Matthew H. Birkhold - Chasing Icebergs: How Frozen Freshwater Can Save the Planet

Chasing Icebergs

How Frozen Freshwater Can Save the Planet

Matthew H. Birkhold

For Jordan

I t is difficult to know what Prince Mohamed Al-Faisal thought when he walked across the flat campus of Iowa State University in early October 1977. The Saudi Arabian magnate was convinced by his friend, the nuclear engineer Professor Abdo Husseiny, that Ames was an ideal place for the princes revolutionary conference. The sugar maples on campus were glowing bright red and the swamp oaks were turning orange. Nearby, farmers were driving combines to harvest the remaining corn for the season. Just one day earlier, over three thousand visitors had gathered in the campus Dairy Farm Pavilion to cheer on participants in the milk maid contest as they competed to obtain the most milk from their assigned cows. A beauty queen, an animal science professor, and the campus farm herd manager crowned the winner, who would reign on campus for the year. The prince was squarely in the American Midwest, impossibly far from any ocean, but he was here to talk about icebergs.

Al-Faisal, colloquially known as the Water Prince, had organized a conference with a grandiose title: The First International Conference and Workshop on Iceberg Utilization for Fresh Water Production, Weather Modification and Other Applications. After working for fifteen years at the Saline Water Conversion Corporation in Saudi Arabia, a company owned by his government, the broad-shouldered forty-year-old was now president of a private business, Iceberg Transport International, Ltd. He was determined to gather the best minds to figure out how to tap into this frozen freshwater resource. Participants came from every continent, except Antarctica, including glaciologists from Australia, engineers from France, researchers from Libya, and a venture capitalist from Monaco. Even the luminary scientist, Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the United States to earn a PhD in meteorology, attended to help tackle the challenge.

On campus, the conference caused a stir. Clad in a dark suit and a crisp white shirt, the Water Prince cut a fine figure walking around the neoclassical faade of the Memorial Union. He graciously posed for pictures with perfectly coiffed hair and a sparkling smile. The real star of the event, though, was an Alaskan iceberg. One month earlier, a diver plunged into the chilly waters off the coast of Anchorage to wrap an iceberg in polyurethane with the help of a plastics expert. They selected a six-foot-long, 4,785-pound berg, about the size of a white rhino. Once the diver safely insulated the berg, he wrapped a heavy sea fiber cable net around the mass and attached it to a rope dangling from a US Arctic Naval Research Laboratory helicopter. Plucked from the water, the iceberg went straight to the Anchorage airport, where it was packed in dry ice and Styrofoam and put on a plane to Minnesota. From Minneapolis, it was loaded onto a freezer truck and driven more than three hours south to Ames, passing over a landscape long ago flattened by glaciers, which left behind the rich soils tilled by Iowan farmers today. On campus, the iceberg was stored in a walk-in freezer in the Memorial Union.

The process certainly did not make iceberg harvesting seem like an easy endeavor. Dan Zaffarano, then vice president for research at Iowa State University, nonetheless thought the result was worth the effort. He explained at the time, We felt it was needed for those persons attending the conference who have never seen an iceberg before. Prince Mohamed, in fact, had himself never seen an iceberg. And he had virtually no experience in the Arctic or Antarctica. He had something better: an imagination. At the conference, alongside the scholarly lectures, the prince presented a paper. With the help of a technical adviser, he pitched an innovative method for transporting icebergs. Attach paddle wheels, operated by individual power plants, to a berg. That way, the icy behemoth would become a self-propelled, self-contained unit that could navigate to any destination.

Privately, some conference attendees laughed. The Water Princes idea was absurdly unfeasible both in terms of engineering and cost. Others dismissed the entire premise of the conference as nothing more than fantasy. The former director of the US Army Cold Region Research and Engineering Laboratory, Dr. Henri Bader, offered a sobering warning to those in the audience: You engineers should be horrified. You are being asked to develop a technology, which in essential respects lies several orders of magnitude beyond anything within your experience. A number of attendees had come only in hopes of impressing the prince to secure funding to conduct their own polar research. Iowa governor Robert Ray attended the formal dinner that crowned the conference, too. He sidled up to the prince at the head table, sipping a drink chilled with ice cubes chipped from the Alaskan berg, which sparkled as the evenings centerpiece. Dr. Olav Orheim, who would go on to become the director of the prestigious Norwegian Polar Institute, remembers it was a spectacle, just for show. We did not know what we were doing.

The optimistic prince had a different take. On the penultimate day of the conference, a yellow forklift drove through the Memorial Union toward the berg. It scooped up the mass, maneuvered it through the columned hallways, and dumped the ice outside. The prince walked out of the building carrying a piece of the iceberg in his bare hands. He lifted it so high over his head, his jacket sleeves pooled to his elbows and his shoulders lifted toward his ears. A giddy smile spread across his face. Al-Faisal declared: We can definitely say the iceberg project is feasible. The only question is when we can begin. Within three to five years, we think we can have a towed berg in situ.

Onlookers cheered. Over the next few days, college students passed the enormous chunk of ice on their way to class and elementary pupils visited campus to admire the ice and touch its frozen surface. One local woman even came armed with an ice pick, plastic bags, and a bucket. As her husband snapped photographs, she chopped into the berg, splintering small pieces of ice that she stuffed into the bags. For later use at a cocktail party, she explained. In the end, the iceberg slowly melted, leaving a soggy patch on the lawn on Harvester Plaza.

Participants left Ames with mixed emotions. It was unclear what would come of the lofty discussions. The conference could very well turn out like the Alaskan iceberg. A tremendous effort for a brief pageant. Exciting but ephemeral. Had the prince done enough to convince people to undertake the effort?

Just six months later, on the other side of the world, crowds gathered in Sydney Harbor to welcome an iceberg. Dick Smith, a thirty-four-year-old electronics entrepreneur, had been studying for months the best way to tow an iceberg from Antarctica. Finally, on March 31, 1978, Smith announced that he would beat the Water Prince and an iceberg would be arriving imminently. The next day, the switchboards jammed as reports came in that an iceberg was spotted. People thronged to the steep cliffs of the south headlands, the traditional viewing grounds of the famous Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, to catch a glimpse of the ice as it snaked into the harbor. The Royal Australian Navy soon intervened, calling Smiths company to offer a place for the ice to moor on the misty Saturday morning. The young entrepreneur could not be reached. He was busy on the barge towing the iceberg. Dressed in a stylish suit, Smith waved and smiled for the cameras that rushed to capture the sight. Soon, boaters approached Smith, begging for pieces of ice. But as the mist turned to rain, the iceberg started to melt. With every drop, more and more vanished and the city began to sober up.