UAE To Drag Iceberg From Antarctica To Solve Water Shortage Set To Last 25 Years (express.co.uk) 350
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.
Salvage I Reboot? (Score:2)
Wow! This sounds very similar to the plot of what was the last episode of Salvage I that I can remember seeing.
Now time to go see if Netflix has it; and if not Netflix, see if anyone has ever uploaded episodes to YouTube.
Re:Salvage I Reboot? (Score:5, Informative)
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the guy wanted to tow it from the Arctic.
Bad idea. Arctic glaciers hive off from land glaciers and are irregular in shape. As they move through warm water and melt, they can become unstable, and roll over. Antarctic glaciers tend to be flat and stable. They also tend to be much bigger. Of course the route to the Persian Gulf is much more direct as well.
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"The UAE hired Earth's handsomest scientists..."
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Let me know if you find the episodes!
Savage 1 - 2x1 Hard Water, Part 1>/P [youtube.com]
and
Savage 1 - 2x2 Hard Water, Part 2 [youtube.com]
Dense (Score:5, Informative)
".. and due to their vast density, they..."
Uhhhh, Icebergs are *less* dense that's why they float. I think the author means mass.
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They mean the mass to surface ratio.
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Well, if you want to pick nits, you should have corrected "would not melt" to "would not melt very fast"...
Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Desalinization plant.
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Interesting)
I did some math. Previously [slashdot.org], I've considered similar absurd ideas, and the cost just didn't fall in their favor.
I feel I should start with a disclaimer: It's currently a very late (or early, depending on one's perspective) hour of the evening, and my physics skill isn't what it used to be. I invite and encourage you all to review my work, and if I'm wrong, please tell me how.
Based on the figures provided, we can work out the magnitude of the problem. The first computation is simple [google.com]: Our speed will be .3m/s, to travel the (roughly) 10000 kilometers between Antarctica and the UAE in one year.
20 billion gallons of water corresponds to roughly 80 million cubic meters of ice. Cut into a sphere for ease of transport and calculation, it would have a radius of about 300 meters, with a cross-sectional area of about 200,000 square meters. We'll ignore the air resistance of the 10% above water, which falls within the error of my rough calculations. Calculation for the force of drag is ugly*, but works out roughly to C*9*10^6 newtons. That "C" is a coefficient simplifying the effect of the iceberg's shape, ranging from 0.5 for a sphere to 2 for more troublesome shapes.
Considering that range, the water's drag is between 4 and 20 meganewtons. A power source (tugboat, added motors, etc) will need to supply that much force just to maintain speed. If I remember my physics correctly, at 0.3m/s, that's between 2000 and 7000 horsepower.
There are tugboats with that much power [marineinsight.com]. I haven't found much information on the annual cost to operate such a beast, but one tugboat operator [yokohama.lg.jp] gives price estimates per hour. For the purposes of this discussion, we can assume that the quoted price covers the operator's expenses well enough to also cover the overhead of running such a large operation, and the benefits of scale will cover the higher costs of an ocean-going expedition. Those are some very large assumptions, but I don't have information to clarify it further.
With those assumptions, the cost to pull an iceberg for a year is only about $20 to $100 million. That's surprisingly cheap, putting the cost of mostly-fresh water at under $0.001 per liter ($0.005 per gallon). In comparison, a desalination plant [quora.com] supplies water at about $0.0005 to $0.003 per liter ($0.001 to $0.01 per gallon).
In short, it's expensive, but it's in the same ballpark as regular desalination for that much water, and if the losses due to melting and evaporation can be controlled, it might just be feasible. As noted in TFA and elsewhere, it would also be quite the spectacle, promoting yet more tourism to the area.
* The formula [gsu.edu] I ended up with is F[drag] = C*.5*1g/cm^3*(.9*pi*(80000000 m^3/(4*pi/3))^(2/3))*(0.3m/s)^2.
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How about cutting the ice in pieces and using regular supertankers for transport ? Seems like it would cut down on the drag, and also introduce more efficient engines. Tugboats are optimized for short powerful port manoeuvring, not long haul traffic.
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How about cutting the ice in pieces and using regular supertankers for transport ?
An idle supertanker costs $75,000 per day, just for the storage space, before fuel costs are calculated. Given that UAE probably has access to many supertankers and could have a nuclear ice melter designed-build for them if they wanted to, one can presume that they've run the numbers on hauling water from Antarctica.
TBH, all that fresh water locked up in Antarctica is a huge problem, and while this is just a drop in the bucke
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That's why a 130lb person like me can hand pull a 21 ton canal narrow boat and why a one horse power horse can move a pair of loaded narrow boats with an all up weight of 70+ tons,the early industrial revolution in the UK depended on that capability before usable steam engines,which also took up lots of valuable load space/capability..
Now do it in Sea State 8 or 9.
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"With those assumptions, the cost to pull an iceberg for a year is only about $20 to $100 million. That's surprisingly cheap,"
Especially if you don't have to buy the oil from Arabs if you _are_ those Arabs.
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Wind loading is especially going to be a pain on top of that water drag since the thing has to go through the roaring 40s, furious 50s and screaming 60s. I don't even know where to start on working that out since it's going to be very shape dependent and assuming a sphere is around the same as ignoring the wind loading entirely.
However, if the wind is behind it to propel it through the southern ocean there's some huge savings ther
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These are tabular icebergs (Score:2)
Fifty knot winds for days on hundred foot high faces three hundred yards long don't matter? The winds push the tabular icebergs of the size mentioned about far more quickly than the currents move and in different directions. They have a high "sail to draft ratio" compared with the arctic icebergs.
An iceberg the size of a city on the other hand will act as you suggest, but nobody is planning to move any of those any time soon.
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They may be able to reduce the transport costs by moving the iceberg into a favorable ocean current, if one is available, and just letting it drift until it gets close.
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Immediate fail. Any competent engineer would select and/or shape a object intended for transport into a rough hull shape, with a L/B ratio of ~6 [marinewiki.org]. I'd expect some change because there'd be less desire to conform to conventional L/D ratios, but there's no way that you'd select a sphere.
"Assume a spherical cow on a frictionless plane..."
Um... no.
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The calculation of a sphere is a reasonable estimate of any sane shape such a berg would be naturally
You and I appear to have very different definitions of the word sane.
Could you perhaps link to some photographs of these naturally spherical icebergs? I mean, if it's so natural and sane then they must surely outnumber all the jagged ones I normally see in pictures.
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So we're going to assume that you're only selecting from spherical icebergs that are already sized for your needs, rather than splitting off ice from a larger iceberg, selecting from elongated icebergs, etc. Because?
Also, good to know that some AC has declared that fracturing a "sphere" into two or three more elongated shapes is completely impossible....
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Let's pretend that mining engineering and stonemasonry doesn't exist, hat we don't artificially shape rock every day, and that we literally cannot be bothered to reduce drag when we push large objects through water...
Lets pretend, you are not such an idiot as you try to display to us.
Please calculate the amount of energy/fuel needed to drag a hull shaped ice berg from Antarctica to UAE.
For fuck sake, the parent calculated down what the minimum energy is if you assume "an impossible" spherical shape.
How dum
Re: Two Words (Score:2)
The idea of sculping the iceberg to reduce drag is interesting... perhaps less like a sphere and more like a hull would be a bit more efficient. Though it might happen naturally in warmer waters as the iceberg is pushed North and the rougher edges melt away.
Also, the melting ice itself might reduce drag.
Would need to just go ahead and do it once with the ice berg as-is to practically baseline the efficiency.
Re: Two Words (Score:5, Informative)
I just did some googling, looking for more information about their plans and found this [arabianbusiness.com] 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.
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Might want to check the currents in the Indian Ocean. Presumably they would drag the ice North a bit -- far enough to get i picked up by the counter-clockwise flowing West Australian Current, then near the coast of Africa, they will drag it North a bit to pick up the clockwise currents in Arabian Sea, and finally drag it North a bit as it drifts by on its way toward India. It's surely nowhere near that simple, but the point is that they probably don't have to drag it all the way. OTOH, there's a lot of r
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] than reverse osmosis.
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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.
Hmm, I wonder what a desert environment has a lot of for free...
I always wondered why desert cities didn't pipe water into huge desalination (distillation) plants just driven by the desert heat.
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As I pointed out in a raciest post years ago in another thread, people in those regions are pretty dumb.
Dumb in a very special way:
1) they often have very high education, e.g. Oxford or Cambridge.
2) they are not innovative
3) business only is done in traditional areas: tourism, banking, oil, etc.
4) business is only done with relatives or 'friends' or 'friends' of relatives
No one is sitting there and thinking: "oh, how could we solve this problem?".
To make them build a solar powered desalination plant in the
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Good catch. This is an error of a factor of 250. Thus driving the final price down by a factor of 250. Making this 125 times cheaper than desal.
Re:Two Words (Score:4)
You would think a country that already has 70 of them and currently gets 96% of it's drinking supply from desalination would have considered your suggestion. Maybe, ... just maybe they have reasons to look at an alternative.
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It's been proposed once or twice in the past, and not carried through. Perhaps some of the variables have changed enough to revisit the idea.
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Good idea. If, and only if, you didn't pollute the water near your shores.
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He might be an idiot, but calling him a "racist" is really pushing it.
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Exactly. The word is so overused and misunderstood it is losing all meaning.
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Natural gas is INXS in the oil producing parts of the middle east. It's free to the people that run desalination plants.
If they perfect natural gas liquefaction and transport, that might change. But the oil wells produce a shitload of natural gas.
Brine wouldn't be an issue, if they had deep oceans with strong currents, but the arabs don't, they should discharge brine into the Indian ocean.
Capturing a huge iceberg/year could put their desalination plants out of business. Get extra tugs for the last 50
Deja View (Score:2)
Vast Density (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't just buying water from other countries be (Score:5, Funny)
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Or, are we trying to solve the polar ice melting by drinking it?
No, this is to solve the problem of rising ocean levels.
Iceberg huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The water shortage is expected to last 25 years, and the average iceberg contains enough water for 5 years (for 1 million people). According to Google, the UAE population is currently ~9.16Million, meaning if all of the water were recovered, it would last about half a year if all water came from the iceberg. And they're planning on starting this project next year. They'd have to tow two average icebergs a year to supply everyone from it. Ok, maybe only like 10% of water will come from the iceberg, but it has to go through a water-treatment plant before it'll be used, presumably displacing capacity for processing other water that'd be run through it instead.
Source looks like a tabloid, by the way.
Re:Iceberg huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder why the water shortage is expected to last 25 years? What is going to happen in 25 years to ameliorate this problem?
Why 25 years? (Score:5, Funny)
a ) Emergence of New Tech(tm) to solve the problem!
b) The managing director expects to tire of playing golf in the desert within 25 years, and will reluctantly relinquish the water.
c) After 20 years of delays in the construction of desalination plants due to graft, the corrupt ministers will retire, thus leaving only a new generation of completely honest ministers, and the plants will be finished up within 5 years.
d) Everyone will have left the UAE due to other countries moving away from ICEs, regional strife, etc.
e) Mandatory 25-year water shortage. Sorry, they'd LOVE to fit it into their schedule next century, but darn, it's just too FULL.
f) Aliens. Somehow.
g) The Rapture will happen in 25 years so it'll be moot.
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They will run out of oil and no longer be able to sustain their lifestyle built entirely on the excessive consumption and sale of energy.
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They will run out of oil and no longer be able to sustain their lifestyle built entirely on the excessive consumption and sale of energy.
That's pretty much it. Because unless some diety is going to create mote oil, it is over time simply going to become more difficult to get until there just isn't enough to support the uses it is put to now. Oil, coal production - unless physics is wrong, they are one time events. The UAE is definitely unsustainable as it is now.
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I wonder why the water shortage is expected to last 25 years? What is going to happen in 25 years to ameliorate this problem?
The local oil is going to run out so the place turns into a ghost town?
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I wonder why the water shortage is expected to last 25 years? What is going to happen in 25 years to ameliorate this problem?
The Rapture.
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But the iceberg will be taken from the polar regions with weak sunlight to the middle east which gets more heat from the sun. So until it melts it will actually be reflecting away more heat than it would without being moved.
Re:Iceberg huh? (Score:5, Informative)
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."
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Yeah. They better treat that water. Nobody wants to open the tap and have a frozen mammoth come out of it.
So the UAE bought Antartica and the world climate? (Score:2)
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I think you meant to say James Cameron.
Lets hope all passenger liners stay clear of those tugged icebergs. It would be Titanic all over again...
Another disaster avoided thanks to global warming (Score:3)
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Normally that hunk of ice would be frozen in place in Antarctica, but thanks to the miracle of global warming those thirsty rich Arabs will have plenty of water.
If it is frozen in place, it isn't an iceberg. Thanks O'Bama!
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And now you know why they predict that the problem will simply go away in 25 years. With a spot of luck, in way less than that.
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And now you know why they predict that the problem will simply go away in 25 years. With a spot of luck, in way less than that.
If people tow any appreciable amount of ice out of there then currents will be affected and it probably will be way less than that. I'll be sorry to lose Santa Cruz and San Francisco but won't miss Dubai.
Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
Then they started looking for ships powerful enough to move such a drag
Project died.
Surprise.
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I remember reading about towing icebergs as a potential solution to water shortages when I was a kid, probably mid-to-late 1970s.
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I was about to mention that story, but did a quick check to see if someone else had. I'm sure the late Dr. A. would be pleased to hear about this, though saddened to hear of the path leading to it.
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Arthur C. Clarke suggested sticking huge icebergs to the front of interstellar spaceships as a shield from the cosmic dust and debris.
I think it was this book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Of course, because there's no difference at all between writing science fiction and marine engineering.
Shit, at a minimum you'd have to keep adding to the driveshaft as the thing melts, causing the propellers to rise out of the water. Or did you mean jet engines, because I'd large myself silly watching someone try and shift an iceberg using a source of extreme heat.
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Or did you mean jet engines, because I'd large myself silly watching someone try and shift an iceberg using a source of extreme heat.
We need an iceberg mod for KSP.
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DickSmith was the chap who floated it:
http://hoaxes.org/af_database/... [hoaxes.org]
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Australia proposed exactly this suggestion about 25 years ago.
Then they started looking for ships powerful enough to move such a drag
Project died.
Yes, but the UAE is the poster child for massive capital projects which make no sense. They have enough slave labor they can probably do it with ropes ;)
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I christen the: Icey McIceberg face.
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Actually, I believe it was an aircraft carrier and the material was composite of ice and wood pulp. The idea was to provide complete aerial coverage of the North Atlantic; the project was shelved when a combination of longer-range aircraft and small escort carriers became available. The project was delayed both by engineering problems and by feature creep, which ballooned the required hull size to a staggering 610m long, almost 2.5x as long as the largest aircraft carrier class in WW2.
Bout Damn Time (Score:2)
People have been talking about doing this since the 1800s, . Nice to see this finally getting it done.
P.S. California take a note, it's almost certainly cheaper than building desal plants but 5 will get you 10, you'll still have to fight your loony environmentalists.
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California has ridiculously more water than we could ever use, even in drought years. It's just at the opposite end of the state from where the people who want to use it are. Transporting across the state is a lot cheaper/easier than towing an iceberg (or desalinization) though.
Sure (Score:2)
Vast density? (Score:3)
Average size iceberg? (Score:2)
Who knew there was an average size iceberg. Well presumably there is. But who knew that the actual average size was so well known.
If you ever played video games... (Score:2)
Snowball's chance (Score:2)
Thus solving the problem... (Score:2)
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+1.25 Funny, +3.75 Informative.
PROBLEM SOLVED !! (Score:2)
Brewster's Millions (Score:3)
Let me get this straight... (Score:3)
Where do they propose to "hold" this five year supply of water? Seems like they'd need to build a really big holding tank, about a 3 billion square foot tank (there are 7.48 gallons of water in one square foot [montecitowater.com])... By my back-of-envelope, sure to be proven wrong, calculation that would mean a 7,745 foot square box, fifty feet tall to contain the 20 billion gallons.
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Re:WTF IS UAE??? (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, but what do you mean by 'WTF'?
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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.
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Do we need to expand UK or USA every time? No. So same shit here.
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A country isn't some niche errata. You've also had nearly a half century to catch up. Not to mention that it's either older than you, or its birth represents news you obviously were not paying attention to.
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UAE has many different types of desalination plant (Score:2)
Yes, they have many desalination plants, using several different technologies, and invest heavily in researching new desalination technology.
Desalination takes a lot of energy aka money. It should cost maybe 50% or 70% to tow the ice than to desalinate seawater.
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In other shocking news, countries that grow a lot of food use a lot of water.
Also, countries that have more water use more water.
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Not always so. The UAE consumption is about 3 times what it is here in Finland and we've got roughly 733 times the amount of renewable water resources than UAE [wikipedia.org] thanks to a high amount of freshwater lakes and rainfall. The population sizes are also roughly the same (5,5 million here here, 5,8 in the UAE).
Adjusted for population size we've also got over double the renewable water resources compared to the USA, yet we use about 1/5th of what the Americans u
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Care to share your photos of irrigated fruit, vegetable, and grain crops stretching off to the horizon in Finland's fertile Central Valley?
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I never claimed we have such. Agriculture here uses a lot less water than in most countries because we don't need irrigation nearly at all thanks to the amount of rainfall. Industry is the heaviest consumer of water.
Of course climate effects consumption, which is why the US food production takes so much more water, understandably. We also import more food than the US, an
Re:Drinking water? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Drinking water? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Oh, well then I expect they'll give up, because your opinion is bound to be more important to them than water.