Saudi Dreams: Icebergs in Iowa

Abstract

The First International Conference on Iceberg Utilization, held at Iowa State University in October 1977, contributed to the formation of nascent hydrologics in the late 1970s that were used to justify incursions into unconventional sites of resource extraction by “dry” nations such as Saudi Arabia. As a central site of water-related knowledge production, the Iceberg Utilization meeting put forward a collection of media that would constitute a form of evidentiary claim in the emergence of increasingly prevalent schemes on the part of water “poor” regions to achieve viable forms of water provision by the early 1980s.