Tara Polar Station

Tara Polar Station

Tara Polar Station is a French drifting scientific base aimed for Arctic Ocean expeditions and operated by the Tara Oceans Foundation and its collaborators. - Wikipedia

All the stories about this thing talk about Global Warming. Can't say as I blame them, that's how you get idiots to cough up the dough to fund this project.

Putting the global warming nonsense aside, it's a heck of a project. Imagine being stuck on this boat for 6 to 9 months with a dozen other people. It's almost as bad as being in a nuclear submarine. You can go outside, but in the middle of winter it is going to be completely black outside. It will be interesting to see how well they survive.

Tara Polar Station Cross Section

Skyfall

Russian 9M730 Burevestnik Cruise Missile Launch

Life imitates James Bond:

Significant activity on Russia's Novaya Zemlya archipelago indicates an impending test of the nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile, known as Skyfall by NATO. - OilPrice

Skyfall was the title of a 2012 James Bond movie. But where is this Novaya Zemlya archipelago? In the arctic ocean, that's where:

Novaya Zemlya Archipelago

Google Maps doesn't show lines of latitude or longitude. I adjusted the view so that the line of longitude that runs through our target is vertical, i.e. the North Pole is directly above Novaya Zemlya at some unknown distance. Looking around, I found a couple other maps of the arctic that do have some better information.

Map of the Arctic showing the July Isotherm line (orange), the Arctic tree line (green) and the Arctic circle (red). Novaya Zemlya is at the top of the Arctic Ocean in this map.

The Isotherm line indicates that the temperature is roughly the same all along the line at that time, in this case July.

Map originally published by Tufts University showing territorial division in the Arctic. Novaya Zemlya is in the lower right quadrant of the Arctic Ocean in this map.

The Russian Ministry of Defense’s newest military base: the Arctic Shamrock, on the large island of Alexandra Land.

Russia isn't messing around when they set up operations in the Arctic. I didn't see any like this on Novaya Zemlya, but there is an airbase on the southern end. There is also small town with a hospital and a church about 75 miles southeast of there. Alexandra Land is roughly 400 miles northwest of Novaya Zemlya.

Another Nautilus

What Happened To The Nautilus?
Mustard

I had not heard of this Nautilus before. I have heard of the one from Jule's Vernes 20,000 leagues Under The Sea, and I have heard about the US Navy's first nuclear powered submarine, but not this one.

Russian Oil

The Russian tanker Renda

Coast Guard Cutter Healy webpage reports:

The Russian tanker Renda transits toward Nome Jan. 13, 2012. The Coast Guard Cutter Healy has been breaking ice for the tanker to ensure a safe delivery of fuel to Nome residents. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Charly Hengen.

Breaking the Ice

USS Annapolis (SSN 760) rests in the Arctic Ocean after surfacing through three feet of ice during Ice Exercise 2009 on March 21, 2009

Found this photo on The Geopolitics. Found the description on reddit.

Mike Vining

Mike Vining

Saw a video by a very annoying guy about Mike Vining, who was one of the first members of Delta Force. He was involved in a bunch of very sketchy stuff, like bomb disposal. He's still alive and just a year older than I am. Reading the Wikipedia story about him I come across this line:

"He has also written articles on naval postal history,"

Naval Postal History? What are you talking about? The Navy has a postal system? Well, I guess they would have to, wouldn't they? Letters to and from for sailors sailing around the world. This leads me to the Univeral Ship Cancellation Society which has a PDF about Naval Covers Fakes, Forgeries and Frauds. 

On page 59 of this PDF we find a story by Mike Vining:

1931 Wilkins-Ellsworth Trans-Arctic Expedition

Sir George Hubert Wilkins, MC, and Lincoln Ellsworth secured use from the U.S. Navy of the soon to be scrapped submarine USS S-30 for an expedition to sail under the ice cap to the North Pole. They got close to the North Pole, but no cigar. They managed to return to Norway and submarine was scuttled off of Bergen.

I tried to extract the story from the PDF, but it was going to take a bunch of mucking around to make it presentable, so you're just going to have to go read the original.

Polar Bear

Walking On Water
Benjamin Hardman

Out of this world.

Cold enough for you?

Why is the Arctic Asymmetric? | Why Trees Grow at the Same Latitude as Ice Sheets
Casual Earth

If you ever wondered why some places are covered with ice and places that seem to have similar characteristics don't, this video is for you. I think I probably wondered about it once, but I likely got an answer like 'oh, I don't think anybody knows, that's just the way it is'. Realizing my scrawny little self wasn't going to personally be able to map the weather of the entire arctic, I forgot about looking for an explanation. Come to think of it, I haven't run into anything about arctic weather that wasn't designed for three year olds. Yes, I know we (that's a royal 'we') keep trying to educate the ignorant, but you know, there are some people out here with brains. There is the problem of how much work is expended on explanations. The amount of effort and information in this one video is probably enough to produce a zillion videos aimed at three year olds.

Arctic

Arctic Ocean

Found this in a story on Unherd:

Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.

I read a couple more paragraphs and decided whatever they were talking about didn't interest me, but here's some pictures of Russia's nuclear ice breaker Arktika.

The "Arktika" is the first days of January sailing north of the Taymyr Peninsula awaiting to assist an LNG tanker coming from Asia via the Northern Sea Route. Photo: Rosatomflot

Arktika, the first of three LK-60 icebreakers

 

Kugaaruk

Basler BT-67 and Twin Otter at Kugaaruk CYBB (formerly known as Pelly Bay) in Nunavut

I occasionally hear about airliners landing in the frozen when the encounter problems flying from Europe or Japan. I've read about ski planes in Alaska and I've posted a couple of pictures of airplanes flying into Antarctica, but this is the first time I've seen an airplane up here.

A Basler-BT67 is essentially a DC-3 equipped with turboprop engines.



Nakurmiik - Hooké Film
HOOKÉ

Kugaaruk has an airfield and North Warning System Radar station nearby.

Kugaaruk, NU, Canada
Area shown is roughly 2,500 miles across and 1,500 miles north to south

Last time we were in this area we were reading The Terror about Franklin's disastrous voyage to find the Northwest Passage back in 1845, and we were a hundred miles to the west on the other side of the penninsula.

Update January 2024 corrected video id.

ARCTIC - Netflix Movie

ARCTIC | Official Trailer
Bleecker Street

Grim movie about survival in the Arctic.

Man (Mads Mikkelsen) alone with the wreckage of his airplane, an AN-2, in the Arctic. He's been there for a few days at least. He's carved out a giant SOS in the snow, down through a couple feet of snow to the bare ground. The letters are like fifty feet tall, big enough that a passing aircraft should be able to see them. He's cut a couple of holes in the ice and is managing to catch some fish. He doesn't have any fuel for any kind of fire, so he's eating them raw. He has a hand cranked radio and every day he hikes to the top a nearby hill and cranks the radio and the radio blinks its red light at him.

One day while cranking the radio the green light blinks and shortly thereafter a helicopter appears, and immediately crashes. The pilot dies. The female copilot survives but she is comatose. He hauls her back to his airplane, which has the advantage of being right side up and level. They stay there for a few days, long enough for him to expand his ice fishing empire, but eventually he decides they need to travel to some kind of outpost. Pretty sad commentary on the local rescue service that they weren't able to get back out to where the last helicopter crashed. So Mads packs up his gear and loads the woman on a rescue sled that he found in the crashed helicopter, and starts hiking across the Arctic.

He does okay for a couple of days, but then he starts running into problems. He struggles but eventually he gets to the top of a hill and spots a live helicopter. The helicopter crew eventually spots him and all is well.

Resolute Desk

Caroline Kennedy & Kerry Kennedy under the Resolute Desk

Tam mentions the 'Resolute desk' which means nothing to me. Is she referring to some vessel from Star Trek or some other science fiction story? I mean, she does dabble in those waters. No, it's in the White House.

The White House Historical Association has the story:

H.M.S. 'Resolute', forming part of the expedition sent in search of Sir John Franklin in 1852, was abandoned in Latitude 74º 41' N. Longitude 101º 22' W. on 15th May 1854. She was discovered and extricated in September 1855, in Latitude 67º N. by Captain Buddington of the United States Whaler 'George Henry'. The ship was purchased, fitted out and sent to England, as a gift to Her Majesty Queen Victoria by the President and People of the United States, as a token of goodwill & friendship. This table was made from her timbers when she was broken up, and is presented by the Queen of Great Britain & Ireland, to the President of the United States, as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the "Resolute'.

Okay then, British ship, doomed Arctic expedition, sounds a whole lot like The Terror. 

HMS Resolute Abandoned

67 degrees North (where it was recovered) would be about 500 miles south of where it was abandoned.

HMS Resolute in search of Sir John Franklin 1850 - Francois Musin

I chose the picture of the desk (top) because it revealed the existence of the door.

Sailboat in Arctic Waters

Sailboat in Arctic Waters
221 piece jigsaw puzzle

Just a cool picture.

Russian Yamal-LNG project on the Arctic Ocean

This Cost $27 Billion Dollars to Build

I am really enjoying hearing how the US wants to employ economic sanctions against Russia, and how we are pressuring Germany to not certify the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, all supposedly to protect Ukraine, a probable hub of corruption and villainy. Or maybe we're just doing that to keep the zillion dollar commissions flowing into the Biden's pockets. Whatever. Europe gets 40% of their energy from natural gas from Russia. What do you think will happen to natural gas prices if Russia starts feeling squeezed? You will notice that Total, the French oil company, is a big investor in this project.

Qatar has a big LNG facility. It's quite a bit warmer there, so it is not as efficient at liquifying the gas as the Russian plant, but they don't have to contend with ice and transport would be shorter, so it might be a wash as to which plant is more efficient.

Aker Arctic, the company that designed the ice-breaking LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) carriers, has appeared here before. Note that while the Finnish company designed these ships, they are being built in China.

LNG carrier cargo tank cross section

The membrane in 'membrane tanks' is a thin sheet of fancy steel. One mm (millimeter) thick steel is pretty stout stuff for any everyday kind of application. The steel used to make automobile bodies is only 0.7 mm (1/32 of an inch). Ship's hulls are more like 3/4 of an inch (19 mm), so I can see how shipbuilders would consider something only 1 mm thick as a 'membrane'.

I guess the part that really bugs me about this project is that is makes us, the US, look like a bunch of gibbering fools in comparison. Putin might be a murderous thug, but I suspect he is not worse than any other powerful man and might be quite a bit better. Or maybe his PR (Public Relations) office just does a better job. I look at the crap our government continues to pull on a daily basis and I'm not sure we have any room to talk. All of which reminds me of this scene from The Godfather:

The Godfather (6/9) Movie CLIP - Working for My Father (1972) HD

Everyone in a position of power is a murderous thug. The only difference is whether they are murdering your friends or your enemies.

Map Porn

Discovery of the Northwest Passage Map
PBS has the key

It's common knowledge (or at least I hope it is) that men derive more pleasure from seeing women than women derive from seeing men. Or maybe that window of time in her month when a woman becomes interested in men is very narrow, so we seldom see that kind of behavior. Men, as we know, are always interested in women, in the biblical sense. Handwaving Freakoutery has a post explaining why that might be. Best, succinct explanation, I have seen.

Succinct. That reminds of Malcolm Gladwell and his bite-sized chunks of knowledge that are easy to swallow and digest. Which is what I try to be. Partly from my desire to avoid doing useless things (like filling in forms) and partly from my desire to follow the old engineering dictum of "necessary and sufficient". I am not a speedy typer. I write a sentence and then I have to go back and spend time fixing all the typo's. Wowzers, two sentences without a typo, except Google doesn't like 'typer'. Fine, whatever.

Got that established, now we come to what got me started on this. I'm reading The Terror by Dan Simmons and he's talking about other expeditions into the frozen north that came before this fatal voyage. In the 18th and 19th Century Brits were all over navigation and maps, so surely someone has put together a map of the various voyages. And where might I find such a map? I could ask Google, but if there isn't much out there, it''s going to throw up a whole bunch of unrelated shit. and then I remembered reddit/r/MapPorn, which got me to wondering why it's called MapPorn and not Maps R Us, or Crazy Map Land, and then I remembered all the times I've read that 'so and so was staring intently at the map', which reminds me that I do fair bit of that myself, and then I realized we (men) are staring at maps the same way we stare at pictures of attractive women, hence the addition of the 'porn' suffix.

I did find one map on reddit (at the top). It's not as hi-res as I would like, but it's not cluttered with too much information. Google did turn up a couple of good links this morning:

• What We Learned In The Search For Sir John Franklin on Arctic Kingdom. A good summary of this expedition and its aftermath.
• 19th-century attempts at the passage on Britannica
• Arctic Exploration on The Canadian Encyclopedia

I suspect the quality of your results depends at least partially on the wording of your search phrase.

P.S. Asking Google for a copy of the map posted at the top, Google identified it as 'world map of nuclear power'. Google doesn't know everything.

Northern Sea Route

Northeast Passage / Northern Sea Route

It seems that sailing ships across the top of the world has become viable, for a couple months of the year anyway. The linked article is all about the military buildup in the Arctic, but the map is from the Economist which has a paywall. Wikipedia has a similar map that also shows the Northwest Passage. I'm not sure anyone is using that yet. 

P.S. As Bruce points out, ice breakers are kind of crucial to traveling this route. I've put up several posts about ice breakers, and half of those posts are about the Russians.

Pic of the Day

Dutch whalers near Spitsbergen - Abraham Storck 1690

Spitsbergen is the largest and only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway.

Via A Brief History of Svalbard, Norway

Sargeant Preston

Meet Iditarod-Winning Sled Dogs
The Iditarod started yesterday. Safe and warm in my basement hidey-hole, I think it's great. Reminds me of Jack London stories and Sargeant Preston, whom I haven't thought of in a zillion years.


Sergeant Preston of The Yukon (1955) - TV Intro.
P.S. There seems to be some confusion over the spelling of Sargent. Spelled that way, it's a person's name. Spelled with a second 'a' (Sargeant), it's the military rank. Usually.

P.P.S. Joe points out that there is only one A in Sergeant. How did I miss that? Perhaps too many years of reading Beetle Bailey and hearing about "Sarge".

Polar Vortex

Stratospheric Polar Vortex
The stratospheric polar vortex splitting apart, bringing freezing weather to mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere for the next month. That dates on the video cover the month of February of this year.

Pic of the Day

McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle with full afterburner during Vigilant Shield in 2016 - Shane Heard

Another picture of a jet fighter blasting off into the air. What makes this one special is that it was taken in Goose Bay, one of those really obscure airports in the land of ice and snow, where nobody goes unless they have to.