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Ice Breaker
Thu Dec 15, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook. Most ships at sea try to avoid bad weather – but icebreakers take it dead-on! Robin White tells us about it.
The Polar Sea is owned by the US Coast Guard, and its job is to keep shipping channels open in the Arctic and Antarctic. It also takes weather scientists to remote parts of the globe. Curtis Shaw was formerly the ship's marine science officer. He says the powerful vessel cuts ice up to 20 feet thick by backing and ramming.
CS: It's noisy. You're dealing with jet engines on the ship running. Up forward of the ship, it's kind of like being in a Pepsi can getting kicked down the street...
Shaw says the ship doesn't cut ice at night so that people can sleep. But sometimes the sea itself is half way frozen…
CS: …you have a lot of heavy swells which are throwing formed ice chunks and ice cold water - up where it immediately freezes onto the ship.
A build up of even a couple of inches of ice affects the stability of the ship so the crew takes turns going out on deck to break it up.
CS: We're sending them out there with baseball bats telling them to keep busy for an hour and when an hour's up you're done and the next guys'll go out there and do it.
All this takes place while the ship is rolling. It's shaped like a football to ride up on the ice more easily, but out in the open ocean big waves can set the ship rocking, sometimes to a 45-degree angle.
The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, home of the world's highest windspeed of 231 miles per hour. Find our program on the at www.weathernotebook.org. Thanks also to generous funding by Subaru of America.
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