this video was made possible by
brilliant a problem solving website that
teaches you how to think like a
scientist I've covered a lot of people's
crazy ideas in the past on this channel
there was the plan to drain the
Mediterranean Sea the plan to nuke a
hole in the ground to create a new sea
and several other lunatic things but
sometimes an idea is so insane that it
causes you to seriously wonder who on
earth came up with it enter the man
Jeffrey Pike and his wild idea during
the Second World War to build a freaking
aircraft carrier out of ice
well that doesn't immediately seem to
make any reasonable sense allow me to
explain why it sort of did at the time
one of the biggest problems that Britain
was facing in 1941 in 1942 was the fact
that German u-boats in the Atlantic were
seeking huge amounts of Allied cargo and
shipping Britain's greatest advantage
and disadvantage during the war was the
same thing they were located on an
island this helps to prevent a German
land invasion from happening in 1940 but
it also meant that all of their imports
from other countries had to be coming in
by ship and if the Germans could sink
enough of it it might mean that Britain
would starve this map here shows every
single allied ship that was sunk by
German u-boat activity during 1941 and
you can see a pattern emerging when he
take into consideration the range that
the Royal Air Force could operate in
represented by these arcs a huge zone of
the Atlantic was simply out of range for
any planes in the RAF taking off from
bases on land to reach and defend and so
this zone was where most Allied shipping
was sunk and it came to be known as the
mid-atlantic Gap the Royal Navy couldn't
simply produce more aircraft carriers to
patrol the area during wartime because
the steel needed to create those ships
was required for other more critical
purposes like guns tanks bombs and
planes and so in 1942
Jeffrey Pike believed that he had come
up with a solution while steel may have
been in critically short supply for
Britain during the war to things that
weren't were wood and ice Pike began
studying icebergs that thought hey you
know what would be cool what if we took
one and shaved off the top to create a
runway dug out the center to create a
hangar to put planes in and then trucked
into the middle of the Atlantic before
it melted there were a few problems with
Pike's Ice Death Star idea though namely
that icebergs are way too small for that
most of an iceberg is underwater
and probably worst icebergs sometimes
randomly tip over which would it be a
100% ideal situation but what if instead
of taking an iceberg from nature they
created their own iceberg and made it
look like a ship or an aircraft carrier
the idea was born in 1942 but creating a
ship out of pure ice wouldn't - because
well ice is ice and it has a bad
tendency to melt and a sink
so instead Pike and a team of scientists
developed a new material specifically
for the ship that they called pykrete
basically just a mixture of water ice
and wood pulp that wouldn't sink and
significantly enhance the strength and
the melting time of ice as a material
one ton of ice only requires one percent
of the energy needed to produce one ton
of Steel so in theory it should have
been a lot cheaper to construct the
whole carrier from pykrete than from
steel but in practice that wasn't
exactly how it would turn out starting
in 1943 the British created a small ish
prototype of the bird ship on a lake in
Canada that was eighteen by nine metres
wide and weighed 1,000 tonnes the full
plant however called for the creation of
the largest ship that would have ever
been created dubbed project Habakkuk the
full ship was supposed to be 1.2
kilometres long by 180 metres wide which
is unbelievably stupidly huge for
reference that's a boat that's bigger
than some countries here is the ship
placed over top of Vatican City here is
the tallest building in the world placed
next to it and here is the actual
biggest ship ever created placed next to
it it was absolute lunacy but even more
insanely they thought they can construct
one for only 700,000 pounds which is
only about thirty one point three
million pounds today for further
reference just one queen elizabeth-class
carrier in the current Royal Navy costs
about three billion pounds it was
calculated that the amount of wood pulp
needed to produce a carrier this massive
would have had a serious effect on the
Allied supply of paper during the war
while the pykrete material itself was
proving to be fairly tricky to work with
in order to prove how durable of a
material pykrete actually was apparently
an admiral brought two different blocks
with him to a convention in 1943 Quebec
with Churchill and Roosevelt
one block was normal ice while the other
was pykrete the Admiral pulled out his
pistol shot and shattered the ice block
then turned and shot the pykrete block
and experienced the bullet bounce off in
ricochet and graze another Admiral
present across his leg
needless to say pykrete was much tougher
than regular ice was but it still
suffered from other similar physical
properties namely cold flow or the
tendency of ice to sag
the prototype ship in Canada was sagging
which meant that more steel
reinforcements were needed than
previously thought and more effective
insulation was needed around the ship's
hole to prevent everything inside for
melting even further if the full model
ship was ever actually built steam turbo
generators on board we're going to
provide 26 external electric motors
around the ship's hull with 33,000
horsepower
the motors couldn't be placed inside the
ship because of all the heat that they
would be producing while a massive
refrigeration plant would be located
somewhere inside instead that would keep
the interior just nice and freezing all
of the crew on board would be literally
living and working inside of these
freezing conditions for months on end
like they were basically in the Arctic
150 total planes divided between bombers
and fighters could be stored onboard the
ship and made ready for takeoff while
the surface would be equipped with
dozens of anti-air guns and small
cannons however all of this extra steel
required for the refrigeration plant
bracing an insulation of a ship of this
ridiculous size was beginning to appear
to be stupidly impractical obviously
according to one American study the
amount of steel required by a 1.2
kilometer long ice ship would be more
than the steel required to build an
entire fleet of conventional aircraft
carriers which kind of defeated the
entire purpose of it in the first place
to save steel and by 1944 a lot of other
things were happening that basically
killed the habakkuk iceberg ship anyway
first Portugal decided to open up their
airfields to Allied planes in the Azores
which greatly extended allied range out
into the Atlantic second longer range
fuel tanks were allowing British planes
to fly for longer and further
out into the Atlantic anyway and third
and probably most importantly the
Americans were starting to get heavily
involved in the Atlantic and were
introducing their own escort carriers
all of these factors combined made
creating a kilometre long ice ship look
like the stupid idea that it really was
an idea made out of desperation rather
than an idea made out of cold science if
you think you can design a better ice
ship you'll need a pretty firm grasp on
things like physics classical mechanics
water flow displacement thermodynamics
and more and all of those things you can
learn on brilliant org brilliant is the
expert in teaching regular people like
you or me complicated things through
active learning and problem solving you
can even learn something new every day
with their short daily challenges which
each tie into one of their full
interactive courses if you want to learn
even more if you like watching things on
this channel I know that you enjoy
learning about things for free so head
over to brilliant org slash bar ll to
sign up there for free and then by being
one of the first 200 people to use that
link you'll also get 20% off of their
annual premium subscription so you can
view all of the daily challenges in the
archives and unlock dozens of problem
solving courses and be supporting
real-life lore at the same time while
you're at it thank you for watching and
I'll see you next week for another
brand-new video then