Not that is stranger nor more useless than water with extra oxygen (Are you supposed to suck it into your lungs??)
An old BBC Radio 4 documentary that I’ve just heard on the bottled water industry says that the drinking deep sea water fad all started with a pipe that was built in Hawaii with the totally unconnected aim of creating electrical power due to the temperature difference with the surface. When that didn’t work out in practice a Japanese businessman with an eye for a fast buck thought of desalinating the water and selling it as a cure-all. As to why people fell for it, that is quite another story…
Michael said,
September 13, 2011 at 11:44 am
Did some reading about OTEC (the process you mentioned) a while back. Among other things, it mentioned potential secondary uses for deep sea water like air conditioning, cold-pipe agriculture (pipes containing cold water are run through the ground, condensing water from the atmosphere around them) and mariculture (once exposed to sunlight, the nutrient-rich water becomes a good habitat for sea life, a ‘la the Monterray upwelling).
I suspect all of these businesses are more profitable than desalinizing it for sale to morons:P