Marine salvage experts are floating a plan to tug icebergs from Antarctica to South Africa's drought-hit Cape Town to help solve the region's worst water shortage in a century.

Salvage master Nick Sloane said he was looking for government and private investors for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of liters of drinking water.

"We want to show that if there is no other source to solve the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet," said Sloane, who led the refloating of the capsized Italian passenger liner Costa Concordia in 2014.