Quantifying Ice Pressure Conditions and Predicting the Risk of Ship Besetting

Abstract

The risks of ship besetting under ice pressure are examined. Hindcasts of ice dynamics examine the conditions that led to the besetting of two vessels in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on 9 March 2005. The analysis examines the distributions of potentially significant variables such as pressure (mean normal stress), ridge thickness and strain rates. A criterion for assessing the risk of besetting was then proposed. A preliminary parametric study was also done in order to illustrate a method for predicting the risk of besetting under different ice and environmental forcing conditions.

Global Snow- and Ice-Related Disaster Risk: A Review

“…Iceberg disasters are mainly concentrated in the ocean areas off Antarctic coast, surrounding Greenland and northeastern Canada. Sea ice disasters focus on coastal and offshore areas of Arctic countries, especially in the Arctic shipping routes (Kubat et al 2012(Kubat et al , 2015. Coastal freeze-thaw erosion mainly occurs on the northern coast of Russia, Alaska, and Canada.…”

“…The presence of sea ice (especially floating ice) in northern regions has significant economic, environmental, and social implications (Kubat et al 2012(Kubat et al , 2015. Sea ice is the main load of offshore and shore-based facilities and ships in ice-prone areas, threatening the safe operation of these facilities and ships.…”

“…For example, in 2007, strong southwesterly winds, ocean currents, irregular shorelines, massive shoals, further drift of floating ice, and intrusion of multiyear ice caused damage to severe pressure buildup along the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador in April and May. As a result, a large number of fishing vessels were trapped in the pressure ice field (Kubat et al 2012(Kubat et al , 2015. In 2010, in the southern Bohai Bay in China, a ship loaded with 1,000 t of fuel oil was squeezed by floating ice and the cabin was flooded.…”

Finding safe and efficient shipping routes in ice-covered waters: A framework and a model

“…To this end, some combination of data sources is used, typically including ship speed data (often from the Automatic Identification System -AIS) and ice data (hind-cast data from operational sea ice prediction models or ship-borne measurement devices). Such models have been proposed for the Baltic Sea (Montewka et al, 2015), and for Arctic areas (Fu et al, 2016;Kubat, 2012;Mussells et al, 2017).…”