Jamal Qureshi didn't want to go out hunting icebergs at night. Everyone, at least the small world that clusters north of the Polar Circle, knows that it is a dangerous adventure. But during the winter of 2016 he had to overcome his resistance. It had run out of ice and customers were still placing orders. The iceberg water bottles produced by Qureshi are sold for 80 euros per unit and the winter night in Svalbard, Norway lasts four months.
Every day that passed he lost money. So he waited for the weather to improve and got on his boat. It was a 28-meter-long icebreaker with a crane in the bow, the kind of boat to navigate between icebergs and avoid being sunk. Despite so many risks, her business has attracted more and more companies and speculators in recent years. At the same time, Greenpeace warns of possible damage to the environment.
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That night, if anything, Qureshi had other concerns. "There was maybe 50 meters of visibility, dark night and soft snow ahead," he says on the phone. “Every now and then, out of nowhere, we would see a huge mass of ice almost on top, and we had to pull back to gain distance. These icebergs break, they crack, you have to be careful and measure the distances ”.
Qureshi has been measuring them since 2013, when he left Wall Street to move to Svalbard, a place with more polar bears than people. He got the idea after backpacking the archipelago and coming back with a gift for his wife: iceberg water. "I thought I could do the same for more people, and help this community," he clarifies. And he founded Svalbardi, a luxury water brand that claims to be the purest ever marketed.
For a long time, yes, it is no longer the only one. Iceberg water sells what its name indicates. Quidi Vidi distills 20,000-year-old icebergs to make a beer. Auk Island Winery mixes the water from these ices with grapes, and Canadian Iceberg Vodka Corporation turns them into a distillate based on potato starch. Speculators around the world seek to exploit icebergs off the coasts of Canada, Greenland and Norway.
They want to capture them and turn them into luxury items. At first the idea sounded as romantic as it was bizarre: iceberg hunters cruising the Arctic in search of the purest water on the planet. But the market has settled and increased.
Entrepreneurs like Qureshi also seize an opportunity. With global warming, the seas fill with icebergs, which melt, raising the sea level. In fact, companies in the sector assure that they can reverse this unwanted effect. Svalbardi's slogan is: "Try the Arctic to save the Arctic." Julio Barea, head of Greenpeace's water campaign, rebuts: “It's absurd. The poles are losing 500 gigatons of ice annually, how many icebergs are these people going to remove? " Asked, Qureshi replies that it depends on the year: "In general, between three or four tons per year." "A drop in the sea", according to the head of Greenpeace, who stresses that the pollution caused by the capture, cooling and commercialization of this water is worse than the supposed benefit.
Greenpeace sees any marketing of bottled water as unsustainable. "But Bezoya's route, which goes from Segovia to Seville, is not the same as a water taken in the Arctic that goes to the United Arab Emirates," Barea clarifies. Qureshi defends itself by brandishing the carbon-free company certificate. “We only use icebergs that are already floating in the sea and are going to melt. We are in constant contact with the authorities to avoid going out when there are marine fauna migrating or hunting, and they are icebergs so small that their removal has no impact on the animals ”, he adds.
Drinking iceberg water may seem exotic around these latitudes, but in the Arctic they have been doing it for centuries. The Inuit cut chunks from these ice masses to fill their canteens for their long summer kayak expeditions. For decades the Nukissiorfiit company has used icebergs to supply water to the 700 inhabitants of Qaanaaq, Greenland, in the long winter.
The situation has taken another turn when several businessmen opted to take this resource to the rest of the world. On the coast that separates Greenland from Newfoundland, business has found its epicenter. The fear of several activists is that this fever will end up melting the poles.
There are companies that seem to justify this fear. In the summer of 2019 an entrepreneur announced the “Iceberg of the United Arab Emirates” project. The idea was to tow, from Antarctica to the Arabian Sea, a colossus of ice two kilometers in diameter. In the end the project broke down. "Plans to transport icebergs to arid regions have been around for a long time," says Antarctic researcher and geologist Jerónimo López. "But they collide with the limitation of having to face very great distances."
The use of glacier water is seen as an eccentricity of the rich, but some expert does not rule out its potential use against the planet's thirst. Most studies choose to focus on other methods, such as rain capture or desalination. But if the situation worsens, the icebergs will continue to wait. If they don't drink them (or they melt) sooner.