Following up on August 27's "The U.S. Has NO Icebreakers It Can Deploy To The Arctic This Year":
What the actual hell.
Congress and the Obama administration should have ordered six heavies ten years ago.
This is dereliction of their single most important function, national defense, and borderline suicidal....
From Arctic Today:
The Norwegian Coast Guard has managed to retrieve scientific instruments with important data from the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, in an last-minute rescue mission improvised after the the U.S. icebreaker originally intended to collect them was sidelined by a fire.
The moorings were set out last year with a plan for them to be recovered by the United States’ Coast Guard icebreaker USCGC Healy this fall. The icebreaker, though, had to cancel the voyage just after leaving port in Alaska in August due to a fire in one of the engines. With the U.S. Coast Guard not having other capable ice-classed ships available, the Norwegians were asked to assist.
KV Svalbard, the Norway’s largest Coast Guard ship with icebreaking capabilities, started the voyage across the Arctic in mid-October in what is the first ever sailing by the Norwegians to the waters north of Alaska.
Lifting the instruments out of the ice-covered waters was a demanding job, but the scientists now have a year of collected data important for understanding the Arctic Ocean climate changes.
“The first of the three moorings with the instruments was lifted onboard in an operation that lasted for 10 hours under demanding conditions for the crew,” Navy spokesperson Michel Hayes told The Barents Observer.
He said that the KV Svalbard behaved very well in the ice.....
.....MUCH MORE
As noted on October 28: "Arctic
Sea Ice is not freezing In October for the first time since
measurements began, now having an unknown effect on weather development
towards Winter" so the Svalbard was able to scoot along the Northern Sea Route on the right side of the map below
