The National Advisor Bureau Limited of UAE, which plans to tow icebergs from Antarctica to Fujairah coast as a new source of freshwater in the region, revealed that the towed icebergs may cause a significant and radical climate change in the region.

The UAE Iceberg Project is part of the “Rub’ El Amer” (Filling The Empty Quarter) projects, designed to transform the ‘Empty Quarter’ deserts into gardens ‘beneath which rivers flow’, including the Khalifa River Project, designed to connect Pakistan’s rivers to the UAE through undersea pipelines.

The Bureau said cold air gushing out from an iceberg close to the shores of the Arabian Sea would cause a trough and rainstorms across the Arabian Gulf and the southern region of the Arabian Peninsula all year round. When icebergs make contact with humid climate (Arabian Sea), moist air is forced to rise. Rising air expands; cools and condenses due to the decrease in air pressure. When enough water vapour is collected in the clouds, they become heavy and fall as rain.

Icebergs are expected to cause a tremendous increase in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. Clouds approaching from the Arabian Sea will flow around a circular low pressure center above the iceberg and create a vortex.

Icebergs off the coast of Fujairah will also become a massive and unique tourist attraction; they will cool the East Coast and transform the UAE Desert into thriving meadows within a decade, it said.

Melting icebergs will release fresh water into the Arabian Sea. This would rebuild ecological balance; reduce seawater salinity caused by brine discharge from desalination plants and restore biodiversity, it said.

The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest mass of ice on Earth with 10,000 trillion tons of snow and ice and contains most of the world’s fresh water. Due to global warming, icebergs break off the Arctic ice shelf, drift into warmer waters and eventually melt. An iceberg contains around 20 billion gallons of fresh water.

The UAE Icebergs Project aims to tow icebergs to Fujairah and leveraging the resulting fresh water from the melting glaciers. - TradeArabia News Service