Titanic Ice Cube Click to Enlarge

In this particular case the water was calm and the sun was almost directly overhead so that the diver was able to get into the water and take this photo. Such clear water! They estimated the weight of this piece of ice at 300 million tons.

The amount of fresh water in just one large iceberg like this could end a drought in a large region. Based on this, in the 1970s two American scientists, John Hult and Neil Ostrander, proposed to carve icebergs so that their front part resembled the bow of a ship. They would then tow several icebergs at a time more easily through the water. This "train" of icebergs would be towed by nuclear-powered tugboats. The plan was considered unfeasible.

In 1977, Prince Mohammed al Faisal, one of the sons of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, created a company that studied the feasibility of towing an iceberg containing 100 million tons of fresh water to the Saudi port of Jeddah, a distance of 14,000 kilometers. Much of the iceberg would melt during the trip, but hopefully enough would remain intact to make it an economically viable plan. During a conference at Ames University in Iowa, the Prince had a helicopter fly in from Alaska with huge chunks of ice from a two ton iceberg to prove the practicality of his plan. Yep.

The idea of towing icebergs for fresh water use remains an untried idea to this day.

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