when they're not surrounded by floating ice. And so on and so forth.
You think that an iceberg that is floating in the water has not raised the level of the ocean (ever so slightly), but it will when it melts?
Slightly, yes, due to the fresh water melting into the salt water.
"Fresh water, of which icebergs are made, is less dense than salty sea water. So while the amount of sea water displaced by the iceberg is equal to its weight, the melted fresh water will take up a slightly larger volume than the displaced salt water. This results in a small increase in the water level."
https://www.newscientist.com/a...
(I'm not the person you replied to)
You're right. The trade will allow them to save a lot of expense and increase their production possibilities frontier, making a wealthier country with more jobs.
They could use solar desalinization. Pump sea water (via teflon- and titanium-coated piping bodies) into a tank for a reflux stil. Insolation heats the tank (it sucks in solar energy), which boils the sea water. The reflux component cools the steam and allows extremely-hot water to fall back into the reservoir, while cooled water flows out.
While this conserves energy, you can do more. This distillation process concentrates sea water, which you must flush; and it will be extremely hot. A reverse-flow chiller allows you to run the inflow of seawater past the outflow of both warm freshwater and hot effluence (you split the seawater into two lines).
Result? The beginning of the hot outflow merges with the end of the cold inflow, which is now hot; and as it travels down the line, the cold inflow becomes colder as the hot outflow cools. Rather than equalizing to a middle temperature, you nearly exchange the two temperatures: cold water and effluent out, hot sea water in.
When your tank is below a certain level, you increase the flow volume of seawater in; when it's above a certain level, you decrease the flow volume.
There are other ways to do this. Hot water out can first drive a steam turbine, then go through this cooling system. The steam turbine, having high thermal mass, would sort of act as a reflux return itself. Now you have a solar rankine boiler with fresh water output.
Most modern research on solar desalination focuses on reducing tank pressure to lower temperatures. We don't focus on energy recapture. When folks turn their eyes toward power recirculation, they'll figure out they can get 30%-50% range extension for electric vehicles.
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Crashmarik should have appended "at the end of the last ice age" to his comment to avoid the flood of nasty responses from global warming advocates. At least, I'm guessing that's what he meant.
Boom! Prior art! Nice work!
Most of the fresh water will escape into the ocean and become useless seawater by the time it's at Dubai.
You've done the math on that?
Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle's "Oath of Fealty" about an arcology outside of LA with an iceberg to provide drinking water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Fealty_(novel)
Also keep in mind a portion of the berg is above water when it's solid. Even if the volume stayed the same, melting would still raise the sea level.
What a coincidence. Dubai also plans to implement flying taxis.
Flying taxi's != flying cars. There already are air taxis which are just airplanes and helicopters which are functioning as a taxi service. Any vehicle can be a taxi in principle - taxi is a service description not a particular vehicle design. An air taxi is not the same thing as a flying car which is a vehicle design that can both fly as well as drive on roads. Flying cars are a practical impossibility in the mass market for a variety of engineering and economic reasons, not the least of which is that we have no power source with sufficient energy density to make them simultaneously economically viable and safe. (basically we'd need Tony Stark's arc reactor)
Sounds a bit strange, because alphalpha you usually mix with growing grains or corn, and use it as food for life stock. St least that is what we do in Europe, never heard about anyone exporting it.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm pretty sure I read this story in 1952: The Martian Way , by Isaac Asimov.
...Except it was Mars that needed water, not Dubai.
...And they got their icebergs from Saturn's rings, not Antarctica.
But aside from that, totally the same plan.
~Idarubicin
No.
The iceberg will be melting the whole time. Most of the fresh water will escape into the ocean and become useless seawater by the time it's at Dubai.
How the hell is that different than what will happen anyway? Icebergs melt..... That's all they do... I take that back, sometimes they sink ships.... Sink ships and melt... That's all...
There's two things that icebergs do: melt, sink ships and display an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Can't Dubai figure out a way to, you know, conserve water?
Their still suit discipline is just getting worse and worse every year. Why they don't even use the same quality of still suits as would have been required by the fremen just a few years ago.
And here we have another example of how global warming confuses people who don't understand averages.
Well that puts me in good company, seeing as the people making the predictions claim to have synthesized physics, biology, economics, and weather prediction into a unified system that predicts the future.
Puts Hari Seldon to shame there.
This is correct. After all these years I still make the mistake of thinking I am talking to other than ideological shock troops.
Yep. Lots of US alfalfa is fed to Asian cattle.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Why would a rational person drag something rough and round through all of that water?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Who told you this nonsense? It's just physics with perhaps a tiny bit of input from biology. Economics and weather prediction aren't involved.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you look, you can find ultrapasturaized milk in the USA. You can recognize it by the 1 month expiration date. Walmart was the last place I saw some.
It tastes _terrible_.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You have never in your life run any sort of simulation model for a serious purpose. It is obvious.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
GGP correctly pointed out that gas is flared all over the middle east's oil fields. Put simply, NG is INXS, available for the slightly more than the cap costs of a pipeline to the power/desalination plant.
Which is why they do so much desalination.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You have never in your life run any sort of simulation model for a serious purpose. It is obvious.
You have never made money from understanding the consequences of todays actions on tomorrow's world. It is obvious.
Who told you this nonsense? It's just physics with perhaps a tiny bit of input from biology. Economics and weather prediction aren't involved.
Through your life have you had the nagging suspicion you're a simpleton ?
I ask because we are talking about deforestation and drying in the Sahara, and you just characterized the input of biology as tiny.
We are also talking about the cost of moving icebergs to provide water vs cost of importing wheat and you characterized economics and weather as uninvolved.
I don't even want to think about secondary and tertiary effects that haven't been properly quantified let alone addressed.
I thought we were talking about global warming.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You'd be completely WRONG about that.
I make money by understanding the consequences of today's actions by computer modeling them (just one tool among many).
I know that all 'competent modelers' can get the model to say exactly what they want. That is the definition of 'competent modeler'.
When modeling is being done in earnest, it is an adversarial process.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You'd be completely WRONG about that.
I make money by understanding the consequences of today's actions by computer modeling them (just one tool among many).
I know that all 'competent modelers' can get the model to say exactly what they want. That is the definition of 'competent modeler'.
When modeling is being done in earnest, it is an adversarial process.
I find you to be less than credible.
If for no other reason than
You have never in your life run any sort of simulation model for a serious purpose. It is obvious.
demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what it is needed to turn a simulation's predictions into usable information that risks can be taken on.
I thought we were talking about global warming.
hmm
Engineering Firm Plans To Tow Icebergs From Antarctica To Parched Dubai
Thought did you ?
What's needed to turn a simulation into useful information?
Someone that disagrees with the results going through the dataset in detail. Like I do on a daily basis.
Using model/dataset validation tools like backcasting, tools that are basically never used in climate modeling as there isn't good long term historic data.
OPs claim was that 'models are just physics'...Which is true to an extent, but 'just physics' can tell you anything you want to hear...He and you have _obviously_ never modeled for a living.
Risks? You monte carlo the piss out of it and use statistical methods. Chaotic, nonlinear systems and all. But _first_ you need a validated model or you're just mentally masturbating.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Have you got an idea of where to put millions of tons of salt?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
--It's only stupid if it doesn't work. You can even do it for humanitarian reasons and not make money on it -- if it actually Does The Job and gives people a good supply of fresh water, it's still not "stupid." Mission Accomplished = Considered Successful
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Also keep in mind a portion of the berg is above water when it's solid. Even if the volume stayed the same, melting would still raise the sea level.
That is not correct. Here are a couple of explanations: http://www.physlink.com/educat...
"Fresh water, of which icebergs are made, is less dense than salty sea water. So while the amount of sea water displaced by the iceberg is equal to its weight, the melted fresh water will take up a slightly larger volume than the displaced salt water. This results in a small increase in the water level." (I'm not the person you replied to)
Okay.. I'll take you at your word.. But... it'll melt anyway. Once a 'berg calves from a glacier, its only future is to sink a Titanic or melt...
But, we're talking about icebergs that are already floating around.. I don't think anyone in Dubai is planning on forcibly calving one off of a glacier... I mean, I could be wrong but I suspect they plan on grabbing one that's already floated North some distance.. Would be rather silly to sail by one that's already there...
Well, mutual defense treaties are fine... I just don't buy this whole "we got here first, so it's ours for all time... blah blah blah".
Make allies, defend your shit.... If you lose, you lose.. Suck it up. If that's not how we are gonna look at it, then I suspect we'll be hearing from some Phoenicians on how they want their land back....
--It's only stupid if it doesn't work.
That's only a valid argument when something actually has been shown to work. Towing icebergs for drinking water is an idea that has been kicking around literally for centuries and has never worked nor has it been shown to even be economically plausible. When something is neither technically sensible nor economically viable then it is by definition a stupid idea.
You can even do it for humanitarian reasons and not make money on it
You think humanitarian activities are immune from economics? Even without the intent to make a profit no organization can lose money forever. Towing icebergs is stupidly expensive compare to already viable alternatives. Why would you do something needlessly expensive when you can accomplish the exact same goal for less and help more people in the process? Why would you tow icebergs when you could divert a river or install a desalination plant for less money? Hell, on an individual scale it is cheaper for people to just get up and move to where there is readily available water already.
Your argument is like the idiots who live in Las Vegas who periodically argue that we should divert the Great Lakes so they can continue to live in an inhospitable artificial desert oasis for... reasons. Just because we can do something doesn't automatically make it a good idea. Some places just aren't ever going to be comfortable places for people to live and we need to just accept that as reality and behave accordingly. If someone wants to live in a desert that's their choice but I see no reason to waste resources needlessly facilitating that questionable choice.
Correct - or sink a Titanic and then melt.
By the way did you know there's a photo of the iceberg that sank the Titanic? There's a smear of red paint on the side.
I think I was more pointing out the hypocrisy of the 'you get what you take' viewpoint with regard to Israel.
The contemporary Republican argument for throwing away the UN resolutions that call for a 2-state solution in Israel (land that was given to them, mind you, from the spoils of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire) is that Jerusalem was built by "the Jews", disregarding the fact that it has been controlled by "the Arabs" and occupied by "the Palestinians" for 450 years. The Israelis ran a good gambit- hoping that in time the political winds would change in the US, and someone would support their behavior. They seemed to have their finger on the pulse of the American Evangelical better than Americans themselves did.
BTW- the US does not have a mutual defense pact with Israel. Our current relationship with them being so tight is a new phenomena.
See Suez crisis.
The evangelical drool over Jerusalem being an inherently "Jewish" city is Reagan-era, when a bunch of megachurch pastors realized "The Jews" returning to Jerusalem was one of the requirements for the second coming.
Quotes used because I think the distinction between Israeli, Jew, Palestinian as they're used de facto are a bunch of bullshit.
They're all Levantines living in the Levant, and we've taken sides in a religious war that has ground to an apartheid stalemate, with the assistance of many hundreds of billion dollars of US aid in military equipment.
Even if this works, and they start running out of large icebergs, the next step will be to create more or larger bergs, by blasting them apart from the ice shelf with out waiting for them to break off naturally. They would have more success with additional desalination and possible treatment of waste water.
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.