Apparently bottled iceberg water has potential in the Asian health market, so I thought why bother bottling it and shipping it before you get it to the country it's going to be consumed in.
The idea is to 'wrap' an iceberg in plastic, pump out the majority of excess sea water and tow the wrapped berg down south. One of the great advantages to this is you don't need to melt the berg it'll happen naturally.
I do industrial rope access work putting up advertising banners occasionally, the banners are radio frequency welded together from 5m strips. Ideally a ship in the pacific artic would survey a berg (laser scaning?) cut various strips of plastic and weld them into a cover which would be a compromise between a suitable shape to cover the berg and a suitable shape to contain the melted water. Then pump out the excess sea water, any remaining would be insignificant compared to the volume of the iceberg, tow it down south and bottle, thus avoiding significant amounts of import duty etc. as it's only the raw materials you're bringing into the country.
You get to save on shipping, handling, processing and duties. Sell it at the same price and make more profit :)-- scubadooper, Aug 08 2004 What inspired me http://www.perc.org...02/icebergs.php?s=3 [scubadooper, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004] We've done this one before, several times, and it's also discussed widely outside the HB.-- DrCurry, Aug 08 2004 //pump out the majority of excess sea water// WTF is that supposed to mean?. Are you pumping seawater from an iceberg? Or are you pumping seawater from an unfeasibly large pair of plastic bags? I mean really!.-- gnomethang, Aug 08 2004 The excess water from the single bag. The berg would be wrapped from below, leaving the remaining joints to be welded above water, the bag would have a valve at the base to allow water to flow out in the wrapping process and later pumped out through.
As to the bag being unfeasibly large, not really, several of the cable ships that I've worked on would be suitable for handling such a large bag. They have multiple cable tanks to store raw materials and spool the bag between while under construction. They're already equiped with the neccasary ROV systems, and ship positioning systems.If you didn't want to make the bag at sea, it'd be easy enough to build them oversized ashore and just wrap the bergs at sea, it'd be easy enough to finish it off by just leaving 4 or 5 joints to be welded-- scubadooper, Aug 08 2004 [DrCurry] I didn't come across any ideas when I searched for them, I have no intention of replicating other peoples work.-- scubadooper, Aug 08 2004 Actually the bag idea, if it was sufficiently insulating, would help solve the problem of getting [insert your environmental regulator here] approval to park an iceberg anywhere useful to allow harvesting of the melt water.
Any notion that icebergs are pure however is quite fanciful. It may be 12,000 year old Penguin / Great Auk shit, but it's still bird shit. It may be 30,000 year old skin flakes from diseased wildebeest, or wind blown fragments of dung beetle from Australia, but the biological 'load' in ancient glacial ice is heavier than tap water in the developed world.-- ConsulFlaminicus, Aug 09 2004 I've heard Dodo do-do does do great things-- scubadooper, Aug 09 2004 random, halfbakery