
Why Scientists Want To Tow A 7-Million-Ton Iceberg Across The Atlantic
French engineer Georges Mougin has spent four decades trying to prove that icebergs are more than frozen curiosities: reservoirs of 12,000-year-old fresh water that could be delivered to places that need it. The film follows a team of glaciologists and engineers as they run 3D simulations to test his plan of towing a 7-million-ton iceberg from Canadian waters to the Canary Islands. Interviews with the scientists lay out the physics of the problem: how much of the ice would survive the journey, what currents and temperatures would do to it en route, and how a vessel could realistically drag something that size across the Atlantic. The simulations double as visual centerpieces, showing the iceberg shrinking and shifting under different scenarios. Rather than treating the scheme as a stunt, the documentary takes it seriously as an engineering question, weighing the costs and unknowns against the appeal of a freshwater source that requires no desalination plant. It ends with the plan still theoretical, but with the numbers taken seriously.