New Presentation Shows Ship Trapped in Ice

A new short film titled Trapped in Arctic Pack Ice has been published for educational purposes by Bjarne Rasmussen. Rasmussen has sailed as an officer on various ships in the icy waters of Greenland and Antarctica for decades and was onboard during the incident shown.

The documentary demonstrates the importance of appropriate ice-class hull reinforcement for vessels transiting icy waters, says Rasmussen. “The movie shows in a visual way a very critical situation where the cargo polar ship MS Kista Arctica is trapped in the thick and hard multi-year pack ice in the NE Greenland in 1998. It is a situation very similar to the expedition ship, the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, which became trapped in thick and extensive Antarctic pack ice in 2013/2014.

“In the situation there is a lot of ice pressure on the ship's hull because the ship has winter ice - ice edge on one side and huge amounts of multi-year polar ice blown in by storm winds on the other. A conventional, non-ice-class ship would likely crack in the hull due to this ice pressure. During that critical situation, we were well aware that we had to fend for ourselves in this vast and desolate Arctic area without SAR facilities,” he says.

Rasmussen believes that specific ice class rules should be defined for ships travelling in Greenland national waters in the summer/autumn period, and that it should be mandatory for master and bridge officers to complete an ice navigation course targeted Arctic ice conditions as this is also currently not mandated. 

Rasmussen has set up a non-profit website (in Danish and English) with information designed to improve safety in Greenland waters: www.iceguide.dk.

Picture credit: Bjarne Rasmussen