If we took a fleet of tug-boats and towed this ice to the Middle East, I wonder how long the fresh water would last?
The money and fuel bill for tugboats sufficient to move that would probably be better spent on massive fields of photovoltaics and electricity-intensive seawater desalination equipment...
The only reason anyone cares that there is a crack is because it implies that the ice is shrinking.
And wouldn't a larger shell expose a bigger surface area?
Not easy. This was a problem my high school math tutor, a glaciologist [0],[1] discussed with me one evening doing some applied math.
From memory, using a tug to pull an iceberg from Antartica to the Australian mainland would be difficult because of the forces involved. As the tug would try to pull the iceberg, the iceberg itself is acted on by other forces (gravity, currents). The tug pulling the iceberg, connected by a cable would be acted on by the forces applied by the iceberg resulting in the berg and tug rotating in circles around each other. [2] Adding another tug has similar problems.
The idea isn't stupid, it's just the physics get in the way of achieving a result.
[0] 1970 - 2003 http://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2003/antarctic-ice-man-and...
[1] 2003 - 2016 https://rmdb.research.utas.edu.au/public/rmdb/q/indiv_detail...
[2] If memory serves me, Jo used 'moments of inertia' to describe this problem ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia