How the UAE is planning to ‘steal’ Antartica’s icebergs

THE UAE is facing a serious water scarcity problem, with one of the highest per capita water consumption rates in the world (about 550 liters per day).

Word has it that the UAE may even run out of groundwater by 2030.

To tackle the water crisis, the UAE’s National Advisor Bureau Limited, a private company based in Abu Dhabi, is planning to tow icebergs from Antartica to the Middle East.

The company’s founder and managing director Abdullah Mohammad Sulaiman Al Shehi believes it’ll not only help solve the UAE’s water problem but also balance out the effects of climate change when it comes to melting glaciers.

According to him, one iceberg is enough to provide fresh drinking water for one million people for a course of five years.

“It’s a huge quantity we’re talking about. Unfortunately, due to what’s happening from global warming, many icebergs are disintegrating in Antarctica. Once they disintegrate, they float in the ocean and they melt, wasting billions of gallons of the water resources of the Earth,” Alshehi told Fast Company.

The process

As per the National Advisor Bureau Limited’s plan, the iceberg will be selected using satellite imagery.

Then, it will be covered in an insulated material to prevent it from melting and transported via barge 10,000 kilometers to the coast of Fujairah.

As soon as the iceberg reaches the UAE, Alshehi’s team will crush the iceberg into smaller pieces and store it in tanks to be filtered and used as drinking water.

The impact

A project of such magnitude is not without some environmental impacts. The transportation of the icebergs may cause significant climate change.

For example, is it not yet known what moving icebergs away from its original position will do to marine life.

Also, the project may bring up questions as to who owns the ice in Antartica as the UAE doesn’t have any claims on glacial territory in Antartica.

The project is part of a much larger initiative by the National Advisor Bureau Limited called the Filling the Empty Quarter Project which aims at creating a greenbelt to arrest stretches of the desert from spreading.

The estimated cost of the project is US$50 to 60 million, and it will kick off its pilot phase in the latter half of 2019.

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Source: travelwireasia.com