The dark depths of Lake Patricia in Canada still hide a secret that was once poised to change the course of World War II.
To gain the upper hand against the deadly German U-boats, the British had come up with a strange idea: make aircraft carriers out of giant icebergs. They were, after all, abundant, completely free and believed to be unsinkable. Crazy as it sounded, the project was approved by British prime minister Winston Churchill himself.
A prototype was built and tested at the lake over four months -- and parts of it remain there, 50 feet below the surface. The ice has long melted, but Project Habbakuk still lives.
Strategic material.
In 1942, at a branch of the British War Office, an eccentric scientist named Geoffrey Pyke was trying to figure out how to protect Allied ships in the "U-boat alley," an area of the Atlantic Ocean where Nazi submarines, out of the range of Allied warplanes, ruled the day. With building materials like steel in short supply, he thought, why not take a chunk of ice from the Arctic and tow it south to land planes on it?
"Pyke was a sort of holdover from the last Victorian boffins, someone we'd never take seriously now because he didn't have multiple degrees. But he did have credibility," Susan Langley, a professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland who's done doctoral research on the subject, said in a phone interview.
At the time, ice was considered almost indestructible: the International Ice Patrol, established to destroy icebergs after one had sunk the Titanic in 1912, had reported that blowing them up wasn't easy, even with torpedoes and incendiary bombs.
"Pyke thought ice was the new strategic material that would win the war," Langley said. "And Churchill was willing to entertain the idea."
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He decided to call the ambitious design HMS Habbakuk, a misspelling of the name of prophet Habakkuk, who, in the Old Testament, wrote: " be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told."
The largest warship ever
Building a warship out of ice was just as hard as it sounds. "One problem was that if you wanted to launch aircraft off of something, it had to have 50 feet of freeboard above the water, but because icebergs are 90% submerged, that meant having almost 500 feet below the water," said Langley.
Such a vessel would be almost impossible to move. Also, when the tip of an iceberg melts, it makes it turn and roll, which would be a problem with aircraft trying to refuel on it. Finally, a flight deck of some other material was required for planes to land and take off.
