Oh Yes!

One of the most fantastic ideas to come out of WW11 was to build a super iceberg aircraft carrier. Gaining the support of Churchill and Mountbatten, British inventor, Geoffrey Pike, set out to build a prototype on Patricia Lake near Jasper in Canada, where it could be naturally frozen. The steel hull structure was filled with a compound of paper pulp and sea water which was frozen to produce a substance called 'Pykecrete' after the inventor. Pykecrete was almost as strong as concrete. The actual carrier, to be named HMS Habakkuk (after the Old Testament prophet) when built, could be up to 4,000 feet long, 600 feet wide, 130 feet high with ice walls 40 feet thick constructed from 280,000 blocks of ice and weigh anything up to one million tons. Pipes, circulating cold air from a refrigeratation plant inside the berg, would keep the ice from melting. It would be driven by 26 electric drive motors giving it a speed of around 6 knots. By 1943, technical problems meant that the vessel would not be ready until 1945 which was too late to be of any use in the Battle of the Atlantic where convoys were sailing part way to Britain without air cover. The model on Patricia Lake was eventually scuttled after the ice took almost a year to melt. A commemorative plaque was placed on the lake's shore in 1989. Sadly, the inventor, Geoffrey Pyke, committed suicide in 1948 with an overdose of sleeping tablets.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/1942.html

__________________