Why can’t we break up icebergs, transport them to land, and let them melt and use the water for something else?

Question

Seems like it could be a solution to them melting and raising the sea levels. I know it wouldn’t be simple but could we chip away at them over time?

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Answer 1

>Why can’t we break up icebergs,

Doable, but there are plenty of icebergs of every size. Just pick the one you want.

>Why can’t we transport them to land,

Mostly the cost. We could have a bunker oil cargo ship lash some ropes to it and drag it to wherever. Instead of hauling 320,000 tons of goods, it can pull this icecube instead. But hauling goods to locations helps sell goods, how valuable is the water?

But let’s say we just nudge it into a handy ocean current and it happens to end up on the beach of a drought-stricken land.

>(Why can’t we haul them onto land)

As in, up out of the water? In one whole piece, that’s absolutely insane. It’s 320,000 tons! But we could essentially set up a mining operation to carve out conveniently sized ice-cubes we could haul out on trucks and stuff. But that ain’t cheap.

>Why can’t we use the water for something else?

Total cost of the operation. It’s considered SUPER expensive to have trucks haul water anywhere. Of course, trucks haul sorts of stuff. The problem with water is we use a lot and expect it to be super cheap. As in free. With rivers of the stuff flowing by all the time. Consider the ol’ Miss. That’s 89,869 gallons per second. That’s 320,000 tons every 14 minutes. Or the San Joaquin River flowing past San Fran, with 320,000 tons of water every 41 minutes. And California collectively uses 70,638 tons of water for agriculture every minute.

We use so much of it, the amount of water a ship could haul just isn’t enough to be all that useful and unless several of those steps somehow become magically free, even desalination is a cheaper water source.

>Seems like it could be a solution to them melting and raising the sea levels.

Oh, hah. Even if we do all this and use iceberg cubes in cities and crop-land, it all still goes down the drain or evaporates and the water enters the water system down in the warm south and leaves the cold frozen north. It’ll still end up in the ocean one eventually.