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In 1977, a Saudi prince transported a two-ton iceberg to landlocked Ames, Iowa, as part of an ambitious effort to convince hundreds of scientists that Antarctic icebergs could one day supply fresh water to some of the world’s driest regions.
The unusual project was led by Prince Mohammed bin Faisal, who resigned as governor of Saudi Arabia’s Saline Water Conversion Corporation to focus on solving his country’s growing water shortages. His plan culminated in the first International Conference on Iceberg Utilization at Iowa State University, where nearly 200 scientists from 18 countries gathered to explore whether massive icebergs could be towed thousands of miles from Antarctica to the Arabian Peninsula.
Saudi Arabia’s rapidly expanding population during the oil boom of the 1970s placed increasing pressure on the nation’s freshwater supplies. While desalination was already widely used, Prince Mohammed sought a potentially cheaper and more sustainable alternative. To pursue the idea, he founded Iceberg Transport International and partnered with Iowa State professors Abdo Husseiny, an Egyptian nuclear engineer specializing in desalination, and Professor Zara Sabri.
The conference received a $25,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, while Prince Mohammed personally contributed another $50,000. To demonstrate the concept, organizers acquired a roughly 10,000-year-old block of glacial ice from Alaska’s Portage Glacier, about 50 miles south of Anchorage.
Divers separated the massive ice block from the glacier before a helicopter lifted it to Anchorage International Airport. There, the ice was cut into smaller sections, insulated, and shipped to Minneapolis before traveling more than 250 miles by refrigerated truck to Iowa State University’s Memorial Union, where it remained frozen until the conference began.
Although the ambitious proposal never advanced beyond the research stage, it highlighted the growing global challenge of securing reliable freshwater supplies. Towing Antarctic icebergs ultimately proved too costly and technically difficult to become a practical solution.
Even so, the concept has never completely disappeared. Researchers in countries including the United Arab Emirates have continued studying whether iceberg towing could one day supplement freshwater resources. Nearly five decades after an ancient iceberg arrived in the middle of Iowa, the remarkable experiment remains one of the most unusual chapters in the history of water engineering.
