The Bering Strait Seawater Deflector (BSSD): Arctic Tundra Preservation Using an Immersed, Scalable and Removable Fiberglass Curtain

Abstract

The First International Conference on Iceberg Utilization, held at Iowa State University during 2–5 October 1977 (Husseiny 1978) awakened the world-public’s interest in a mega-engineering concept first advanced circa 1949 by John Dove Isaacs (1913–1980), the maverick USA oceanographer (Behrman and Isaacs 1992). More than 60 years ago few took Isaacs’ mega-project proposal seriously and, until 1977, little was done by mega-engineers to rigorously evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of towing tabular icebergs, naturally and artificially calved from the periphery of the icy continent of Antarctica, to the warm dry-land regions enduring, or predicted to endure during the twenty-first century, significant consumer demand-driven freshwater shortage. During the twenty-first century, the Earth’s two coldest regions, our planet’s northern and southern Polar Zones, achieved their commonly accepted cultural–geographic status as the axial and symbolic polar foci of the supposed anthropogenic “Global Climate Change” (Yusoff 2005; Cameron 2005). In the Arctic, at the southern tip of Novaya Zemlya (i.e., the island of Yuzhnyj), which lies at about the same latitude as Alaska’s northernmost point (latitude 71ºN), the Russians demonstrated their technology by detonating on October 30, 1961 the most powerful aerial nuclear explosion in history—the Tsar Bomb yielding 50 Mt; the Arctic is contaminated by decaying radioactive materials deposited by weapons test fallout, industrial nuclear accidents on land and warship mishaps at sea, and from intentional disposal of nuclear waste by marine dumping. However, and beneficially, with the advent of nuclear-powered submarines “…the entire Arctic Ocean…ceased to be remote and is open to study on a year-round basis…” (Molloy 1962). We accept the practical mega-engineering outlook that physical things of our world are never truly static, and that utopia/dystopia is a dynamic terminology and, therefore, the properly professional approach of the mega-engineer is ‘if it needs to be done, it can be done’. We only have to secure a real need.