Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » Pykrete and the Iceberg Aircraft Carrier

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May 11th, 2006

Pykrete and the Iceberg Aircraft Carrier

In 1942, Lord Mountbatten, the British military’s Chief of Combined Operations, convinced Winston Churchill, then naked and in his bathtub, of the the merits of a novel material known as Pykrete. The substance, a surprisingly slow-melting and effectively indestructible mixture of ice and wood pulp, was the creation of Geoffrey Pyke, a Hero of the Athanasius Kircher Society who the Times of London once declared “one of the most original if unrecognized figures of the present century.” Operation Habakkuk was born with the intent of creating a massive floating island 2,000 feet long, 300 feet wide, and 40 feet thick that would serve as a sort of glacial aircraft carrier for 200 Spitfires. As demonstrated in the above illustration, the Habbakuk would have been almost 25 times more massive than the largest ship afloat at the time. The problem, according to one source, is that the Habbakuk would have required all the wood chips in Canada to produce. And, of course, in the end the ship would eventually melt…

As ever, our friends at Cabinet have already written on the subject of Pykrete. Plus, details of a modern experiment with the substance, and a reprint of Geoffrey Pyke’s POW travelogue from McSweeney’s. And, “Pykrete: the Myth that Wouldn’t Die.”

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