Glacier ice is being sent to posh bars in Dubai from Greenland.
It is up to 100,000-years old, is cleaner and doesn’t melt as quickly.
Start up company Arctic Ice extracts it from detached glaciers at the Greenland ice sheet.
Using a specialised boat with a crane, they scour the fjords around the country’s capital Nuuk in search of an uncontaminated form of ice that has never been in contact with the top or bottom of the glacier.
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After identifying a suitable section, they extract the ice – compressed over millennia – before placing it in a plastic crate.
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When the boat is full, they ship the crates to Nuuk to fill up a larger, refrigerated shipping container that then sails to Denmark.
The ice is loaded onto another ship before travelling to Dubai where it is sold by the distributor Natural Ice.
The ice then ends up in drinks sold in glitzy bars in the upmarket emirate.
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A company spokesperson said: “The ice is sourced directly from the natural glaciers in the Arctic which have been in a frozen state for over 100,000 years.
“These parts of the ice sheets have not been in contact with any soils or contaminated by pollutants produced by human activities.
“This makes Arctic Ice the cleanest H20 on Earth.”
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Despite launching in 2022, the company only recently shipped its first 20 metric tonnes of pure ice to Dubai.
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It is common for glacial ice to be used in drinks in Greenland and Arctic Ice hopes that it becomes popular in the UAE too.
The company’s co-founder Malik V Rasmussen said there are no air bubbles in the ice, causing it to melt more slowly than normal ice.
The glacial water is also purer than the frozen mineral water typically used in bars in Dubai.
Rasmussen said he hopes to introduce a new major revenue stream for Greenland, which still remains economically dependent on Denmark.
He said: “In Greenland, we make all our money from fish and from tourism.
“For a long time, I have wanted to find something else that we can profit from.”
He added: “Helping Greenland in its green transition is actually what I believe I was brought into this world to do.”
To help the environment, Arctic Ice said it plans to use carbon-neutral vessels for shipping in the near future.
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