I'd wayyyyy rather be in a ship that can break ice than in a sub that can travel under.
Nothing to do with anything, of course. Just reminded me of a book I read awhile back that had a lot of ice breaking parts - thriller by Alistair McLean. Ice Station Zebra. Considering I'm skeered of enclosed spaces, I had no business reading it. *shudder* Enclosed space under water AND under ice. Ack and double ack.
And, of course, as if it wasn't enough to give me the heebie-jeebies as it was, they had to go and have a fire, too.
Ungh...
Huh...Wikipedia now has full synopses of a lot of books. Inneresting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Station_Zebra
Submarines surfacing up under ice always seemed like a wildly improbable thing to me.
Yah, if only a few feet thick... that's one thing. But ten or twenty feet... that stuff is as hard as concrete.
Something I learned about was the difference between driving through "new" soft ice and "old hard" ice. Experienced drivers could tell the difference by just looking at it. "New" in this context was ice less that just a few hundred years old. "Old hard" ice was ice that was many hundreds of years, to possibly thousands of years old.
Breaking "old hard ice" is sortof like breaking concrete of the same thickness, if only that concrete were floating on water in the Bering sea. It sounds exactly like that, from the inside of a steel ship, as well. :-)