The Tip of the Iceberg

Synopsis: There can never be more water on earth, and of all that exists, only a tiny fraction is potable. Of the potable water, much is disappearing, as the levels of the world’s great inland lakes retreat and as fresh water becomes polluted. At the same time, water needs are increasing with the rise in world population. In the U.S., desert cities such as El Paso, Texas, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Las Vegas, Nevada, are drawing up plans to pipe in water over long distances, competing with other populated areas for precious water resources. Water is a basic human need, but is it a basic human right? In the conclusion of his article, Dale Wasserman looks at the emerging answer to that question and a possible solution to the looming worldwide water crisis.

When a commodity is in short supply but faced with growing demand, it is inevitable that the price must rise. Potable water is in short supply. The demand is growing and the price is rising. What is also inevitable is that business interests will sense profit. In the case of water supplies, it has already happened that global corporations, more powerful than local governments, increasingly dominate the business, operating waterworks at near-monopoly rates proportionate to their size and power. Providing water to communities has traditionally been a local affair, run by small local companies or cooperatives fundamentally nonprofit in nature—which has made them vulnerable to being bought up by the handful. This is precisely what the great corporations have been doing, with the result that the water supply of entire countries has been corralled into ownership by consortiums, which control the supply and dictate the price.

The price, of course, goes nowhere but up. The case of Bolivia is currently an example; price hikes have stirred unrest and outright rebellion. The people of Bolivia cannot survive without the water, nor can they pay the prices imposed by the foreign corporations that have bought control of the sources. The situation has already provoked violence and deaths; much of the population has taken to the streets battling police and soldiers in what the people are calling La Guerra de Agua—the Water War. The national government has found it necessary to impose martial law.

The entity, which the people of Bolivia are fighting, is a consortium dominated by a company based in the United States: the Bechtel Corporation, whose directors include a former Secretary of State, George P. Shultz. But this is a bit unusual; the waterworks of the world are generally in the hands of a trio of European companies which dominate the field. One of them is Suez, of France. Another is Vivendi Environment, also of France; Vivendi now runs over 8,000 water systems in more than 130 countries. Suez owns systems in 130 countries; one of those countries is the United States, and one of those systems is that of Atlanta, Georgia. But in all likelihood the largest of the three is RWE (Rheinisch-Westfalische-Elektrizitatswerk-Aktiengesellschaft) of Germany, whose tentacles spread far and wide and produce astonishing profit. A recent headline on the financial page of the London Times: “RWE shares post double digit gain.”

The biggest American player is, of course, Bechtel. Other corporations, however, are joining the parade. Among them are General Electric, ITT Industries, Siemens AG, Tyco International Ltd., and the Danaher Corporation.

Bolivia may be an extreme case, but it is not an exception. Most Third World countries find themselves in a similar situation: corporations have bought control of their supply in the global water business that thereby controls the availability and the price.

According to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, “Water is the last infrastructure frontier for private investors.” Obviously, those capable of such investment have taken note. Consequently, we now have an interesting paradox: a substantial part of the earth’s population cannot afford the one utility that is absolutely necessary to sustain life. The battle for control of that utility is still in its early stages, but its implications are daily becoming clearer.

Almost three fourths of all the fresh water in the world is locked up in the polar ice caps. It has been accumulating there for the past three million years—snowfall adding successive strata, which compress into ice and form the purest, pollution-free form of water on earth. About one eighth of this is in the Greenland ice cap. Responding to global warming, its glaciers are melting at a surprising rate, pouring rivers of fresh water into the sea, which is, unsurprisingly, rising. This is the threat that movies are playing upon: that the rising sea will eventually overwhelm New York and a host of coastal cities in both hemispheres. By inference, it will drown all of Florida.

Well, yes, it probably will. But with the plentitude of other threats, the most horrendous of which are coming from mankind itself, it seems foolish to worry overmuch about this one.

Greenland bergs, which calve off the glaciers where they meet the sea, are mountainous in shape, with four fifths of their mass under water. They have a tendency to tip over, to tumble as melting alters their balance, and in tumbling to spawn outlaw waves similar to tsunamis. Such a flip-flop would account for the otherwise mysterious wave which, in March 2005, came out of nowhere to pummel a cruise ship, terrify its passengers, and inflict damage. Of course these bergs have an even greater capacity for damage; witness the one calved off the famous Ilulíssat Glacier which, in 1912, floated into the northern sea lanes and brought about the death of a ship called Titanic.

The bergs of the Antarctic are very different beasts. They are born of ice shelves, not glaciers, and they are not mountainous but flat topped; indeed, they look much like the mesas of my home state, Arizona. In size, too, they are commonly compared with states—Antarctica bergs have been noted as comparable to Rhode Island, Delaware, or even Connecticut.

The Antarctic ice cap contains two thirds of all the fresh water on earth. Now there’s a fact worth repeating: the Antarctic ice cap contains two thirds of all the fresh water on earth. It is also the purest water on earth; its snow strata were laid down before man had opportunity to pollute; indeed, much of it was there before man in his present form even existed. Word of its unique quality reached the civilized world in 1773 when Captain Cook took note of it and collected 15 tons of fresh ice water for his ship, Resolution. To this day, cubes of Antarctic Ice are the caviar of the commodity.

Trillions of tons of ice drift north from Antarctica each year and simply melt away. Several years ago, a flat-topped berg measuring 90 by 35 kilometers detached from an ice shelf and drifted along the Antarctic Peninsula for many months. It was estimated to contain enough fresh water to supply Washington, D.C., for several thousand years.

In the year 2000, a berg somewhat larger than the state of Connecticut, designated by the maritime authorities as B-15 and nicknamed “Godzilla,” broke loose from Antarctica’s smaller pieces designated respectively as B-21 and B-22. (These fragments were merely the size of Rhode Island.)

In its virgin state, B-15 was estimated to measure approximately 4,000 square miles. No accurate measure of the water it contained was ever calculated, but by fair estimate it would equal all the water in Lake Michigan and possibly even that of Lake Superior. By any measure, it would have quenched the thirst of the United States for a good long time.

The Antarctic contains 90 percent of the world’s ice. In fact, the ice cap on Antarctica, three miles thick, is so heavy that it presses down the continent and warps the world into a slightly pear shape. If the land-based portion of Western Antarctica were to melt, the oceans would rise by at least 20 feet. If all of Antarctica were to melt, the oceans would rise by 50 feet…or possibly more? We don’t really know; on this subject we enter a fog of speculation. Nobody knows. Possibly that’s for the best.

What is worth consideration: if the Antarctic has a huge supply of fresh, pure water which is going to waste—and if the rest of the world is suffering from a growing shortage of the stuff—why don’t we get the two together? Make a plan? Strike a balance? Solve a simple-minded equation to the benefit of practically everybody?

The paradox has been noted, and consideration has moved from the realm of science fiction to sober studies of practicality. There have even been certain halfhearted stabs at resolving it. In the 1970s, a Saudi Arabian prince announced a plan to tow icebergs from the Antarctic to his homeland in the expectation that this liquid bonanza would cause the Arabian desert to bloom and to triple his nation’s food supply. After great fanfare the project faded when, upon commissioning studies, the Saudis found that their plan, which they envisioned as a fleet of giant oceangoing tugs towing a berg and using 88 to 100 million gallons of diesel fuel, wouldn’t pay off economically. Even with the Saudis navel deep in oil, it would be too costly.

The Saudi attempt made one thing clear: towing an iceberg was the wrong way to go about it. Subsequently, the Saudis, along with the Arab Emirates, bent all their efforts toward desalinization of seawater. It was an effort which worked and which still does—but only on a very limited scale and at a prohibitive cost per gallon.

For a truly scientific run at the idea, we must look to a man who was authentically qualified and of impeccable credits in his field. Before Joseph A. Connell developed a singleminded passion for moving bergs from the Antarctic to California, he had demonstrated a talent for imaginative inventions. He had, for instance, built a plant to recover methane gas from garbage at a landfill on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in California. After the laughter died down, the voters observed something interesting: it worked—and an olfactory nuisance had been converted to an asset.

Further, Connell had invented the Cryostart, a system for starting jet engines, still in use at airports around the world. Additionally, he held more than 80 worldwide patents in the fields of energy, water and cryogenics. But in later life, when Connell had no need of more money or fame, he turned all of his considerable talents to the problems of bringing icebergs from the Antarctic to the lands needing them most. In his hands, difficult problems became amenable to solution, and he set about answering questions and outlining realities.

Of the many problems raised by the proposition, the most important, by far, was that of propulsion. By what means could a berg a thousand times larger than the largest ship ever built be moved and steered? To this Connell set a firm condition: “The iceberg must be self-propelled,” he said. “It must use no ships and no fuel.”

No fuel? For this we must reach back to an inventor of an era earlier than Connell’s, the 19th century French physicist, Nicolas Carnot. It was Carnot, a pioneer in thermodynamics, who observed that differences in temperature generate energy and devised a system of heat exchangers which used no fuel but were capable of running turbines.

This is not the place to expatiate upon how, exactly, the system works. It is enough to say that it did work. Did it work well enough to perform the task at hand? Not at that stage of development. But 30 years have passed, and technology has been advancing in great gulps. Problems raised in the utilization of bergs may today have answers which were unavailable to Connell. No systematic attempt has been made to find them.

Connell had been thinking small for reasons of practicality and penury. However, he made a precise proposal: he would select a berg about the size of Manhattan and install a crew of 40 to 50 upon its flat top, plus all the equipment they would need for living and for operation of their vessel. Such equipment would include solar-heated living quarters, a helipad, and a monorail to carry personnel from stern to stern. He budgeted the enterprise at $65 million and applied for a loan to the World Bank, which had earmarked $1 billion to improve water resources in needy countries. Sadly, he was overtaken by death before he could implement his plan. But he had shown how it could be done, and had pointed the way for others with similar ambitions.

What is notable about Connell’s plan is that he envisioned it solely as an aid to agriculture, which in turn would dramatically increase food supply in the region selected. In the case of the first berg, the water was to go to vast agricultural works in Baja California. In Connell’s time the shortage of drinking water had not yet approached current dimensions, nor actually even been clearly foreseen.

Time has imposed a difference. In the time that has passed since Connell planned and plotted, there is no longer thought of accessing the Antarctic for water to stimulate agriculture. Indeed, agriculture is now seen as a villain in the misuse of water: the far greater proportion of drinkable water from aquifers goes to the cultivation of sorghum and soybeans. The great Ogallala Aquifer, supplying eight states of the American Midwest, is an example. Depleted by 200,000 wells sucking water for the fields, this underground “sixth Great Lake” would require 50 times its present rate of recharging merely to remain stable.

Nineteen seventy-seven seems to have been the year in which interest in the harvesting of Antarctic icebergs peaked. In that year an extraordinary conference was called, to take place at Iowa State University at Ames, Iowa. The formal name of the conclave was “First International Conference and Workshops on Iceberg Utilization for Fresh Water Production, Weather Modification and Other Applications.” The conference was sponsored by, among others, the National Science Foundation, the King Faisal Foundation, and the U.S. Coast Guard. The names of the scientists attending were a roll call of fame in the field. Some 40 countries were represented, among them Australia, Canada, Chile, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Libya, Monaco, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, United Kingdom, and the United States. The manifesto of the conference read, in part, as follows: “In a planet of plenty, people have started to realize that a time of scarcity is approaching. The earth’s resources of energy, fresh water and minerals are depleting at an accelerating rate. Human consumption is doubling again and again…. Consequently, scientists and engineers are in active search of solutions….

“The vast amount of fresh water and energy stored in icebergs has stirred the curiosity of those of us who like to believe that everything has some ultimate use…. Until recently the efforts to explore the feasibility of using icebergs as water sources has been limited to inventions, to appraisals and to brainstorming. The peculiarity of the concept has inspired the imagination of the expert and the layperson alike. The thrill of the subject matter has attracted the comic writer and the serious investigator. The novelty of the topic has stimulated the innovative ability of many entrepreneurs….”

The findings of the conference were gathered into a volume of 760 pages which, with meticulous attention to detail, including numerous photos and drawings, explored every aspect of corralling, powering and steering Antarctic icebergs to needy destinations.

A generation later, the question arises: why hasn’t it happened? Why haven’t the aims of the Conference been accomplished? Because of technical difficulties? Of course, they are enormous. But when did technical difficulties ever paralyze American ingenuity? Or possibly the cost? Indubitably high. But compared to the billions which cities have earmarked to reach out for water which, in all likelihood, isn’t even there…?

Of perhaps we are awaiting a crisis, one of the sort which frightens people into action. There are hints that we may not have to wait much longer.

In the meantime, those state-sized “Godzillas” of fresh pure water circle the Antarctic continent endlessly until they disintegrate and are lost forever.

Environment