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U.S. Coast Guard Seventeenth District

Ice is Where You Find It^*

Ice is indeed where you find it, and we have found it in earnest about 250 miles east of Prince P atrick Island, which is part of the Canadian Archipelago.  Our position was roughly 82^oN, 132^oW.  The ice we found in this region is part of what is left of the permanent polar ice cap-ice that took ten years or more to form.  This is ice that tests man and machine. For most of our summer, we've been operating at latitudes north of 80^oN.  We've seen plenty ice coverage of eight- to ten-tenths concentrations, but much of it was softer, first-year ice.  When I made my first trip to the Arctic 23 years ago, nearly everything north of 75^oN was permanent polar ice pack.  Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colon, the Chief Scientist of the National Ice Center has sailed all summer with us.  He gave a presentation to the crew that showed that 60% of the perennial Arctic ice cap has disappeared since the 1980's.  Although over 80% of the multiyear ice was at least 10 years old then, most of the remaining ice pack is 5 years old, or younger.  Some of it melted, some of it broke up and was blown through Fram Strait, east of Greenland, into the Atlantic Ocean where it ultimately melted.  There are undoubtedly large implications to this change.  Most I will leave to the reader.

To the icebreaker sailor, multiyear ice (also known as perennial ice, polar ice, or old ice) challenges the capability of the ship and the skill of her crew.   The ice we are seeing is 6-15' thick.  Multiyear ice appears as a muted blue color, and is very hard because it is formed under pressure.  (Although the colors are similar, this is not glacial ice.  True icebergs, which originate from glaciers, are much harder and denser than multi-year sea ice).  The most difficult ice conditions are breaking through pressure ridges.  Pressure ridges are formed when large plates of ice slam into one another, the edges crumble, stack up, and freeze.  This trip, the largest pressure ridges we've tried to cross were about 15' thick.

Healy is a 16,100 ton ship driven by electric motors which deliver 30,000 horsepower.  In heavy ice conditions, we try to strike the ice at about 7 knots, or 8 miles per hour.  That's a force equal to 49 fully loaded track-trailers running into something at 65 miles per hour.  In the heaviest ice, we may only make half a ship length with all that force.  In the case of pressure ridges, sometimes we just bounce!  If the ship stops, we back up and hit the ice again, a technique called "backing and ramming", although we're not so much "ramming" ice, as riding over it and using the weight of the ship to break it. 

Last night, the conditions were especially challenging.  We've been working for a week with the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Louis S. St-Laurent, "The Queen of the Fleet".  The Louis, as she's known, is very similar to Healy in overall icebreaking capability.  For a few hours last night, the ice was under such pressure that one ship alone would become beset.  So at a distance of under 100 yards (for ships of this size, that's close), and in visibility of maybe 200 yards in fog, we worked together in parallel.  One ship worked ahead until stopped.  While she backed, the other worked ahead to make a parallel track.  It sounds simple enough, until one's seen how ships behave in ice.  We only have control over the general direction the ship travels.  The ship seeks the path of least resistance.  When ice breaks in front of the ship, the bow will find the weakest point.  When two ships work in parallel, they tend to shear toward one another.  Between the snow which covered the ice (making it hard to "read"), the fog, darkness, and close proximity, the conditions kept us sharp last night.  As my colleague, Captain Marc Rothwell of the Louis says, "it's just seamanship."  Indeed, it is "just" seamanship.  It's some of the most fun and professionally rewarding ice seamanship we perform.  And it truly reinforces the teamwork of our two nations as we explore and map our common interest in the Arctic.

 *The title of today's entry is borrowed from the title of memoirs by Coast Guard Captain Charles W. Thomas.  Captain Thomas was among the Coast Guard's first modern ice Captains, commanding the cutter Northland during the Greenland Patrol of WWII, and the first true U.S. icebreaker, the cutter Northwind.  In his book, Captain Thomas attributes the phrase "ice is where you find it" to CAPT C.C. Von Paulsen, a pioneer in ice seamanship, his predecessor in Northland, and Commander of the Greenland Patrol. The phrase simply implied that Arctic ice operations are unpredictable and ever-changing.  (See ICE is where you find it, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1951). 

Fair winds and open leads,

Captain Fred Sommer

Commanding Officer, USCGC HEALY 

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