Heavy Ice Forces New Russian Icebreaker on Long Southerly Voyage
Legion | May 24, 2023 | Stephen J. Thorne

Latest Arctic challenges illustrate the difficulties in predicting climate change effects.

Just like the continued existence of the world “illustrates the difficulties in predicting the end of the world.”

Russia’s newest icebreaker—an 82-metre, 4,000-ton naval vessel—has joined its Pacific fleet off the Kamchatka peninsula, just across the Bering Sea from Alaska. But the route the Yevpatii Kolovrat navigated in mid-May has raised some eyebrows.

Instead of traversing Arctic waters from the St. Petersburg shipyard where it was built, the ship sailed out into the Atlantic and south to the Mediterranean Sea. It then passed through the Suez Canal and crossed the Indian Ocean into the Philippine Sea before it arrived at its home port in Petropavlovsk in the North Pacific. The route is easily twice as long as the northern passage to Kamchatka.

Why would Russia’s newest icebreaker not sail the Arctic waters for which it was intended? The answer: heavy ice.

Data from the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute showed a thick layer of sea ice covering Russian Arctic waters in early May. In the Laptev and East Siberian seas, two belts of multi-year ice were considered impassable, even by the vaunted Russian ship named for a 13th century war hero.

And, to save the Global Warming scam, an invented statistic, followed by a moving of goalposts:

Canada’s federal auditor general reported in November 2022 that average summer sea-ice coverage in the Canadian Arctic had dropped by about 40 per cent in the last 50 years due to climate change, but lately it has been longstanding sea ice, not the seasonal variety that comes and goes, that has impeded Arctic traffic.