It is a plan as crazy as the situation is desperate -- towing an iceberg from Antarctica to Cape Town to supply fresh water to a city in the grip of drought. Earlier this year, Cape Town came within weeks of shutting off all its taps and forcing residents to queue for water rations at public standpipes.
The cut-off was narrowly averted as people scrambled to reduce their water usage and Autumn rains saved the day. But the threat is expected to return to the coastal South African city again next year and beyond.
"The idea sounds crazy," admits maverick salvage expert Nick Sloane, the brains behind the tow-an-iceberg scheme. "But if you look at the fine details, it is not so crazy."
Sloane suggests wrapping the iceberg in a textile insulation skirt to stop it melting and using a supertanker and two tugboats to drag it 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) towards Cape Town using prevailing ocean currents.
The iceberg, carefully selected by drones and radiography scans, would be about one kilometre in length, 500 metres across and up to 250 metres deep, with a flat, tabletop surface.
Melted water could be gathered each day using collection channels and a milling machine to create ice slurry -- producing 150 million litres of usable water every day for a year.
Purest freshwater on earth
Sloane's idea might be dismissed as mere fantasy.
But the 56-year-old Zambian-South African has a reputation for taking on the impossible after he re-floated the giant Costa Concordia cruise ship that capsized in 2012 off the Tuscan island of Giglio, killing 32 people -- one of the world's largest and most complex maritime salvage operations.
"Icebergs are made of the purest freshwater on earth," the founder of Sloane Marine Ltd said earnestly.
"Thousands break off every year. Mother Nature has been teasing mankind with this for a long time, saying 'this is here'."
He estimates it would cost $100 million (86 million euros) to haul an iceberg on a journey that could take up to three months, and another $50-60 million to harvest the water for one year as it melts.
"In Russia, they have pushed (icebergs) away from oil installations -- but small ones, they are about half-a-million tons. (Here) we are talking about 100 million tons," said Sloane.
Weighing up options