28 January 2010
ice breakers and the ice
The boat that I described yesterday as playing a role in the rescue of the Ivan Makarin is back in Vladivostok, so reports vecti.ru. Now this is only indirectly related to the issue of ArcticRussia but the ship was stuck in the ice in back in November while working for the BBC in Antarctica.
The interesting fact here is that the ice breaker was stuck for about a week. вести.ru are reporting how this can happen, even to an ice breaker. Basically, the ship was ’seized’ in about three meters of ice and could not easily move for fear of damaging either the rudder or the propellor.
This map, from the Catlin survey shows the extent of recent Winter sea ice and this map from the US army shows averages across the whole of the Arctic basin. Though averages across the northern sea route would appear to be less than three meters ice cover is not even and is subject to compression at particular places. This is why ice breakers, as is evident from figure 6 right at the bottom of this page, cannot always travel in straight lines.
