Imagine it’s October 1977. You’re standing outside Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, a small town nowhere near an ocean. In front of you sits a two-ton piece of glacier ice, slowly melting. That's not a scene from a movie. It really happened. A 2018 peer-reviewed article by historian Ruth Morgan, published by ANU Press, describes how this frozen spectacle sparked a serious international conference on turning Antarctic icebergs into drinking water for the Arabian Peninsula.
Anyone who has watched reservoirs shrink in the West, or followed headlines about the Colorado River, will find this story oddly familiar. For a long time, people have been looking for quick fixes to water scarcity. This one just so happens to involve a Saudi prince, a helicopter and a slice of Alaska.
A prince with a big idea for a dry region
It was Prince Mohammed al-Faisal, King Khalid's nephew, who was behind the iceberg idea. He sponsored the Iowa conference to promote an idea he'd been working on for years, according to a 1977 TIME report. He was already president of a company called Iceberg Transport International, which he had set up with French engineer Georges Mougin, Scientific American notes. Their pitch to the world was easy to say but hard to do: instead of expending a lot of energy desalinating sea water, why not tow a huge iceberg from Antarctica to the Middle East and simply melt it?
The prince did not just send out invitations to scientists to participate. He decided to show them the ice itself.
