Breaking the Ice

The Arctic Ocean is the only region yet unexplored by scientific ocean coring programs. One of the main reasons is that it's a great challenge to keep a vessel stationary in the drifting ice floes while sediment cores are being retrieved through a pipe that extends from the ship to several hundreds of metres below the seafloor. To core the 500 metres of sediment, the ACEX expedition team members will use a 4.5 metre coring tool to repeatedly core down through and then retrieve this sediment sequence. To avoid shearing off the pipe that connects the vessel to the sea floor, the coring vessel must maintain its location in challenging conditions, such as thick fog, shifting winds, and metre-thick drifting ice floes that can quickly change directions or collide, forming 20-m thick ridges. Keeping position will be achieved using a dynamic positioning system, a computer controlled system linking multiple propellers around the ship`s hull.

To meet these challenges, an operational plan involving three icebreakers has been devised. The Swedish registered Vidar Viking, equipped with a 34-metre tall derrick, will serve as the coring vessel. Two protecting vessels will break and push apart ice floes and ridges, enabling the Vidar Viking to stay on location until the cores have been recovered. The Swedish Oden, will be positioned in front of Vidar Viking as a protecting shield with the Russian vessel Sovetskiy Soyuz, stationed a kilometre or more upstream into the ice floes.

The expedition will make use of the most modern satellite and communication technology available. Satellite data on weather and ice conditions will be transmitted regularly from Oden's base in Sweden. Helicopters will deploy global positioning system (GPS) transmitters on ice floes in order to estimate the speed and direction of the drifting ice.

The Arctic Coring Expedition project is a truly pioneering effort. All that is required now is good weather and a little luck, which even the best scientists count on when undertaking such challenging research projects.