How Icon of the Seas Makes 1 Million Gallons of Drinking Water a Day From the Sea

On the largest cruise ship in the world, nobody asks where the water comes from. The answer is a sealed room below the waterline, turning the sea into your drinking water about two hours before it reaches your glass. Icon of the Seas makes roughly 93 percent of its own fresh water out of the ocean it sails through, enough to keep close to 10,000 people supplied for a week at a time. The evaporators boil seawater on the waste heat coming off the engines. The reverse osmosis membranes force it through under enormous pressure. This looks at why the ship runs both, and why the plant can almost never be switched off. It also covers where the water is drawn in through the hull, how it is stored and pumped up through 20 decks to every tap, why it is tested every single day, and the strange loop where the ship helps power its own desalination plant by burning its own waste. Luxury above, machinery below. The glass at dinner was open ocean that same morning.