An iceberg from Antarctica can solve the water crisis in South Africa. That is what Nick Sloane feels. He is a South African marine salvage expert, and his solution is to bring home an iceberg from Antarctica.
Cape Town, the parliamentary capital of South Africa, has been facing a critical shortage of water in recent times. There was a severe drought that led to a crisis situation. In order to prevent the repetition of this and ensure adequate availability of the precious commodity, Nick Sloane has come up with his solution.
Daily Mail UK reports that Sloane wants to tow a large enough iceberg from Antarctica to Cape Town across 1,200 miles of open water.
He admits that 'the idea sounds crazy,' but melting a 100 million ton iceberg could generate nearly 150 million liters of usable water every day for a year.
Melt an iceberg to produce water
Melting of icebergs due to global warming is a natural phenomenon and it increases the sea level which, in turn, gives rise to innumerable problems in coastal regions. However, melting an iceberg from Antarctica intentionally to produce water for South Africa is a revolutionary concept. The country had declared a national disaster over the drought. Therefore, the success of the project will help the Western Cape residents to forget the miseries of a life minus water.
Nick Sloane is based in Cape Town as a director at the US marine salvage firm Resolve Marine.
He engineered the refloating of a capsized Italian passenger liner in 2014. Now he wants to bring an iceberg and melt it to create water to fight drought conditions in his region. He has a team of experts who, in his opinion, can undertake the task of towing the block of ice using suitable equipment. The iceberg would be selected by drones and radiography scans, and some percent would be lost due to evaporation in the course of the journey.
It will be a cost-intensive project and the authorities would have to factor that into their decision.
Iceberg could solve the water problem
Cape Town is starved of water and an iceberg could just solve the problem. Water is the basic requirement for life and the city and surrounds faced a critical shortage of this vital commodity last year.
According to Quartz Media, the city had to ration its water supply to meet the crisis and officials fear that such a day might return again.
Nick Sloane has suggested that an iceberg is towed from Antarctica to the city to take care of the problem. He has defined the specifications of the iceberg and says that it will be possible to generate millions of liters of fresh water for the city. The project has yet to get the go ahead from the authorities.
