Sea ice thickness Options

[Brian Plankis]

Dear Ute,

You mentioned in some of your previous posts that the ship is going through ice now, how thick is the ice and how fast can the ship move through the ice?

Is the sea ice considerably thinner than years past?

[Guest]

Ute,

I accidentially hit the wrong button, the above question was from me, Brian Plankis. It was nice to meet you at UH in EDRS8382 before you went off on your expedition!

Brian

[Ute_Kaden]

Brian,

First of all my thoughts are with you. I hope you are all are safe in HOU and that RITA weakens a bit. Thanks for reading the journal.

Ice thickness varies greatly. The new one year ice is only inches to about 2 ft thick. On the contrary, multiyear ice looks very blue, is hard and thick. We measured thickness between 1 m (3 ft) to more than 5 m (16 ft). The pressure ridges we saw are up to 48 ft thick. It is very impressive to see the Healy breaking ice. We are doing this since 5 weeks. Thus, after we left the North pole we encountered heavy ice. It is late in the season and freezes up started already.

Healy specifications: 4.5 ft (1.37 m) at 3 knots continuous 8 ft (2.44 m) Backing and Ramming

However, we broke thicker ice!

The sea ice cover overall is shrinking. To say that it is thinner this year we do not have enough data for the whole area available here at the boat. Dr. Weber would say we can only talk about the area we researched. Well, for us we collected data in a relatively small area of the arctic. No conclusions yet. For me, after drilling a 3 m ice core it was thick enough!!!.

Best regards,

Ute