Expectations were high. The challenge was worth it. Nothing more and nothing less than the arrival of an iceberg in Malaga weighing 15,000 kilos from Greenland. The goal? Environmental and awareness-raising, according to the promoters: they wanted to place it in the middle of a street in the Andalusian city so that everyone could see how it was falling apart. According to the promoters, a metaphor for what is happening in the Arctic. According to others, a completely indispensable action. Yesterday was D-day, H-hour. The mass of ice had to be presented in society. Everything was ready for this. A press conference was scheduled to show the newcomer from the Málaga Provincial Council, which financed part of the project. And yes, the appearance before the media was made, but with the absence of the main protagonist. It was the promoter of the challenge, Manuel Calvo, founder and president of the oenagé MaratonDog, who had to face the incredulous looks of those present. Next to him, Cristóbal Ortega, first vice-president of the Provincial Council, did not know where to look.
The presentation was progressing, but no one was talking about the elephant in the room. “Where is the iceberg?” everyone wondered without verbalizing it. Well, they had to wait until the end of Manuel Calvo’s speech, which was not short, to find out. It had evaporated.
Calvo explained that things started to go wrong on August 9. That day, the shipping company that transported the mass of ice in a container (in theory, at 22 degrees below zero to preserve it) called him. They explained to him that there had been an accident. “Apparently, they did not anchor the iceberg and, with the rocking of the ship, the mass of ice moved and, with its weight, ended up breaking the door of the container”, he pointed out. The result? The iceberg fragmented into four pieces.
After the disappointment, Calvo told them that anyway, and even though it wasn’t the same, he wanted the iceberg (or what was left of it) to arrive in Malaga. “There was this commitment to the city”, he said. And so they ended up with the shipping company. But she called him again after a few days. Another mishap had happened. The largest remaining piece of the iceberg was the size of a watermelon. In short, not a single icicle has arrived in Málaga.
Calvo recalled that the challenge was huge – “it wasn’t going to Benidorm and filling a bottle with sand” – that “failure is not trying” and that he had already accepted the facts. “Every achievement that one sets out for cannot always be achieved”, he argued, while the representative of the Provincial Council, who was next to him, kept looking at the ground.
He also explained, when he answered questions from journalists, that not a single euro had been paid for the cost of transport. In this sense, he said that there was a reserved item of 5,000 euros (in part, public money from the Provincial Council) that was not paid in the end. The reason? The deal with the shipping company was to pay for the work once the iceberg had arrived. He also emphasized that none of the ten expeditioners had been paid to do the expedition.
He also explained that even though the iceberg has not arrived, they will calculate the carbon footprint they have generated and, subsequently, they will carry out reforestation to compensate for it.
However, he wanted to emphasize that the effort has not been in vain. The material they have collected – which will be translated into a documentary, which they will present on November 7 and which they intend to take to different film festivals – will be exhibited in different schools. “We are not scientists, but we are messengers of what is happening there.”
In this sense, he was pleased that his challenge had aroused so much media attention. In the end, he argued, what they intended to do “was a wake-up call to send a message: the Arctic is melting, let’s save the Arctic.” Certainly, what has melted is the iceberg that they announced with great fanfare, the jewel in the crown of the Arctic Challenge project.
