An iceberg is a piece of freshwater ice more than 15 m long that has broken off a glacier or an ice shelf and is floating freely in open (salt) water. Smaller chunks of floating glacially derived ice are called "growlers" or "bergy bits". Much of an iceberg is below the water's surface, which led to the expression "tip of the iceberg" to illustrate a small part of a larger unseen issue. Icebergs are considered a serious maritime hazard.
The Weddell Sea is part of the Southern Ocean and contains the Weddell Gyre. Its land boundaries are defined by the bay formed from the coasts of Coats Land and the Antarctic Peninsula. The easternmost point is Cape Norvegia at Princess Martha Coast, Queen Maud Land. To the east of Cape Norvegia is the King Haakon VII Sea. Much of the southern part of the sea is covered by a permanent, massive ice shelf field, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf.
RV Polarstern is a German research icebreaker of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. Polarstern was built by Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Kiel and Nobiskrug in Rendsburg, was commissioned in 1982, and is mainly used for research in the Arctic and Antarctica. The ship has a length of 118 metres and is a double-hulled icebreaker. She is operational at temperatures as low as −50 °C (−58 °F). Polarstern can break through ice 1.5 m thick at a speed of 5 knots. Thicker ice of up to 3 m (9.8 ft) can be broken by ramming.
Sea ice arises as seawater freezes. Because ice is less dense than water, it floats on the ocean's surface. Sea ice covers about 7% of the Earth's surface and about 12% of the world's oceans. Much of the world's sea ice is enclosed within the polar ice packs in the Earth's polar regions: the Arctic ice pack of the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic ice pack of the Southern Ocean. Polar packs undergo a significant yearly cycling in surface extent, a natural process upon which depends the Arctic ecology, including the ocean's ecosystems. Due to the action of winds, currents and temperature fluctuations, sea ice is very dynamic, leading to a wide variety of ice types and features. Sea ice may be contrasted with icebergs, which are chunks of ice shelves or glaciers that calve into the ocean. Depending on location, sea ice expanses may also incorporate icebergs.
An ice shelf is a large floating platform of ice that forms where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface. Ice shelves are found in Antarctica and the Arctic. The boundary between the floating ice shelf and the anchor ice that feeds it is the grounding line. The thickness of ice shelves can range from about 100 m (330 ft) to 1,000 m (3,300 ft). The world's largest ice shelves are the Ross Ice Shelf and the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica. When a large piece of an ice shelf breaks off, this can lead to the formation of an iceberg. This process is also called ice calving.
An icebreaker is a special-purpose ship or boat designed to move and navigate through ice-covered waters, and provide safe waterways for other boats and ships. Although the term usually refers to ice-breaking ships, it may also refer to smaller vessels, such as the icebreaking boats that were once used on the canals of the United Kingdom.
The McMurdo Sound is a sound in Antarctica, known as the southernmost passable body of water in the world, located approximately 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) from the South Pole.
Seabed gouging by ice is a process that occurs when floating ice features drift into shallower areas and their keel comes into contact with the seabed. As they keep drifting, they produce long, narrow furrows most often called gouges, or scours. This phenomenon is common in offshore environments where ice is known to exist. Although it also occurs in rivers and lakes, it appears to be better documented from oceans and sea expanses.
The Amery Ice Shelf is a broad ice shelf in Antarctica at the head of Prydz Bay between the Lars Christensen Coast and Ingrid Christensen Coast. It is part of Mac. Robertson Land. The name "Cape Amery" was applied to a coastal angle mapped on 11 February 1931 by the British Australian New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) under Douglas Mawson. He named it for William Bankes Amery, a civil servant who represented the United Kingdom government in Australia (1925–28). The Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names interpreted this feature to be a portion of an ice shelf and, in 1947, applied the name Amery to the whole shelf.
A drifting ice station is a temporary or semi-permanent facility built on an ice floe. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States maintained a number of stations in the Arctic Ocean on floes such as Fletcher's Ice Island for research and espionage, the latter of which were often little more than quickly constructed shacks. Extracting personnel from these stations proved difficult and in the case of the United States, employed early versions of the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system.
An ice pier or ice wharf is a man-made structure used to assist the unloading of ships in Antarctica. It is constructed by pumping seawater into a contained area and allowing the water to freeze. By repeating this procedure several times, additional layers are built up. The final structure is many metres in thickness, and strong enough to support container trucks. Operation Deep Freeze personnel constructed the first floating ice pier at Antarctica’s southernmost sea port at McMurdo Station in 1973. Ice piers have been in use each summer season since, at McMurdo's natural harbor at Winter Quarters Bay located at 77°50′S166°40′E. The harbor is positioned on the southern tip of Ross Island.
Arktika 2007 was a 2007 expedition in which Russia performed the first ever crewed descent to the ocean bottom at the North Pole, as part of research related to the 2001 Russian territorial claim, one of many territorial claims in the Arctic, made possible, in part, because of Arctic shrinkage. As well as dropping a titanium tube containing the Russian flag, the submersibles collected specimens of Arctic flora and fauna and apparently recorded video of the dives. The "North Pole-35" manned drifting ice station was established.
Wiese Island, or Vize Island, also known as Zemlya Vize is an isolated Russian island located in the Arctic Ocean, named after Soviet oceanographer of German-descent Vladimir Wiese.
Ushakov Island is an isolated island located in the Arctic Ocean, Russian Federation.
Xue Long is a Chinese icebreaking research vessel. Built in 1993 at Kherson Shipyard in Ukraine, she was converted from an Arctic cargo ship to a polar research and re-supply vessel by Hudong–Zhonghua Shipbuilding of Shanghai by the mid-1990s. The vessel was extensively upgraded in 2007 and 2013.
The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceans. It spans an area of approximately 14,060,000 km2 (5,430,000 sq mi) and is known as one of the coldest of oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea. It has also been described as an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It is also seen as the northernmost part of the all-encompassing World Ocean.
Fletcher's Ice Island or T-3 was an iceberg discovered by U.S. Air Force Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher. Between 1952 and 1978 it was used as a staffed scientific drift station that included huts, a power plant, and a runway for wheeled aircraft. The iceberg was a thick tabular sheet of glacial ice that drifted throughout the central Arctic Ocean in a clockwise direction. First inhabited in 1952 as an arctic weather report station, it was abandoned in 1954 but reinhabited on two subsequent occasions. The station was inhabited mainly by scientists along with a few military crewmen and was resupplied during its existence primarily by military planes operating from Utqiagvik, Alaska. The iceberg was later occupied by the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, and served as a base of operations for the Navy's arctic research projects such as sea bottom and ocean swell studies, seismographic activities, meteorological studies and other classified projects under the direction of the Department of Defense. Before the era of satellites, the research station on T-3 had been a valuable site for measurements of the atmosphere in the Arctic.
A stamukha is a grounded accumulation of sea ice rubble that typically develops along the boundary between fast ice and the drifting pack ice, or becomes incorporated into the fast ice. It is a pressure ridge. Wind, currents and tides contribute to this phenomenon. Stamukhi tend to occur in belts that are parallel to the shoreline, along coastal shoals, at water depths of about 20 m (65 ft), but that can reach 50 m (160 ft). They can build up to heights 10 metres (33 ft) or more above the waterline. Although they remain pinned to the seabed, these features can be subject to small displacements, either due to thermal expansion or to the pressure exerted by the drifting pack ice onto the fast ice. Because stamukhi tend to be deeply grounded, they may occur as isolated ice features in the open sea during the summer season, after the surrounding ice has melted away.
Antarctic sea ice is the sea ice of the Southern Ocean. It extends from the far north in the winter and retreats to almost the coastline every summer. Sea ice is frozen seawater that is usually less than a few meters thick. This is the opposite of ice shelves, which are formed by glaciers; they float in the sea, and are up to a kilometre thick. There are two subdivisions of sea ice: fast ice, which are attached to land; and ice floes, which are not.
Filchner Station was a German research station in the Antarctic. Administered by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, it was established in February 1982 on the Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf. The first station in Antarctica to be mounted on jacks, the structure was raised each year to allow for the increase in height of the shelf by snowfall. It was also relocated around 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) southwards each year to account for drift of the ice shelf. In October 1998, Filchner Station was stranded on iceberg A-38 when it broke away from the ice shelf. Research operations were cancelled and an emergency salvage operation was carried out that removed the majority of the station by February 1999.
