During World War II, one of the strangest and most ambitious Allied engineering ideas was Project Habakkuk — a British plan to build enormous aircraft carriers out of ice. The concept was born in 1942 from the imagination of eccentric scientist Geoffrey Pyke, who proposed using a material called pykrete, a mixture of ice and wood pulp, which was incredibly tough and slow to melt. The idea was that such ships could operate as floating airbases in the mid-Atlantic, where there were no islands or r