This wouldn't have happened if you Freepers would have left your SUV's in the garage and not warmed the planet!
Posted on 12/29/2013 6:42:11 AM PST by Zakeet
Edited on 12/29/2013 6:48:42 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
After nearly a week trapped by deep Antarctic ice, the 74 passengers aboard an expedition vessel could soon be freed.
But based on the troubles of the last few days, no one's sure exactly when that might happen.
An Australian icebreaker ship Aurora Australis is headed toward the Russian-flagged vessel and is expected to arrive around midnight (8 a.m. ET) Sunday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
This wouldn't have happened if you Freepers would have left your SUV's in the garage and not warmed the planet!
Not to worry.
The ice will melt when summer arrives.
Oh wait...it IS summer....
And Obama just keeps playing golf in Hawaii, LOL
In a related story at the bottom there is this link to 100 yr old photos which suggest it was pretty warm in Antarctica back then...:
>http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/28/world/antarctic-historic-photos/index.html<
Freeze until they die, OK, is that racist?
And winter is coming.
Don't know if the lag is the same for the summer Antarctic region.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/iphone.anom.antarctic.html
The Antarctic ice mass is rapidly increasing
The Captain of this boat is an idiot and
It carries a Ship of Fools
ONLY if there are any blacks on board. If not, then you're OK.
Ice that the Russian ship is trapped in is reportedly 3-4 meters thick.
Seems to me that the owners of the Russian ship need to be contacting their agent at Lloyds.
This boat of boneheads need to turn in circles, jump up and down a million times to bring forth the globull warming deity to save them.
Not one report from the MSM pointing out this is the middle of the southern hemiespheres summer.
Frozen in ice in the summer; while out looking for signs of global warming. Nice.
Next thing they will say guaranteed:
“ Climate change brings weather extremes. This sudden amount of unexpected ice is the result of climate instability from human caused CO2 emissions.”
I used to drive icebreakers, and the one I was on was in a similar pickle, and it has a lot to do with wind.
Icebreakers ‘ratings’ are generally for CONTINUOUS ice operations at 4 knots. You can ‘back and ram’ ice that is much thicker than 4 feet.
The one I was on could back and ram ice up to 21 feet thick. If you were going through multiyear ice (to be avoided), you had to back and ram.
Icebreaking REALLY is a matter of ice avoidance than it is ice breaking. ‘Poliniyas’, for example (lakes of water you find in the ice as you navigate - Poliniya is the Russian word for ‘lake’) are your friend.
Icebreakers carry helicopters to help them find the paths of least resistance in the ice.
What screwed the Russians here isn’t the ice, but the wind.
When the wind blows a multiyear ice flow down on to your track, and you are between the shore ice and the flow being pushed down upon you, then you end up with a conveyer belt effect - you break ice in the morning and with great labor and fuel use you make, say, six miles. You shut down when the sun goes down, and when you wake up, everything on the beach that you passed the day before is suddenly ahead of your ship off of your bow.
The wind pushed the ice and the ship back down your track.
As the days now start becoming shorter down there, the available ice breaking days get shorter too. If it is cold, and this year it is very cold, then your ability to back the ship down its track becomes very dangerous (most icebreakers today are designed to mill ice - even multi-year chunks the size of a McMansion - through its props.)
Having said that, when your track refreezes, you aren’t backing through broken ice and water, but new ice.
Not sure about the specs of the Russian breaker, but most of their breaker fleet is nuclear powered. They have many conventionally powered breakers, but those breakers rely on the weight of the fuel to do most of the work.
The breaker ‘dolphins’ up on top of the ice in front of it and the weight of it breaks through the top of the ice, not through the ice like a pizza cutter would through pizza crust.
So, unless it warms up, and the wind shifts, they need to be looking at wintering over. I can’t imagine what that would be like on a nuke ship. On a conventional boat, you keep some engineers, one storekeeper, maybe two, a bare-bones deck force, and maybe two officers.
You literally lock down most of the ship and everyone lives in the area closest to the superstructure. You don’t go in the areas that have been locked down except to check watertight integrity.
They fly in supplies, and lots and lots of fuel filters, and you catch up on your reading. There will be science missions they’ll no doubt give you since you are there, but the real possibility of being crushed in the ice like Bear was back in the day is pretty small.
Comforting to know it’s five degrees colder in my backyard this morning than it is near the South Pole.
It is summer time in Antarctica, there shouldn’t be any ice. It is 100 in Argentina and the pirana are snacking on swimmers.
Leni
The ship is carrying scientists and passengers led by expedition leader Chris Tunrey, an Australian professor of climate change.
The expedition to gauge the effects of climate change on the region, began November 27. The second and current leg of the trip started December 8 and was scheduled to conclude with a return to New Zealand on January 4.
Ironically, Turney's bid for this expedition was inspired by Sir Douglas Mawson's disastrous and near-fatal (for him) expedition of 1912.
Turney doesn't have much to say (FB) about getting stuck except to post a 'recommend' on this CNN story by "Tea-bag" Cooper.
LOL. Can't wait to read Turney's paper on the trip...
Very informative post - thanks. I was a draftsman at Lockheed shipyard in Seattle back in the early 70’s during the construction of the Polar Star and Polar Sea icebreakers. Impressive vessels, I heard later they had problems with the controllable pitch propellers while breaking ice.
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