Rosneft endeavored to move an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean weighing over 1 million tons in order to prevent it from crashing into an oil platform, said Rosneft's Vice President Andrey Shishkin on September 13, 2017.
The iceberg’s tonnage is double that of the famed floating ice chunk that sunk the Titanic in 1912.
To effectively tow the ice, experts use echo feedback to measure the depth of the iceberg and then use the information to adequately equip ships that will eventually move the huge block of frozen water.
The Arctic is one of the last frontiers of natural resource discovery, and underneath the tundra and ice are vast amounts of undiscovered oil, natural gas, and minerals, the economics blog Zero Hedge said last year.
That’s why there is a high-stakes race for Arctic domination between countries such as the U.S., Norway, Russia, Denmark and Canada.
In terms of oil, it’s estimated that the Arctic has 90 billion barrels of oil that is yet to be discovered.
That’s equal to 5.9 % of the world’s known oil reserves – about 110 % of Russia’s current oil reserves, or 339 % of U.S. reserves.
