In 1977, a Saudi prince towed an Alaskan iceberg to Iowa; now engineers are exploring the idea as freshwater scarcity worsens

The royals across the world are known to pull numerous extravagant moves with an aim to impress. While Cleopatra made guests dine on gold plates, King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France built temporary palaces of brick and glass for a meeting. But in modern times, such grand gestures have been slightly uncalled for, especially when they are pointing at something the world is trying hard to ignore, climate change.In 1977, Saudi prince Mohammed bin Faisal, son of the reigning king and head of Saudi Arabia's Saline Water Conversion Corporation paid to tow a chunk of Alaskan iceberg to a conference in landlocked Iowa, serving guests 4,000-year-old ice in their drinks to prove his plan of shipping icebergs to Arabia for drinking water. The chunk had been extracted from the Portage Glacier near Anchorage a few days earlier by a team of US Navy scuba divers, hoisted out by a helicopter, flown to Anchorage airport, put on a commercial flight to Minneapolis and then trucked the last three hundred miles to Ames, as per a report by Science Blog.This was where a conference hosted by the 42-year-old prince was taking place. The delegates arriving in Ames on October 2, 1977, for ...