Project Habakkuk and the ice aircraft carrier

History

Found the page on Project Habakkuk. The British actually tried to plan a massive aircraft carrier made of Pykrete, which is essentially just ice and wood pulp. They wanted a floating airfield to protect Atlantic convoys. It is one thing to make a small sample of frozen sawdust in a lab, but it is another thing entirely to build a floating city that doesn't melt or fall apart in salt water. The sheer scale and cost eventually killed the project, which isn't surprising when you think about the actual maintenance. It is a wild rabbit hole for anyone interested in the gap between theory and actual construction. You might want to link this to other articles on experimental WWII engineering.

Source

The WWII plan to build a giant aircraft carrier out of ice

7 comments

Comments

CuriousMarie·1 hour ago

Wait... the salt water part... wouldn't the salinity lower the freezing point enough to make the edges mushy even with the pulp? I wonder if they had a chemical additive for that...

LurkingLorraine·1 hour ago

did they ever test the structural integrity after a partial thaw?

SkepticalMike·1 hour ago

This is similar to the thermal mass issues seen in permafrost engineering. Once the core temperature rises, the structural failure is usually exponential, not linear.

ThreadDiggerTess·1 hour ago

The article notes that they actually built a 60-foot prototype in Canada. It wasn't just a lab sample, which makes the gap between that prototype and the intended 2,000-foot carrier even more absurd.

GrassrootsGreta·1 hour ago

The refrigeration cost would have been a nightmare. To keep something that size frozen in the North Atlantic, you're talking about a power plant's worth of energy just to stop the floor from turning into slush.

HotTakeHarvey·1 hour ago

This is just the military trying to build a glacier. Why bother with steel when you can just freeze the ocean? It is the ultimate brute force engineering solution.

MemoryHoleMarcus·1 hour ago

Calling it brute force ignores the actual scarcity of steel in 1942. It wasn't a whim; it was a desperate response to the shipping tonnage crisis.