L'Astrolabe berthed at Franklin Wharf in Hobart, Tasmania | |
History | |
---|---|
Name |
|
Port of registry | Cook Islands |
Builder | Ferguson-Ailsa, Glasgow, United Kingdom |
Yard number | 567 |
Completed | 1 January 1986 |
Identification | |
Status | In service |
General characteristics | |
Tonnage | |
Length | 65.5 m (214 ft 11 in) [2] |
Beam | 12.8 m (42 ft 0 in) [2] |
Depth | 5.35 m (17 ft 7 in) [2] |
Ice class | 1A Super [5] |
Installed power | 2 × Mirrlees Blackstone 8MB275 (2 × 2,300 kW) [6] |
Propulsion |
|
Speed | |
Capacity | 50 passengers [7] |
Crew | 5 officers, 7 other crew [4] |
Aviation facilities | Helipad |
YWAM Liberty is the former L'Astrolabe, a French icebreaking research vessel which was used to supply the Dumont d'Urville research station in Antarctica. [3] [4] [8] [9] [10] [11] The vessel made regular voyages between Hobart and the Dumont D'Urville research station for fifteen years and was replaced by a new icebreaker bearing the same name in 2017. [12]
The vessel has also traversed the Northeast passage. [13] The European Space Agency reports a 1992 traverse "was the first civilian expedition through the NSR since the Russian revolution." L'Astrolabe was escorted on her transit by Russian icebreakers.
L'Astrolabe attempted to reach Akademik Shokalskiy , trapped by an outbreak of old glacial ice in the Antarctic Ocean. L'Astrolabe didn't match Chinese research vessel Xuě Lóng 's 6 nautical miles (11 km; 6.9 mi) from the trapped Russian ship, but got closer than the Australian Aurora Australis' 10 nautical miles (19 km; 12 mi). Withdrawing after encountering heavy ice, she subsequently supported further attempts by Xuě Lóng and Aurora Australis to reach Akademik Shokalskiy and rescue her passengers. [14]
From July 2018 YWAM Liberty spent six months in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea providing primary health, dental, optometry and ophthalmic care. The ship is administered by YWAM Ships Kona, from Kailua-Kona in Hawaii. [15]
On January 27, 2005, a crew member was found to have gone overboard. [4] The missing crew member's body was found.
During the recovery of his body the second engineer's hand was seriously injured, and he was at risk of losing his thumb. [4] A report by the Australian Transport Safety Board concluded his injury would have been avoided if the block he was using to recover the ship's boat had been equipped with hand holds. The report noted that the deceased crew member was found with a high blood alcohol level. He had been seen to be depressed, prior to his death, and the report concluded he had jumped or fallen overboard under the influence of alcohol.
On October 28, 2010, a Eurocopter AS350 helicopter which operated between the ship and the Dumont d'Urville Station crashed in bad weather en route to the station. All 4 on board were killed. [16]
The French Southern and Antarctic Lands is an overseas territory of France. It consists of:
Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville was a French explorer and naval officer who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. As a botanist and cartographer, he gave his name to several seaweeds, plants and shrubs, and places such as d'Urville Island in New Zealand.
The Northeast Passage is the shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, along the Arctic coasts of Norway and Russia. The western route through the islands of Canada is accordingly called the Northwest Passage (NWP).
The Dumont d'Urville Station is a French scientific station in Antarctica on Île des Pétrels, archipelago of Pointe-Géologie in Adélie Land. It is named after explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville, whose expedition landed on Débarquement Rock in the Dumoulin Islands at the northeast end of the archipelago on January 21, 1840. It is operated by the "French Polar Institute Paul-Émile Victor", a joint operation of French public and para-public agencies. It is the administrative centre of Adélie Land.
The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is a shipping route about 5,600 kilometres (3,500 mi) long. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is the shortest shipping route between the western part of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific region.
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.
Oden is a large Swedish icebreaker, built in 1988 for the Swedish Maritime Administration. It is named after the Norse god Odin. First built to clear a passage through the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia for cargo ships, it was later modified to serve as a research vessel. Equipped with its own helicopter and manned by 15 crew members it has ample capacity to carry laboratory equipment and 80 passengers, functioning independently in harsh Polar ice packs of the Arctic and Antarctic seas. It was the first non-nuclear surface vessel to reach the North Pole, together with the German research icebreaker Polarstern. It has participated in several scientific expeditions in Arctic and Antarctica.
USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10) is a United States Coast Guard heavy icebreaker. Commissioned in 1976, the ship was built by Lockheed Shipbuilding and Construction Company of Seattle, Washington along with sister ship, USCGC Polar Sea.
Aurora Australis was an Australian icebreaker. Built by Carrington Slipways and launched in 1989, the vessel is owned by P&O Maritime Services. It was regularly chartered by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) for research cruises in Antarctic waters and to support Australian bases in Antarctica.
Kapitan Khlebnikov is a Russian icebreaker. The vessel now operates as a cruise ship offering excursions to the Arctic and Antarctic.
Astrolabe Glacier is a glacier 10 kilometres (10 km) wide and 19 kilometres (10 nmi) long, flowing north-northeast from the continental ice and terminating at the coast in a prominent tongue at the east side of Géologie Archipelago. It was first sighted in 1840 by the French expedition under Captain Jules Dumont d'Urville, although no glaciers were noted on d'Urville's chart of this coast but a formidable icy dike with perpendicular flanks of 37.7 m high according to the joined plate, corresponding to the glacier tongue. The glacier was photographed from the air by U.S. Navy Operation Highjump in January 1947. It was charted by the French Antarctic Expedition, 1949–51, and named after d'Urville's flagship, the Astrolabe.
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.
RV Akademik Fedorov is a Russian scientific diesel-electric research vessel, the flagship of the Russian polar research fleet. It was built in Rauma, Finland for the Soviet Union and completed on 8 September 1987. It started operations on 24 October 1987, in the USSR. The ship was named after a Soviet polar explorer, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences Evgeny Fyodorov, who worked on the first Soviet manned drifting ice station North Pole-1.
Astrolabe was originally a horse-transport barge converted into an exploration ship of the French Navy. Originally named Coquille, she is famous for her travels with Jules Dumont d'Urville. The name derives from an early navigational instrument, the astrolabe, a precursor to the sextant.
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 SCARSouthern Ocean Continuous Plankton Recorder (SO-CPR) Survey was established in 1991 by the Australian Antarctic Division,of Environment, Water Heritage and the Arts, to map the spatial-temporal patterns of zooplankton and then to use the sensitivity of plankton to environmental change as early warning indicators of the health of the Southern Ocean. It also serves as reference for other Southern Ocean and Antarctic monitoring programs.
MV Akademik Shokalskiy is an Akademik Shuleykin-class ice-strengthened ship, built in Finland in 1982 and originally used for oceanographic research. In 1998 she was fully refurbished to serve as a research ship for Arctic and Antarctic work; she is used also for expedition cruising. She is named after the Russian oceanographer Yuly Shokalsky.
MV Thala Dan, built in Aalborg in 1957, was an ice-strengthened refrigerated cargo-passenger ship. Operated by Danish J. Lauritzen A/S from 1957 to 1982, she was jointly chartered by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions and the French Polar Expeditions to re-supply their respective Antarctic stations. Afterwards acquired by the Brazilian Navy and renamed Barão de Teffé, she was engaged in the emergent Brazilian Antarctic Programme from 1982 to 1994.
L'Astrolabe is a French icebreaker that is used to bring personnel and supplies to the Dumont d'Urville Station in Antarctica. The vessel, built by Chantiers Piriou and delivered in September 2017, replaced the 1986-built vessel of the same name.
Potential cooperative studies can be established between the Australia, France. Ice breaker Astrolabe supplies yearly the Dumont D'Urville base which can do some geophysical work in the way back and the Marion D'Ufre, not an icebreaker has multibeam, side scan sonar and a long-45 m- piston coring system), Italy and the US.
Volunteers and crew on the French research vessel, L'Astoblobe have been measuring temperature and salinity during regular trips between Hobart and the French research base in Antarctica, over the past 15 years.
Called SURVOSTRAL (Surveillance of the Ocean Austral), the joint Australian-French-US program has produced a 15-year dataset based on readings taken by the volunteers and crew of the 65-metre French ship, L'Astrolabe, on regular voyages between Hobart and the French base at Dumont D'Urville.
The Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway first demonstrated use of ERS-1 SAR data for near real-time ice mapping in the NSR in August 1991, only a few weeks after the launch of the ERS-1 satellite. SAR derived sea ice maps were then sent by telefax to the French polar vessel L'Astrolabe during her voyage through the Northeast Passage from Norway to Japan (Johannessen et al., 1992). This was the first civilian expedition through the NSR since the Russian revolution. This demonstration was evaluated as very interesting by the captains and sea ice experts onboard the Russian icebreakers which escorted L'Astrolabe through the ice-covered parts of the route.