No disaster yet, but they are taking huge risks. A 20-year-old 'shadow fleet' oil tanker without ice-class is entering icy Arctic route The Mires is 244 meter long and sails under the flag of Sierra Leone. “Ships of this kind are in danger of serious damage if they get in contact with sea ice,” says a professor in ice navigation. “Unfortunately, there appears to be an increasing number of ships without ice-class sailing on the Northern Sea Route (NSR),” says Professor in ice navigation Norvald Kjerstad. “Ships of this kind are very exposed to serious damage if they get in contact with ice - especially ice that contains parts of glacier ice or multi-year-old ice, which is the case along the whole NSR,” he explains. Kjerstad spoke to the Barents Observer as the Mires, a 244-meter long oil tanker without ice-class entered the eastern part of the sea route. The tanker is on the sanctions lists of Ukraine and the UK. The Mires set out from the Chinese port of Xiushan Island on August 28 and sailed through the Bering Strait and into the Chukchi Sea on August 9. There are substantial volumes of sea ice in the area. The ship will have to sail through an area of almost 500 nautical miles covered by drift ice. “These are normally unacceptable conditions for a ship without ice-class,” Kjerstad emphasizes to the Barents Observer. The destination of the 106,094-ton deadweight tanker is not clear, but it is likely to eventually make a port call in Murmansk where it will pick up oil and proceed to an export market. The 20-years-old tanker is sailing on the icy route with the blessing of the authorities in Moscow. The permission issued by the Russian Northern Sea Route Administration reads that the ship is allowed to sail across the whole route without icebreaker escort in areas without sea ice. Ship tracking information indicated that the tanker was sailing without icebreaker escort near the coast of the Chukotka peninsula on September 11. Apparently, the Mires is the only zero ice-class oil tanker with permission for transit sailing on the NSR this year. But there are several other kinds of vessels without ice-class approved for sailing in the area. The Barents Observer has compiled a list of more than 20 non-ice-class bulk carriers, cargo ships and container carriers that have gotten Moscow’s approval for sailing on the route. Several of them were sailing in the far northern waters in the first week of September. Among them are the container carriers Hong Chang Sheng and Honwell. The carriers are 26 and 24-years old respectively and both sail between China and St.Petersburg. According to Ksenia Vakhrusheva, Arctic project advisor at the environmental organization Bellona, there is a high risk for environmental damage, especially of oil spill, from shipping along the NSR. She explains that so-called 'shadow fleet' ships are allowed to sail on the route. Many of them sail with their AIS turned off and many are not listed in the official NSR registry. She argues that Russian authorities are neglecting security. “The attitude of the authorities towards environmental risks is negligible. It is more likely that we will know about an oil spill from international journalists who monitor satellite images, than from Russian authorities,” she says to the Barents Observer. Vakhrusheva emphasizes that vessels without ice-class in principle can sail along the NRS only when there is no ice or with an icebreaker escort when there are light ice conditions. But the conditions in the far northern waters can change rapidly. “The question is what happens when ice conditions change. Last year, Chinese ships violated this rule and continued shipping with harder ice conditions than was permitted. We saw that Russia allowed this and no known sanctions were in place on these ships. It can happen again,” she says. The Arctic expert does not exclude that Russia uses the Arctic route for transportation of sanctioned goods. “Russia uses all possible routes to deliver sanctioned goods, including the NSR. Delivery of equipment for the Arctic LNG 2 project was an example of this. It is possible that vessels carrying goods from China to Russian ports carry also dual-purpose or sanctioned goods, but it is difficult to investigate.” The Mires is sanctioned by the UK and Ukraine. According to Ukrainian authorities, the ship’s owner and commercial manager indicate that the tanker is part of the so-called ‘shadow fleet’ that transports Russian oil in circumvention of international sanctions.
The destination of the 106,094-ton deadweight tanker is not clear, but it is likely to eventually make a port call in Murmansk where it will pick up oil and proceed to an export market. The 20-years-old tanker is sailing on the icy route with the blessing of the authorities in Moscow. Sounds like nothing a couple of torpedoes couldn't fix
Anytime you head into those latitudes, you are taking huge risks. One that is just as big as sea ice is ice accretion on the ship's surface. the weight of the ice can destabilize and sink a ship remarkably fast. An oil tanker has a lot of surface area and not so many crew members. It would be impossible to clear the ice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin's_lost_expedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Terror_(1813) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_disaster_of_1871 "The Terror" is a great (historical fiction) book and a pretty solid miniseries
A few years ago, I did a little contract work with a few buddies for some orgs that run research ships that go beyond 60 degrees latitude (most north, but a couple south). Our job was to help them develop better safety protocols. They were having a difficult time crewing the ships because many crewmembers rightly thought that the science researchers who were funding the trips had too much influence over operations and were willing to put the whole ship at risk in pursuit of their research. Captains were loathe to go against the folks paying the bills. Additionally, some ships being used were not built for ice so they compensated by staying away from ice (which is folly up there). There was a lot of complacent thinking: "But nothing's ever happened." The culture was ripe for a major incident. While the environment is completely different from wildland fire, the safety processes were similar. We got agreement on turn-down protocols and language all researches had to agree to before setting foot on board. Propped up the captain's authority with institutional support and identified safety issues the crews were noticing but were not acted upon. Radio comms and location tracking were a big issue too, so we set up some new processes and bought new equipment to track locations better. Also, amazingly, they had no uniform way of identifying sea ice types so we cobbled together a book stolen mostly from navies and coast guards in Norway and Canada that helped captains and crews identify the 40+ types of sea ice. Finally, we implemented evac drills and found out that most lifeboat lowering mechanisms had never been tested in realistic conditions and some were even rusted shut. Two things we could not solve: ice accretion on ship surfaces and getting into safety suits and then lifeboats without getting wet. Of course, once you are wet at those latitudes, you're dead even if you manage to live a little bit longer. Well, I guess there was a third thing: if the ship catches fire, you're probably done because of the safety suit/lifeboat issues, but fire has always been a huge problem for both ships and airplanes because there is nowhere to go. I think we made a difference, but I suspect the culture is not strong enough and the orgs too disjointed to sustain the changes long-term. We'll see. Anyway, let's just say the extreme latitudes want to kill you and kill you in a way that you feel it. It is absurd to me that some companies are now running tourist cruises to Antarctica. Just no. It'd be like hiring a guy who has summitted the highest peaks in Kansas to guide you to the top of Everest--you don't even need to go to the top of Everest and you certainly don't need to take a cruise to freaking Antarctica. Penguin movies are not reality. Here's a basic descriptor of sea ice types. Most of these categories have sub-categories and every type can influence polar ship operations in some way. What's missing in this doc is info about the transitions between types that can sometimes occur with astonishing quickness. https://www.canada.ca/en/environmen...ns/educational-resources/sea/types-forms.html
