6.30am AEDT Sunday 05 January 2014
US Coast Guard ice breaker to assist ships beset in ice in Antarctica
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC Australia) has requested the US Coast Guard’s Polar Star icebreaker to assist the vessels MV Akademik Shokalskiy and Xue Long which are beset by ice in Commonwealth Bay.
The US Coast Guard has accepted this request and will make Polar Star available to assist.
The Polar Star has been en route to Antarctica since 3 December, 2013 – weeks prior to the MV Akademik Shokalskiy being beset by ice in Commonwealth Bay. The intended mission of the Polar Star is to clear a navigable shipping channel in McMurdo Sound to the National Science Foundation’s Scientific Research Station. Resupply ships use the channel to bring food, fuel and other goods to the station. The Polar Star will go on to undertake its mission once the search and rescue incident is resolved.
RCC Australia identified the Polar Star as a vessel capable of assisting the beset vessels following MV Akademik Shokalskiy being beset by ice overnight on 24 December, 2013. RCC Australia has been in discussion with the US Coast Guard this week to ascertain if the Polar Star was able to assist once it reaches Antarctica.
The request for the Polar Star to assist the beset vessels was made by RCC Australia to the US Coast Guard on 3 January, 2014. The US Coast Guard officially accepted this request and released the Polar Star to RCC Australia for search and rescue tasking at 8.30am on 4 January, 2014.
The Polar Star will leave Sydney today after taking on supplies prior to its voyage to Antarctica.
It is anticipated it will take approximately seven (7) days for the Polar Star to reach Commonwealth Bay, dependent on weather and ice conditions.
At 122 metres, the Polar Star is one of the largest ships in the US Coast Guard fleet. It has a range of 16,000 nautical miles at 18 knots. The Polar Star has a crew of 140 people.
The Polar Star is able to continuously break ice up to 1.8 metres (6ft) while travelling at three (3) knots and can break ice over six (21ft) metres thick.
RCC Australia will be in regular contact with the relevant US Coast Guard RCC at Alameda, California, and the Captain of the Polar Star during its journey to Antarctica.
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www.amsa.gov.au/media
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Re: G says:
January 4, 2014 at 1:04 pm
@Heraldo Ortega Nobody, Doncha know the US only has one ship! OMG!!!!!111
Nope, we have 3 but one’s mothballed due to sequestration and the other’s in dry dock being repaired.
This one’s supposed to be re-supplying our research facility and cutting a channel to it. Sure hope they don’t run out of supplies or fuel while we’re fooling around for these idiots.
As the guy who does the overhauls for the numerous FT4 Pratt & Whitney turbines aboard the Polar Class USCG ships, it is nice to hear about them in the news, regardless of the outragous costs associated with the ice breaking missions. However, not one person in this forum has mentioned the drugs seized by means of a well aimed Barret .50 cal to the engine of a drug running boat, from a helocoptor, or the many other positive accomplishments, like giving men and women a sense of belonging, among many other traits and skills,
. Janice Moore says:
January 4, 2014 at 10:30 pm
Thank you, Old Car Boater (were you a ferry captain? other deck dept.? engineer? — I’ve known a few with WSF), for sharing that beautiful ship, The Mackinaw, with us (at 21:22 today). That is a shame that they choked her with concrete. Whoever gave that order should be taken 2 miles out in the salt chuck, tossed overboard, and told, “Good luck.” That makes me sick. It wasn’t enough to enter the final “R.O.”; “F.W.E.” into the log and tie her up and walk off and leave her, neglected and unused. They murdered her. Now, we can go look at what the funeral parlor did with her carcass. Well, she is a lovely ship and well worth going to see, I’m sure. Your linked article was a fine tribute.
Janice
=================================
I don’t know how to reply to your post, but I will try with this. I was only the lowlyest of deck watches back in the 1960’s on a 710′ Great Lakes ore ship on the Reiss Lines. I was also a deck hand on a 118′ Yacht in the GL’s, the Natoya. Please Note Trivia: She has about 20 cameo shots in the James Bond movie Thunderball. She is always at anchor and painted all in white; there is one shot when James and a friend run up along side of her in a dingy and also she is seen off shore, during a shore-side skeet shooting aspect of the movie.. I am told that after the movie she was taken out and sunk on a reef; don’t know for sure.
Sorry, never and officer, but grew up in the home port of the Mackinaw, Cheboygan, MI and knew many Coasties. I have been in large scale computers for the past 25yrs. I am extremely disappointed in the atrocious science associated with the “global warming’ movement. I have developed global “data warehouses” for analyzing global pools of data, and $100Bn’s of dollars have been poorly spent on this whole affair. Of course, Al Gore made $160M in process, so is not complaining.
The Old Mackinaw was replaced by a “new” Mackinaw, which is more oriented to buoy tender work and has Z drives (the props can be oriented in 360 degs turn). Now that the Great Lakes have some real ice, it will be interesting. Unlike the old Mack, with throttles and and a ships wheel for steering, she has little joy sticks and rotating controls. She promptly ran in a breakwall causing $30k in damage on her first formal run, causing the skipper to lose his position. Also, the Z drives have required much maintenance and the old salts say the Old Mackinaw could have been totally re-worked for the cost of the Z drive maint $.
To the poster about the boilers on the old Mack, etc., she was very well maintained, esp. the boilers, as the Feds are very strict about that. Thank God, as the last minute, she was not cut up, but the owner of am area ferry company picked her up and she ran on her own bottom and power to her current site, in Mackinaw City, MI. She sits at a huge dock once used by cars ferries. Since they have not run for over 35 years, the dock space was unused. Please see the website, as she is in magnificent shape!
http://www.themackinaw.org/
William Ossman says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 4:37 pm
can we not bill the global warming idiots
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Split the bill between Greenpeace and WWF. Of course they get a lot of their funding from goverments aka tax payers so no matter how you slice it, whether it is insurance, university, government or the green movement who pay, it is the tax payer who ultimately foots the bill.
The Russian Ice breaker and the US Navy have pressurized water reactors (PWR). This means the primary coolant that flow through the reactor transfers heat to a secondary (water-steam) system which is cooled (condensed) by seawater. US and Russian submarines sail in both polar and equatorial waters, so seawater temp from about freezing to the warm water of the Persian gulf pose no problems. Warm water would reduce the conversion efficiency (T high – T low) etc. (+ steam cycle) but this does not matter for transit. Another type Boiling water reactor (BWR) the water that cools the reactor boils, steam drives the turbine, and is condensed with seawater (or fresh water). It does get uncomfortably hot & humid in the engine room in warm waters, but the crew will stay in the air conditioned areas as much as possible. It is remotely possible that the engine ventilation does not generate sufficient airflow for warm environments, but I seriously doubt this to be the case.
The USCGC Polar Star has a crew that could have been safely holed up at a bar in Sydney, instead they are sailing into an Australian East Coast Bass Straight low pressure.
Expressions come to mind, the crew will be;
‘yelling at the lawn’
‘driving the big white porcelain bus’
All this courtesy of a mad religion that has infested western institutions of learning. A sight-seeing trip by high priests looking for messages of doom before returning to their temples to demand sacrifice.
R. de Haan says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 4:58 pm
….Now if Obama, Kerry and the EPA think AGW is real and punishing economic measures are needed I propose we send them our energy bills for this cold period in protest….
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Nah, much better to send them down to the Antarctic in a wooden sailing ship to view the ice melting first hand and forget about any rescue attempts. Heck they can use Sec Kerry’s sailboat “Isabel,” or we could be nice and give them a ship like Mawson’s “Aurora” such as the expedition yacht “Blizzard.” Kerry to captain the ship of course. With Nancy Pelosi, Obama and the rest as crew.
milodonharlani says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 5:38 pm
James Strom says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 5:26 pm
Please note ¨citation needed¨. I´m dubious…
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I tried to find better info than Wiki and found World Nuclear Association: Nuclear-Powered Ships
Jeffrey Shultz on January 4, 2014 at 2:20 pm
” So what do they call this? Climate changeback? ”
You mean UN-doing the change ?
Climate UN-change.
Al Fred Gore says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 6:53 pm
These cuckoos will return in a few months when the ice thaws…
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It is already High Summer down there. I doubt you are going to see much more thawing, especially with ice that thick. In two months the area will start freezing up again. link
Dennis Beeson says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 7:37 pm
….
I can not figure out what you are trying to say. But make no mistake this fiasco wasn’t caused by a “freak” storm. It was caused by the idiocy of CAGW loons believing their own hype and NOT listening to their Captain. The sea Ice in Antartica is at RECORD HIGH LEVELS! Would you warmists please get that through your skulls. Mawson’s ship sailed through open water three years running however that is no longer possible. Antarctic Sea Ice Graph
Lee says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 7:39 pm
….
Lee, You might be interested in the following links:
link
link
link
link
[snip . . content free, but you could make your point if you tried I am sure . . mod]
Caleb says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 7:52 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Nicely said.
These people are haters of mankind, once you peel all the layers off.
milodonharlani says:
January 4, 2014 at 4:39 pm
tty says:
January 4, 2014 at 3:41 pm
Kamovs are built for over water. Russians designed them originally as ship-borne anti-submarine platforms.
True for the original military Ka 25 and Ka 27’s the civilianized Ka 32 (used in this case) does not have flotation devices.
The real reason for this apparently stupid, irresponsible expedition was to highlight the fraud which the global warming theory constitutes.
After spending decades promoting this fraud, through corruption of the broadcast and print media, which has uncritically promulgated the lies required to promote public acquiescence to the additional taxes, which the fraud is intended to justify, the world’s governments have eventually baulked at continuing the needless destruction of their economies.
Due to the pervasiveness of the alarmist propaganda of the architects of the fraud, these same architects realised that in order to reverse their previous position, they would be compelled to demonstrate unambiguously to the public that the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory (CAGW), which morphed into climate change, then climate disruption, is totally false.
I believe that even Professor Turney cannot be so stupid and irresponsible as to risk so many lives, deliberately, through negligently failing to ascertain the risks associated with the sea ice, at his current location and thereby risking the possibility of becoming trapped in it, as has now seemingly happened.
Neither do I consider it likely that even Professor Turney could believe that the substantially increased sea ice present in Antarctica is due to global warming. He could only have said this for the benefit of illustrating the absurd falsehoods of the climate alarmists and the stupidity of those who believe them.
Therefore, it seems to me that this is a public relations stunt, intended to begin the process of abandoning the cult of global warming, undermining public support for the cult and thereby allowing governments to confront the more immediate threat of public debt, which constitutes a genuine and serious threat to most industrialised nations.
Joachim says: @ur momisugly January 4, 2014 at 8:56 pm
I wonder about “RESCUE”….
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If the ice shifts the ships could get crushed.
See The Last Voyage of the Karluk: A Survivor’s Memoir of Arctic Disaster
There is a lack of information as to the ice breaking capabilities of the Russian nuclear powered ice breakers as they only quote the ice thickness that they can break continuously at normal speed of ~3 knots. The US Polar Star also quotes this figure but in addition it quotes the maximum it can break, ie. the back up and ram it figure, this maximum is not quoted for the much larger (3 x) Russian nuclear ice breakers, with even bigger ones currently being built and still larger ones proposed.
The commercial justification for large ice breakers is in the Arctic not the Antarctic. With Australia’s and NZ paranoia about all things nuclear, there’s no obvious location for a home port for a nuclear ice breaker in the Antarctic, except perhaps Cape Town. Russia does have significant interests in the Antarctic and if Southern sea ice continues to expand Russia may one day choose to station a larger ice breaker in the area.
Perhaps if the Russians were to develop a Thorium based reactor for use in ships then Oz / NZ may be persuaded to allow such a vessel to be based there.
Candidates for 2014 Darwin Awards! Al Gore at the top of the list.
US Coast Guard to the rescue again! What a great branch of the military.
These “scientists” should have been allowed to continue with their vacation, ahem, “research” while mired in that SUMMER “anomaly”–and while this is difficult to believe, they are going back to their tax-payer funded regroup “offices” still believing that there is something “extraordinaire” about the “climate”–being caused by the cattle passing gas in New Zealand.
The helicopters should simply have dropped more National Geographic magazines (some of the older “geographics”, when they actually had articles about geography in them) for their review while they were languishing, with coffee / latte supplies.
What an affront to civilization these characters are–passing these vacations for “research.” Unfortunately it is all quite common.
This is just additional evidence that our God has a sense of humor.
It’s not the whack job global warmers fault, it’s summer down there and when you combined that with the Coriolis effect, they were doomed from the start. Plus adding in the treacherous Northern , I mean Southern Lights, it only exacerbated their predicament. Thus it became a mission destined to fail. “The charge of the light”headed ” brigade. They were doomed from the start. Only Michael Moore and Brad Pitt can save them now.
They just sailed into the perfect lab. Leave them there to measure the ice melting rate. Why rescue them?
No one wants to report that the original mission was to measure the retreat of the ice mass in the Antarctic “summer” to provide evidence of “global warming”. Why is that? The whole debacle is humorous and now the Coasties are gonna save the day? We’ll I’m ok with that from a national pride standpoint. Chicoms and Aussies can’t do it, hope USCG gets it done.