In 1977, a Saudi prince towed a chunk of Alaskan iceberg to Iowa and served 4,000-year-old ice to guests. Decades later, his bizarre plan to ship icebergs for drinking water is attracting serious engineering interest

In October 1977, a two-tonne block of ice arrived at Iowa State University's Memorial Union in a refrigerated truck. The ice had been taken from Portage Glacier near Anchorage, Alaska, just days earlier. US Navy scuba divers extracted it before a helicopter lifted it out.

It was then flown to Anchorage airport, placed on a commercial flight to Minneapolis, and transported roughly 300 miles by truck to Ames. The ice was approximately 4,000 years old. It was there because of a Saudi prince with an unusual idea: countries struggling with water shortages could potentially tow icebergs to their shores and turn the freshwater inside them into drinking water, as per a report.

The prince who wanted to make iceberg water practical

The event was the First International Conference on Iceberg Utilization, held on October 2, 1977. Its organiser was 42-year-old Mohammed bin Faisal, the son of Saudi Arabia's reigning king and head of the country's Saline Water Conversion Corporation.


The conference guests got a small taste of the idea itself. Pieces of the two-tonne iceberg were used to chill their drinks, while larger pieces of the ancient glacier ice were placed in punch bowls, as per a Science Blog report. The drinks were apricot nectar, in keeping with the prince's religious observance.

But the display was not simply for entertainment. Mohammed bin Faisal had spent the previous decade overseeing Saudi Arabia's national desalination program and knew how much the country depended on turning seawater into fresh water.

Desalination required enormous amounts of energy. In Saudi Arabia, that energy came from burning oil, which the country could otherwise sell on international markets. As the population grew and demand for water increased, the economic drag of producing fresh water through desalination also became a concern.

The prince was looking for another source of freshwater. The plan was to tow an enormous iceberg to Saudi Arabia A small group of engineers was exploring the possibility of harvesting freshwater from icebergs that would otherwise melt into the ocean.

The proposal Prince Mohammed promoted involved an 85-million-tonne Antarctic iceberg. The plan was to tow it roughly 5,000 miles through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, at an estimated cost of about $90 million, as per the Science Blog report.

The calculation behind the idea was straightforward. A huge iceberg contains an enormous amount of freshwater. If one could be reliably towed to a country that depended heavily on desalination, wrapped in insulation to slow melting during the journey and then melted in a controlled way, the resulting water could potentially cost less than desalinating seawater. The problem was turning that calculation into reality.

The iceberg never made it to Arabia

At the end of the 1977 conference, Prince Mohammed told delegates that “We can do it if we put the effort into it. Perhaps we will tow an iceberg in three to five years,” as quoted by Science Blog. Then a Time magazine report from the same month quoted him predicting that one would reach Arabia within three years.

However, neither happened. The engineering challenges of moving a floating block of freshwater ice across thousands of miles of ocean turned out to be substantially more difficult than the initial modeling had suggested.

Insulation was one of the biggest problems. Engineers needed something that could survive the journey, keep enough of the iceberg intact through weeks in tropical waters and remain affordable at enormous scale.

Propulsion presented another challenge. No available tugboat could pull a mass of that size at meaningful speed against real ocean currents.

The plan remained a proposal rather than becoming an actual water-supply system.

One engineer kept working on the idea

The concept did not disappear entirely. French engineer Georges Mougin, who had been part of Prince Mohammed's original team, continued working on the problem for decades.

In 2011, he used 3D modelling software, updated ocean-current data from satellites and improved insulation materials to run new simulations.

His conclusion was that transporting icebergs was more feasible than the technology available in the 1970s had been able to demonstrate. But the idea remained expensive and risky. It also required political and financial support that no country had been willing to provide.

Why the iceberg idea is being examined again

The idea has resurfaced as countries continue to face pressure over freshwater supplies.

Desalination has not become cheaper as quickly as originally hoped. Newer reverse-osmosis systems have reduced costs substantially since the 1970s, but removing salt from seawater still requires significant energy. Countries whose freshwater supplies depend heavily on desalination therefore continue to look for alternatives.

At the same time, ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland has increased significantly since the 1990s.

The freshwater Prince Mohammed was interested in capturing is therefore being released into the ocean as icebergs and other ice melt.

Interest resurfaced during Cape Town's severe water crisis in 2018, when proposals were made to tow an Antarctic iceberg to the South African coast. Another proposal in 2019 targeted the UAE.

Neither project progressed beyond feasibility studies.

An Anchorage Daily News report revisited the Portage Glacier story and noted that engineers in several countries are once again running the numbers on iceberg transport as a possible response to freshwater shortages in parts of the Arabian Peninsula, southern Africa and Asia.

Nothing has been built. Nothing has been formally commissioned. But the idea Prince Mohammed promoted at Iowa State University in 1977 has not completely disappeared.

The 4,000-year-old ice was only the beginning

The two-tonne block of Portage Glacier ice was a small demonstration of a much bigger idea.

Prince Mohammed died in 2017 without seeing an iceberg reach Arabia. Nearly five decades after ancient Alaskan ice was served to conference guests in Iowa, the idea of moving enormous blocks of freshwater ice to places that need the water is being examined again.

The technology, cost and risks remain unresolved. But the experiment in Iowa captured the basic idea Prince Mohammed wanted to explore: instead of watching freshwater ice melt into the ocean, could some of it be transported to people who need it?