Russia abandoning its North Pole research station due to thin ice breaking up

Russia abandoning ice station

Guest Post by R. Gates on Neven's Arctic Sea Ice Blog, May 23, 2013

Russia has ordered an "urgent" evacuation of its drifting ice station known as North Pole-40 that sits on top Arctic sea ice, because of disintegrating sea ice that is posing dangerous conditions to reseachers. This is one more indication that the thickness of the ice is now getting very thin at places it was not before, a metric not fully captured in the extent and area data.

Barents Observer reports:

Floating research station in need of evacuation

The scientific research station was placed on the ice floe in October 2012 and was planned to stay there until September. Now the floe has already started to break apart and the crew has to be evacuated as soon as possible.

Russia’s Minister of Nature Resources and Ecology Sergey Donskoy has ordered that a plan for evacuation should be ready within three days, the Ministry’s web site reads.

“A collapse of the station’s ice floe poses a threat to its continued work, the lives of the crew, the environment close to the Canadian Economic Zone and to equipment and supplies,” a note from the minister reads.

Donskoy suggests that the nuclear-powered icebreaker “Yamal” could evacuate the station from the floe and move it to Severnaya Zemlya.

With ice levels in the Arctic reaching record lows, finding a suitable floe for the station proved to be a difficult task last autumn. The icebreaker carrying the station’s crew had to sail all around the North Pole before finding an ice floe solid enough to hold the station. None of the three floes that had been pre-evaluated from land as possible objects were considered safe enough.

Also the previous shift of Russian scientists experienced problems with the ice situation in the Arctic. In late April the members of North Pole-39 had to move the whole research station to another ice floe because the first one was breaking up.

Only three times has a station had to be evacuated before schedule. The last time was in 2010, when the icebreaker “Rossiya" had to go out and rescue the people on the floating station “North Pole-37” already in May.

Read the rest here, or over at PhysOrg, BBC, NDTV, Channel NewsAsia and many more.

Here's the current position of NP-40, as shown on the AARI website:

Let's hope the evacuation is a success.

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