A Giant Ball Will Help This Man Survive a Year on an Iceberg

Pretty risky bet for the company, if he survives that's great marketing, but if he dies, that's the end of it they're not selling any.

Assuming they ever ship any, and to him. This story may just be their marketing to try to get there, anyway.

Christ this website is terrible. Blogspam to the core, scrolling even a little bit changes the url to random other articles on their site

> He’s working with a company to develop nanosensors able to detect movement in the iceberg so he has advance warning of a flip

The "nanosensors" doesn't sound likely at all. If I were to tasked to create a "iceberg sudden flip detector" I would break the problem into two parts. Part 1 is monitoring the shape of the iceberg as it is changing. Part 2 is modelling how stable the iceberg is given the measured shape. Both sounds like a wicked hard problem even if you have a large team of engineers.

For the first maybe you could do periodic ultrasounds from the inside out. Embeding an array of accustic transducers and an array of microphones in the ice and then using signal processing black magic to pick out the shape of the echo you get back from the ice-ocean surface. Or just hang around with a ship mounted side scanning sonar and monitor the iceberg from the outside.

The second one should be a "simple" monte carlo simulation. But to validate it you would need data recorded from the evolution of many icebergs. Which I suspect would be expensive and lengthy to obtain.

"The capsule is strong enough to survive a storm at sea or getting crushed between two icebergs."

The first part is probably true. The second part is folly. "Remember the Titanic".

Missing from the article is any details on ventilation. You need fresh air to survive, which means non-water tight holes will be somewhere on that thing. Normally on a boat, they would be on the part that's above water. On a spinning ball, that wouldn't be an option.

My best guess is that it will be integrated in the center tube. Buoyancy ensures the center of the ball is usually above water, and one end of the tube would always be above water.

I’m amazed by the idea that providing escape capsules would have saved many lives. The Christmas tsunami caused about 230 000 fatalities in a densely populated area. People didn’t even get to higher ground. Where are you going to store the hundreds of thousands capsules that you’d need to even make a dent in that number. And how will people get into those capsules within minutes of the warning?

> The survivors, including Nobile, spent a month wandering the free-floating pack ice, at one point shooting and eating a polar bear, until their rescue

This sounds like something Jules Verne could have written. In fact I seem to remember this exact plot device in a book a read when I was a teenager, but the name escapes me.

So when the flip starts you basically have a few seconds to strap in before getting tossed around the capsule as it tumbles down the side of the berg right? Even if you are strapped in I feel like surely you're going to come out very concussed at the least.

Stability of icebergs is tricky. They don't "become" top heavy as the article states, they are constantly top heavy.

The center of mass of the iceberg is above the center of buoyancy 100% of the time. What prevents the flip is a flat base which hopefully counters the small tilts by moving the center of buoyancy in the same direction as the center of mass.