ice-breaker

ice-breaker, a vessel specially designed to force a way through pack ice in extreme latitudes. Modern ones have a massively reinforced hull that is designed to help the ship rise on top of the ice and then crush downwards through it. The Germans have a research ship which is an ice-breaker, and several other nations with an interest in the Arctic and Antarctic regions have them, too, but the Russians have by far the largest fleet.

The first nuclear-powered ice-breaker was the 16,000-ton, 44,000 shaft horsepower Lenin, which was launched by the USSR in 1960. In 1978 the first successful attempt was made to navigate the Northern Sea Route (NSR)—a 5,000-kilometre (3,125-mls.) stretch of Arctic water across northern Siberia from Murmansk to the port of Dudinka—on a year-round basis, but normally the route is only open to commercial traffic during the summer months. With the industrialization of Siberia the route is a vital one and in 1988 it was estimated that 6 million tonnes of cargo was carried on it.

During the 1970s and 1980s the Russians built up a fleet of more than 75 ships of different types of ice-breakers. The most important of these were those constructed to convoy merchant ships along the NSR. Besides the Lenin, these include three other nuclear-powered vessels of 75,000 horsepower, and in August 1978 one of them, the Arktika, became the first surface ship to reach the North Pole. In cooperation with Finnish shipbuilders a fleet of specialized multi-purpose freighters were also built which are capable of transiting the NSR independently. Such ships must be capable of operating in ice that is up to five metres (3 ft) thick and in a temperature that can be as low as -50 °C.

Following the end of the Cold War in 1989, and then the collapse of the USSR, several Russian ice-breakers have been converted into cruise ships. For example, the 134-metre (440-ft), 15,000-tonne Kapitan Khlebnikov carries 114 passengers as well as 60 crew, who can be taken to places in Arctic and Antarctic waters quite inaccessible to normal cruise ships.