In 1977, a Saudi prince flew a two-ton iceberg to landlocked Iowa to convince 200 scientists from 18 nations that Antarctic ice could be towed to Arabia

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.

Flying a glacier across America
Here is the part that sounds made up but isn't. According to Rafico Ruiz's Arcadia essay for the Environment and Society Portal, which draws on a 1977 report in the Des Moines Register, a team moved a roughly 1,133-kilogram (2,500-pound) block of ice from Portage Lake in Alaska to Ames, Iowa, wrapping it in insulation and dry ice for the journey by helicopter, plane, and truck. According to the Environment and Society Portal, the operation used divers from the US Arctic Naval Research Laboratory, a helicopter to lift the ice, and finally a refrigerated truck to get it onto campus, where it was stored in a walk-in freezer at the Iowa State Memorial Union until its public unveiling.

In her article, Ruth Morgan quotes the original New York Times report from October 1977, in which it was reported that one local couple arrived at the unveiling with plastic bags, a bucket and an ice pick, intending to take a piece home. They told the paper that they thought they would just put it in drinks.

Two hundred scientists, one wild pitch
This was not merely a publicity stunt. TIME reported in 1977 that scientists from 18 nations gathered at Iowa State for the First International Conference on Iceberg Utilisation, October 2 to 6, 1977. As the Environment and Society Portal reported, some 200 glaciologists, marine biologists and engineers came along, as well as representatives from companies and politics. The conference was largely sponsored by Prince Mohammed Al-Faisal and the National Science Foundation, according to Rafico Ruiz's Arcadia essay. Abdo Husseiny, a professor of nuclear engineering at Iowa State, served as principal investigator on the research proposal behind the event, per the same essay. Separately, the Iowa State Daily reports that Husseiny secured a 25,000-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, while the prince covered the remaining costs, reportedly around 50,000 dollars.

Scientific American reports that the company actually proposed towing a 100-million-ton iceberg about 11,500 kilometers to the Arabian Peninsula for an estimated cost of 100 million dollars. The math only worked if the iceberg shed no more than about 20 percent of its mass along the way.

Why the plan never left the ground
Spoiler alert: nobody’s ever managed to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to a desert coast. The 1970s version of this plan couldn't be carried out because of ocean currents, melting rates and the cost of building tugboats strong enough to do the job.

That hasn't stopped people trying again. A similar plan was announced in 2017 by National Advisor Bureau Limited, a UAE-based company, to tow icebergs from near Antarctica to the coast of Fujairah. At the time, Newsweek’s coverage included several sceptical polar scientists, including one academic who called the scheme a stunt. As of the latest public reporting, that iceberg still hasn’t arrived.

The idea that refuses to melt away
To young Americans who see water supplies tightening around the South-west, the 1977 Iowa iceberg conference is not just a quirky bit of trivia. As Ruth Morgan explains in her article, the meeting came just months after the 1977 United Nations Water Conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina, which had formally declared fresh water a scarce resource, to be carefully managed. That warning still resonates almost 50 years later.

The iceberg never reached Arabia. But the anxiety that sent it to Iowa in the first place, the fear of running dry, has only grown since.