The Iceberg aircraft carrier

"Geoffrey Pyke, one of a group of scientists Mountbatten nurtured at Combined Operations, was his coconspirator in the greatest of all his flights of fancy. Habakkuk was to be an aircraft carrier, fashioned out of a colossal molded iceberg. It could be frozen in Canada or Russia and then dragged to the North Sea to fight Hitler. Pyke invented a special extra-strong ice, which he named Pykecrete, made from paper pulp and seawater. A prototype Habakkuk, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and twenty feet deep -- about the size of twelve double-decker buses -- was set up on Canada's Patricia Lake, so that Mountbatten could sell the idea to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Quebec. With typical theatrics, Dickie produced two blocks of ice -- one standard, one Pykecrete -- pulled out a revolver and shot each one. The standard ice exploded; the Pykecrete survived, and so impressively that the bullet glanced off it and stung the American chief of naval operations in the leg before lodging in the wall. The Americans vetoed the project."

Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer.

(La teoria de l'iceberg is one year old. Thank you for reading us!)