Project Habakkuk: Britain’s WW2 Ice Warship

I was on CNN this morning and found this interesting article of making aircraft carriers out of ice. Apparently some parts of the prototype lay at the bottom of Lake Patricia in Jasper National Park. I know during war there are many ideas for different type of weapons but this was the first time I ever heard of an aircraft carrier made of ice. Wondering if others had heard of the project?

CNN link - https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/project-habbakuk-ice-aircraft-carrier/index.html

 

There are files on creator, Professor Geoffrey Pyke at the National Archives, but this one looks the most interesting:

Financing of secret weapons: Project Habakkuk; Geoffrey Pyke | The National Archives

 

I've read that the Germans found out about Habakkuk quite early on, and had designed a giant floating hairdryer in order to melt it.

 

I was recently on holiday in Alberta and visited Jasper and the surrounding areas. We met a few locals whilst there and chatted about Habakkuk. Apparently the locals used to scuba dive to the bottom of the lake to view the sunken platform, however, this became more and more dangerous as the whole thing moved and sunk deeper.

 

The whole point of the design was that it wasn't made of water ice but of a frozen slurry of wood pulp - trials made by firing torpedoes at it proved it to be very strong. The main purpose was to provide staging points for ferrying aircraft across the Atlantic but improved aircraft made this necessary.

 

In 1943 fifteen men spent two months on Patricia Lake building a 1-to-50-scale model prototype of the planned Pykrete boat. It was considered seaworthy but full-size versions were never built, and not long after the war ended.
Pykrete is the mixture of water and wood pulp frozen together. Pykrete was much stronger than plain ice, and took much longer to melt, months if not years, out on the open ocean. Pykrete, being lighter than water, would never sink.



Maybe we should be adding wood pulp to the world's glaciers!