Imagine it’s October 1977. You’re standing outside Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, a small town nowhere near an ocean. In front of you sits a two-ton piece of glacier ice, slowly melting. That's not a scene from a movie. It really happened. A 2018 peer-reviewed article by historian Ruth Morgan, published by ANU Press, describes how this frozen spectacle sparked a serious international conference on turning Antarctic icebergs into drinking water for the Arabian Peninsula.
Anyone who has watched reservoirs shrink in the West, or followed headlines about the Colorado River, will find this story oddly familiar. For a long time, people have been looking for quick fixes to water scarcity. This one just so happens to involve a Saudi prince, a helicopter and a slice of Alaska.
