Berg-Like Flotillas: Helping Polar Bears

You need large modular slabs , each with a honey-comb internal structure to meet weight /buoyancy requirements . Recycled plastic would be a reasonable material to go for , and may attract 'green' interest /financing . Units need to be maximum possible size , with some provision for linking . A helicopter could handle a lot of weight , but the thing would be tricky to move if it flapped about on route .How about a long line of such floats dumped out the back of a cargo plane ? Look through some of the discussions on plastics for possible leads about who could make such things. The flotilla could incorporate a tracking/warning beacon.I like this odd sounding idea , but can't suggest much more than that . Good luck.

Back in the 1940's the allies seriously wanted to construct a floating runway for bombers to use so they could attack enemy subs without the threat of running low on fuel just when they had one in their sites. I should go to a marine construction company and ask for their help. These islands could be towed by tug to the correct position then just nudged back to the ice flow every time they drift too far south. I am sure one of the big oil rig yards would like to help you out. plastic is not good in very cold salt water.

Thanks BrainWave. I didn't know plastic wasn't good in cold salt water. I will take your suggestions and continue to persue this. Please remember PBs in your prayers.

Glad you signed up PBs in a Jam , It'll help get people to look at your question . If you've got a novel idea , getting people to seriously look at it can be hard. I just had another thought ; modular design = modular cost = sponsorship ?

Can you clarify if your vision is for static artificial bergs , or ones that could be used to tow PBs to better location (what's left of it )

Kris

I didn't know about the plastic /water thing - it's great to learn.

Another WW11 invention (used) was the floating Mulberry harbours , constructed of concrete and towed over to France - If they could do that in the 1940's , todays technology must have a solution for PB's. If my memory is right the floating runways were to be made from modified bergs (incorporating straw ).

They were using a wood pulp and water mixture for making the ice. It had some insulating qualities and high strength. The "bergs" would have had refrigeration plants to keep the ice frozen.

I appreciate the lack of chuckling. I am on the heels of Green Peace, David Suzuki, IFAW and even Sir Richard Branson. I've contacted NASA and Harvard. I dropped seeds down the throats of several 'plastics' manufacturers and am praying that wheels will continue to do what they do best, turn! I like your suggestions Mr E re transporting...in fact I had a thought just last night, Greenpeace's flag ship could bloomin' well tow a berg out there..Hey, if I can save 1 polar bear from a watery grave this summer, I'll be singing hymns from a rooftop somewhere! PBs in a jam

Have you thought about a solar powered refrigeration unit to refreeze the water into ice perhaps one of those giant factory ships could churn out real ice bergs.

every winter they will get frozen and crushed, so they need strength,

The polar bear drowning hoax notwithstanding, are you aware that polar bears routinely swim 60 miles or more?

Now look at what I've gone and done!

The hate mail raining down on me is going to be worse than the fact that my Ford 4X4 pickup is (from manufacture to wrecking yard) uses less energy than a Prius.

You are so right Merk.

If polar bears are becoming endangered it is likely due to those hunting guides in single engine prop jobs flying over head and letting Mr. City Folk pop a trophy bear with his 7mm mag and a 12X scope.

My Alaskan fishermen buddies (commercial guys) tell me a polar bear can out distance a seal in long range swimming.

As for making ANY kind of floating contrievance to put in the water........better check the Coast Guard regs first. You could be fined heavily for hampering or endangering navigation by placing unauthorized buoys in navigable waters.

Global Warming??? It was sleeting here in south Louisiana last Saturday!

The question doesn't require that you believe about drowning bears or not. Asking the Coast Guard if you should think about a question is a bit lame - I doubt they're in the habit of moving oil rigs along - their only function is to assist people to do what they want safely , not to impose some kind of commercial martial law.

I wouldn't know about the merits of a 4X4 in a Wall-Mart car park , or its life span , but it sounds like the equivalent of walking around all your life in one of those prosthetic fat-suits.

Hey , I can do wind up as well !

I've never heard of an Architect turn down a commission because he didn't believe who was going to use the building .

I do not believe that bears are drowning, and suggest that "PBs in a Jam" should use his obvious creativity to solve more pressing problems. It seems irresponsible to encourage people to pursue expensive solutions to low-priority or nonexistent problems.

Where shall I start .

I do not believe that bears are drowning,-irrelevant

and suggest that "PBs in a Jam" should use his obvious creativity to solve more pressing problems.- It's not obvious , ideas were politely asked for.

It seems irresponsible to encourage people- Sure , junk any idea you don't like

to pursue expensive solutions to low-priority or nonexistent problems.- accountant , moralist and god all in one ! Take a break , you need one with that degree of opinionated , unsubstantiated , un-constructive drivel. You summarily dump upon somebody who you know nothing about with a diatribe of opinion not backed up by fact . Shame on you . I may or may not believe the premise , but somebody with an idea deserves respectful answers of a constructive nature. You contribute nothing of use and hide behind the description of 'Guest'.

I'll leave you to ponder that since I'm prepared to encourage somebody with an idea , and can afterward go merrily on my way - what they make of it is up to them. The ignorant will simply look , make snide and cynical remarks , then go their sad way.

I do not mean to sound snide or cynical. You may read whatever emotion you wish to into what is written in black and white.

"PBs in a Jam" is obviously looking for creative ways to fix problems. He is obviously willing to think outside the box. Great! Now go fix real problems!

Nobody can prove or disprove that polar bears are drowning unless they are observing them doing so.

"I have a great idea for a perpetual motion machine, and happen to have enough money to research it and build it myself." Kris, I hope that you would not encourage me with an idea, and afterward go merrily on your way. That is, of course, unless you encourage me to find a new problem to fix, or encourage me to get educated about nonexistent perpetual motion machines before I blow my money on them.

-Andrew

Andrew , I see your point about being realistic/pragmatic etc . If you browse around cr4 you'll see a huge volume of conversation about complete 'pie-in-the-sky' type ideas. The Challenge Questions could be deemed a waste of time - at least the question posed here has a chance of airing knowledge on real issues . You could address the question even if you think it's specific goal is meaningless - the end product may turn out to have some more tangible benefit in other applications . I hold no view either way on the topic of Polar Bears , but that doesn't mean I think the proposed 'flotilla' does not have merits . Anybody who spends time to junk an idea because they see it as worthless , has the opportunity to ignore the subject and focus on what they see as worthwhile . If you did believe you had a perpetual motion machine I would try to prove why you didn't , but if that was not going to happen I'd say build it and you'll find out. The analogy is not perfect.

There are plenty of inventions and discoveries that were made by accident by looking for something else (alchemy etc). It's possible to be constructive even with criticism -'this way won't work because...'. The issue of whether something should be done is a political one - not an Engineering one . Kris

So believing the question to be valid is not required for me to give it serious consideration. Much like the World Wildlife Fund's television ads about global warming. They say that not believing in global warming wont make it go away.

Make What go away?

I think a better use of resources would be to combat the problem of Wooly Mammoths eating the rice crops in NewYork city.

What do you mean Mammoths in NewYork? There's no such thing, and besides, rice is not grown in NewYork.

"The question doesn't require that you believe in Wooly Mammoths or not." The fact that such a thing would be so terrible (let's not forget that those big hairy beasts are caused by rich westerners) makes any effort to stop it a noble and worthy endeavour.

please elaborate on

"my Ford 4X4 pickup is (from manufacture to wrecking yard) uses less energy than a Prius."

When you take into account all of the energy expended in producing, driving and ultimately disposing of a vehicle and factor in the typical total mileage for that particular model, you can calculate an actual $ cost per mile. This includes the cost (in energy) to produce the plastics, metals etc. the assembly, the fuel to drive and even the energy expended in designing said vehicle not to mention the energy used to transport it to the wrecking yard at the end of its life.

When the actual amount of real energy used in making that vehicle available to me for my use is totaled, you will find that not one of the supposed "green vehicles", those that are electric or hybrid, use less energy than my 2005 Ford F150 4X4 four door pickup truck uses. Even the Hummer comes out lower than a Prius.

Lets not forget that the electricity used to charge an electric car does not spring out of thin air, for the most part it is produced via the burning of carbon based fuels. Then the batteries themselves... huge cost (in energy to manufacture) and vast quantities of cadmium that is destined for eventual landfill.

Now, if you are not truly concerned about CO₂ emmisions but only want to appear to be an environmentally sensitive wonk (Al Gore) you can just go ahead and purchase carbon credits with all of the money you are not saving by buying an expensive green machine.

Do Polar bears deserve to be saved? Polar bears are the most vicious of all species of bears, grizzlies included. Think of all those cute baby seals they kill. Think of the poor baby seals that starve to death after they are orphaned by the bears eating their mothers. The poor seals, when they come out of the water to rest, they can only sleep for a minute at a time because they have to be on the look-out for those camouflaged white bears. All those poor sleep deprived seals.

Come on , get serious , you know full well what the damn point is . I'll take the piss with the best of them - give the question it's due - All those poor crab fishers , Canadians who can't club seals , people who can't run their 4X4s in Ontario

A question was asked - put up or shut up.

Polar bears deserve to be saved? What kind of question is that? Are you suggesting we are better off without the Dodo bird? or any other animal that has gone extinct?

cute baby seals ??? Will they still be cute when they overpopulate to the point that they are living in every stream, pond, lake and river? When the price of fish is higher then the price of petro because there were no PB's to munch the little darlings?

I'm was not going to add to this because I'm of the belief that bears can swim for miles and there is no problem to solve, but I'm not going to sit still and let any animal go extinct! There is a balance and it must be maintained.

Back in the '50's in the US there was a bounty of $50 US paid for the front left paw of any wolf. Now the wolf is gone. Today, there are more white tail deer then we can manage. The deer have lost their fear of man and are eating our crops, damaging our homes and getting hit by our cars. Oh to have a wolf back again.

... stupid dear ,-head-butting your car !What next , they'll come shooting.

If you won't to defend the non-cuddly ones thats fine -I'd support you . The ones already gone - who wouldn't want to see a Dodo , side-stepping as the question is.

If PB's were becoming extinct without our help you might have a point.Do you really think PBs push the price of fish up ? Odd , cos it didn't have a price until fairly recently.

I was being facetious. The whole "polar bears are drowning" is an appeal to the emotions. When determining environmental policy, I would prefer that emotional appeals be avoided. We should stick to the facts. Unfortunately environmentalism has become the new "ism" and objectivity has been thrown out the window.

One side argues that the world is doomed because of unfettered greed. The other side argues that environmentalism is the new marxism that will result in totalitarian oppression.

By the way, the deer overpopulation problems near urban areas is due to laws that prohibited farmers from killing deer foraging in their fields, except during hunting season. Where I lived near Chicago, we rarely saw deer until the 1970's. By the 1980's they were everywhere. One cannot explain this by the extinction of natural predators in the mid 1800's.

Like yourself , I would have preferred to see the original question phrased slightly different . I would have done so , because any mention of cute animals/global warming is certain to get a question ignored in the emotional flood . eg " I'm designing an artificial base to be used by stricken vessels etc." would find answers that suit a purpose that others agree with (possibly), yet still apply to my real interest. Deceitful , possibly , but the end result is helpful to all .

How about semi submerged old containers? or islands made from old pallets and floating rubbish, if there was a way to gather up the rubbish .....

Also, perhaps the bears will adapt as the seals must still be there and they need somewhere to haul onto, perhaps if the bears knew where the seals had gone......

solar powered ice makers?

Why do you want to air lift them, and, why not make them durable enough for several years.

Have you thought about picrete: it's a frozen mixture of water and sawdust? It is incredibly strong and very resistant to thawing out (the sawdust reduces the rate of heat transfer). As long as you kept them (the bergs) in the arctic they would re-cool enough each winter to keep them frozen all summer.

The UK and US almost certainly worked out how much they would cost during WW2 (they were going to make sort of permanent aircraft carriers in the north Atlantic: these would have been further South than the ones you want to deploy).

Greetings fellow board members,

Helping the bears will not be a problem, creating artificial pack ice islands will not be a problem, the bouyancy factor is the problem as a floating barge of any type will be well above the water line and an artificial island will require a slope or steps to ccess it as a bear is not equipped to jump out of the water. Floating work barges with a raised solid floor are very common and many are built and used in both inland and off shore with cranes and large excavators/draglines tracked equipment- the tracked equipment is driven on to wooden blocks to distribute the weight of the machine over the barge to reduce overall weight per square foot.

Part two:

The floating barge will need multiple sealed compartments and very heavy wall construction-to maintain its seaworthyness and bouyancy-one to reduce any possible berg damage- along these lines one needs to think of the russian owned nuclear powered ice breakers and thier construction as it will require this much work simply from a survival stand point.

I do not remember who makes them(the ice breakers) for the russian government but it is easy enough to find out who did.

If you seriously want to lower the surface water temeperature-think temperature-think temperature-think temeprature by pumping the colder arctic seawater from the bottom and bringing it to the surface will displace the warmer water and it(the warmer water) will eventually sink back to the bottom and be recooled by heat loss.

This water exchage can be done anywhere anytime no matter the lattitude and I might ad it has been going on for millions of years naturally

"This is a simple problem with a very simple solution- the one creating the problems are the problem and are too close to see the problem."

"The simplest solutions quite often are the ones which solve complicated problems"

Before expending time and energy on the artificial ice slab assumption, you should fully inform yourself on how polar bears live and die. For example it's my understanding that when the bears swim open water to another ice floe, they are searching for a food source - seals and sea lions, presumably. So they won't stay on artificial ice because they would starve. IF their food source is the key to the problem, figure out a way to make the food sources accessible in absence of slab ice. Also, the bears have to return to solid ground to hibernate. That's another reason that artificial ice might be of limited help to them.

..you're in a boat on a body of water and come across a drowning man, what do you do? You throw him a lifeline! I hardly think any of us would sit back, flip open our laptops and research the benefits of a rope versus a lifejacket. I appreciate all of your comments, especially you Kris for defending the real issue at hand here. This is a rescue operation. We are all aware of the complexities of global warming and I don't propose to solve this issue, I am here on this forum to solicit viable means of production. I am working on sponsorship/funding. Please continue the discussion, and thank you. PBs in a jam

Having worked with folks who actually SEE THE PB's on and off every year for decades, I can say that they are more in danger of winding up at a taxidermy shop than drowning. With that said, if you insist on making "floating islands", you could try this.....

• Just build a regular double walled steel barge any size you feel desirable.
• Bolt large mesh Braided High Density PE/HC (with copper wire intwined inside the braids of the twine to kill off algae growth). *Garware-Wall Ropes Lmtd. of Pune India sells a good product. Sapphire or Mark II Olivene netting would be a good place to start.
• The netting should be 8 mm Double Braided webbing with a 300mm x 300mm square cut mesh x 5 Meters long x 3 Meters deep
• bolt it onto the decking with 7x19 SS cable running through the edge of the mesh to hold it in place. Use a 6mm x 12 strand Dyneema braided line ( from Samson Ropes , Ferndale, Wa.) to bind the netting to the cable. *Dyneema is a molecularly alligned HDPE fiber produced by the Van Beelan co.
• drop 3 meters of mesh into the water so the critters can claw their way up and onto the deck. It will float on the surface as it has a .94 sg.
• Be sure and put a GPS inside the barge to keep track of it ( or them) when it drifts 200-300 kms. off course with the tides and currents. If it gets into the shipping lanes or fishing grounds you'll have serious legal (criminal and civil) issues to deal with so make sure you have it fully insured by Loyds .

I do not guarantee or warrant any of this. This is just an untested idea....like what you asked for.

I still feel that these "islands' will attract few if any polar bears and will get you or your group into serious trouble with both the Canadian and US Coast Guard when they drift into harms way.

With this said, how about spending some time coming up with a plan to protect our coastline here in Louisiana which is still laid bare since Katrina and Rita. There are 1.25 million people who live and work along here THAT ARE IN DANGER OF DROWNING and it ain't from Global Warming.

Back to work.......

netmaker

Thank you netmaker,

Back to '..in a boat, drowning man in sight, hmm...what do I do?' analogy. I'm interseted in rescue, not resolving the issues of governmental ownership. Your suggestions on the 'mesh' material are duely noted. This 'berg' would be towed to avoid harassing legalities..Down the road, GPS could be discussed. Right now, I want to instigate action. Get something built, get it out there and give a bear a chance to catch its' breath.

WAG: Stacks of 4 x 8 foam insulation panels with fiberglass / plastic coating & interleaving about 8" thick.

Strong enough & cheap.

To PRAGMATIST, your suggestion is valid. This is the simplest, most practical and viable idea thus far. Now for cost analysis... and support. Thank you.

Bears have built in flotation due to hollow hair. They will not sink, but they can become exhausted and get battered by ice, even killed.

Average number of cubs/litter has been dropping. Average weight of males and sows has also dropped as has the fat/weight ratio.

So there is no doubt they are stressed.

Will they adapt? This is a lightning fast change in evolutionary terms, so new genes cannot evolve. What can happen is variation of expression. The big problem is loss of food as seals can not pup on ice that is not there. Where will the seals pup? land spits and islands? Hard to say.

this is a recent comprehensive report on

http://www.akcf.org/_attachments/pdf/IceDependentMarineMammals.pdf

some more informaition

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22seal+pupping%22+%2B%22ice+loss%22+%2Barctic&btnG=Search

The only comparable food source is the caribou herds.

there are some articles about it here.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22polar+bear%22+%2Bpredation+%2Bcaribou&btnG=Google+Search

Cost analysis is problematical.

Materials : about 60% of their cost at Home Depot should be about right.

Labor & transportation of the amounts required to do any good to the
remote locations required: ??????????

Maybe if you could recruit all of both GreenPeace and the Sierra Club, you'd have a shot.

You're talking one or two of these 'Burg`s per Sq. Mi. in thousands of Sq. Mi.s
of ocean.

It might also help the seal population though, and those lil buggers
are so damn cute! - (Good P.R. opportunuty.)

..cyniscism aside, your simplistic attitude is my position also. Next question becomes is the Green Peace fleet equipped with such 'slabs'? Who better to be in the position of rescue than these crew members?..The very same who photograph and film distressed scenarios.

For those of you who are skeptical about this critical situation may I suggest a quick google search under 'Drowning Polar Bears, Arctic'. Pictures don't lie. Bears are not fish. Build it, they will come. To those of you who have taken my query seriously I genuinely thank you.

No offense to anyone here.....

The internet as well as the scientific community has equal amounts of folks who believe this either way.

So far, No floating carcasses. No pods of Orcas feasting on bloated dead bears...... no carcasses floating up on the beach......and so far, no video of bears going under for the Deep 6.

Bears can swim 60 miles. For you landlubbers that means 3 x's the line of sight over water from a fixed position at water level....curvature of the earth and all of that.

If you watched a bear swim away, you would lose sight of him or her after 20 miles.

I am not a scientist or an engineer so my opinion is just that .....an opinion.

My suggestion on a Crawl Mat bolted to a double hull barge would probably work as "faux- ice berg". However, no one knows what the bears would do until it is built and deployed.

So, Anyone could be right on this.

the problem is mainly the lack of seals. Bears cannot catch them in the water and can only get them when they raise pups on the ice and climb out via small holes, beside which the bears wait.

SO we have seal deaths coupled with PB deaths.

Does a polar bear drown in the arctic when there is no-one there to see it drown?

Of course they do. suerveillance is thin to none and a few deab PBs seens at sea can mane a large dead population with few seen. ocean water based predators will deal with a carcass in short order. Sharks, sea lions, orcas, fish etc, all eat meat

Interesting points aurizon . If I can borrow and expand ; Birds die all the time , but nobody disbelieves it because they aren't tripping over carcasses .

Those disbelieving PBs drowning , seem to accept a problem with seals finding a place to pup - perhaps they could view the 'problem' as finding a solution to the latter . The artificial berg concept could serve either or both purposes.

On land a wild creature that is ill/dying almost invariably seeks a place where it can rest and avoid predation...where it dies, unseen but found by the insect recyclers it is soon just feathers/fur and bones. At sea birds do become ill and cannot find land and perforce land at sea, from whence they may never alight and soon sink or get washed onto a nearby shore.

PB as a predator are a scattered load on the seals. There are ~12,000,000 square Km. of sea ice and the seal population was ~20-30 million or about 2-3 per square KM.

PB population was 15-25,000 and they would eat a seal a week, more or less and so they amount to a low level of predation of ~1 million annually.

From this I conclude it is not practical to create floating islands to maintain these classical populations. (assuming you could make something the seals would go to to have pups and that the PBs could go to to eat pups/seals and not have an avoidance by seals of this nice place for PB munchies!!).

Seals have been around for a long time. They may adapt to island rearing and the bears to swimming along the coasts/islands to get seals as they must have done during the past warm episodes. The problem is past warming/cooling episodes changed very slowly and that allowed changes in gene expression (the so called 'fast evolution') that let the seals/PBs move between past genetically learned regimes.

This warming might be too fast for this to allow this process to operate.

I'm sure there was a reliable report I read somewhere within the past 12 months of legalized trophy shoots . Odd what an excess of money will do to some people . It's the same with egg-collectors , the rarer it is the more they want it ( and will even destroy eggs to push up rarity)

I always suspected engineers were creative, lateral thinkers and your posts have certainly substantiated this notion. The objective here seems to have woven itself into quite the interesting web. Initially seeking to actualize a product to 'rescue weary bears in open water' has transformed into an oasis of sprouting concern and information/opinion-sharing. I'm compelled to ask that you continue the discussion, here, there, anywhere, everywhere. True extinction of an idea(or a species) happens when this ceases.

A good question is one that provokes a lot of people to comment/discuss etc. I'd say your question has done that . Anything that gets people of different opinion to swap viewpoints has to be for the better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habbakuk

This would need some modification , but if it was possible in 1943 well....

The project was only cancelled , because the need had ceased . Many brilliant people of the time worked on this project.

The evolutionists may claim the disappearance of Polar Bears as natural progression in the larger scheme of things...I suggest we have a moral responsibility to make positive change on a planet that is at the mercy of collective action and the power of prayer! The micro/macro view contains clues...

Hey, I'm an artist making a concerted effort and I just want the blinders off! In the meantime, if funding were available NOW, what next? Has anybody actually envisioned a solution to the construction of a Rescue-Berg?

Totally agree with you - The technology of Habakuk is totally viable and cheap . It would last long enough to be viable , and could be done on almost any scale as an artificial ice slab. Make a slab in Newfoundland (Cornerbrook , was the planned development site ) and borrow a couple of tugs etc.

The Habakuk is not viable or cheap in the number and quantity required to deal with even 5% of the seal population. They would have to be set up here and there and tethered to form some semblabce of the ice in which they would get embedded every winter (unless you sailed them South).

Which would then support 5% of the former PB population.

PBs have been around for 100,000 tom 250,000 years.

http://www.geol.umd.edu/~candela/pbevol.html

and so have been through warm periods of ice lost as well as cold periods of glaciation. Same with the seals. Now this warmming is a lot faster. Will they adapt?

How did they adapt in the past?

they are ~ 20 million years old in some form.

http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/zone/underwater_sous-marin/hseal/seal-phoque_e.htm

http://polarmet.mps.ohio-state.edu/ASPIRE_99/seals/science/evxt.htm

Think I'll defer to your greater knowledge aurizon . I raised the Habakuk thing because somebody else may draw inspiration from it somehow. Any possibility , however remote , is worth checking since the obvious may otherwise be missed . Thanks for the links.

There is no doubt that PB have a problem. They may have to land adapt back to brown bears or go the way of all large land animals since man came along 50,000 years ago.

The fact that we can understand this does not mean we have the will to stop it. The USA can stop Japanese whaling in 1 day. All they need to do is say to US Customs, "stop all Japanese imports until the Japanese stop whaling" and pass the law to enable that.

The Japanese meat trade for whales is ludicrous. Most of it goes for dog food as many Japanese are against buying and eating whale meat.

Join the small furry animals protection league, whales are honorary members

Whaling for 'research' is a joke . I don't recall any huge bits of research being published by Japan. There is clearly a trade off being made - ie we'll ignore the whaling if you...

Kris, You and I (I mentioned pykrete back in about post 15 but spelled it incorrectly) may be trying to solve a slightly different problem to the one originally posted. I think he wants something that can be used to rescue individual (or groups of) polar bears which have been observed to be in danger.

"PBs in danger", I think we (Kris and I) are possibly approaching this in a slightly more (Aurizon's comments accepted) practical way. Attempting to protect part of the environment, and allowing the bears to "sort themselves out" may work better than "fire fighting".

Again, as I said before the aircraft carrier would have been designed to work much further South. If you built the bergs cleverly (maybe in layers) you could let the Arctic winter do the hard (freezing, expensive) work.

Glad your back Randall . There was a great documentary on Discovery channel the other day (National Geographic : "Sea ____" something ) all about the Habakkuk project . The technology is ripe for other applications . Only timing stopped it's full implementation in 1943 . Geoffry Pike was a true eccentric genius , who was used and dropped by the establishment (a la Turing ).

I saw on the news about lots of ships stuck in the pack ice these were seal hunters, is this poetic justice?

Yes. Although I suggest it's far more than poetic...I don't wish harm on anyone, but this latest development with the packed ice on our Eastern coast is certainly a loud call from the one in charge. Seems to me the ice further north has done exactly what scientists, enviornmentalists have declared for some time..it's breaking off from the glaciers in the Arctic, it's all shifting south and will eventually melt..be gone, forever! In the meantime lava flowing from active volcanoes creates something like 32 acres of virgin land annually...fascinating. So..will we have Polar Bears in New Brunswick? Or will they simply follow the seals...I just want them around. Dialogue continues I'm happy to say with 'Rescue-Bergs'. Happy Earth Day people! Say a prayer for the planet, even if you only partially believe in the power of the exersize.

In a curious way , the danger of ice to shipping may force people to address the problem in a way that is advantageous to the PBs etc . I don't know exactly how , but I think it may come to be ( a sorry indictment of our global ethics , but who cares if it helps all).

I'm not much of an enginier. I have heard of Pykrete as an effective means of island production. Pykrete is of course the mixture of ice water and sawdust. This was taken seriously by the U.S. Navy during WWII for the production of much larger carriers that could withstand such things as the suicide bombers from Japan. This stuff is seriously dense and heavy at the same time. Due to how easy it can be made, however, it could be produced in the polar region with great success. I have not studied this to deeply. I do think it might also have another side effect of cooling the polar region if done right.

There is also another problem to this, the ice might be to dense for the polar bears and other animals of the region to break the ice for it's natural means. However, by creating small breaks within the pykrete allowing regular ice to be made (of course this will need professionals who know and understand the usual nature of the region including the animal life as well as highly trained engineers with experience on the subject) this can be done effectively.