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A Dubai firm's dream of towing icebergs from the Antarctic to the Arabian Peninsula could face some titanic obstacles.
Where many see the crumbling polar ice caps as a distressing sign of global warming, the National Advisor Bureau Limited sees it as a source of profit, and a way of offsetting the effects of climate change in the increasingly sweltering Gulf.
The firm has drawn up plans to harvest icebergs in the southern Indian Ocean and tow them 9,200 kilometers (5,700 miles) away to the Gulf, where they could be melted down for freshwater and marketed as a tourist attraction.
"The icebergs are just floating in the Indian Ocean. They are up for grabs to whoever can take them," managing director Abdullah al-Shehi told The Associated Press in his Dubai office. He hopes to begin harvesting them by 2019.
[...] The firm would send ships down to Heard Island, an Australian nature reserve in the southern Indian Ocean, where they would steer between massive icebergs the size of cities in search of truck-sized chunks known as growlers. Workers would then secure them to the boats with nets and embark on a yearlong cruise to the United Arab Emirates.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Wednesday May 17 2017, @10:10PM (3 children)
Sounds like the plot from Speed 3. A glacier that has to move faster than 3 knots or melt. Starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @11:38PM
This would certainly redefine the meaning of "moves at a glacial pace".
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday May 18 2017, @01:23AM (1 child)
I want to be there when they try to get it to STOP moving. Should be hilarious.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday May 18 2017, @04:32AM
They'll jump it off a ramp, sending it safely flying straight over the Burj Khalifa and landing in a convenient spare plot of desert.