Pretty much the entirety of the United States’ nautical access to the Arctic and Antarctic is in Seattle’s backyard. Tucked in at Pier 37, next door to the big Chinese freighters, are the Coast Guard’s three red-hulled polar icebreakers. Polar Star and its sister ship Polar Sea are the heavy icebreakers, capable of crunching through 20 feet of ice and thus suitable for a trip to Antarctica. Healy is a medium icebreaker that heads to the Arctic during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer for scientific research and support. To get to the far frozen corners of the world on a boat, there you have it: America’s fleet.
The icebreakers represent the confluence of the past and the future. A mission to the ice reads like old-school adventure, but always in the service of science, like climate change or dark matter, that may steer the course of human civilization.
A trip south means crossing the unpredictable and treacherous Southern Ocean before confronting miles of thick ice that the ships, owing to their sloping hulls, ride up onto and, owing to gravity, shatter. For the crew, it’s like a series of small earthquakes going on for hours, for days, in an empty place. Sometimes they’re called upon to rescue ships trapped in the ice, as happened this year when Polar Star had to free an Australian vessel and tow it to safety.
But the primary purpose of the southern trip, called Operation Deep Freeze since its inception in the 1950s, is to open a path to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station for supply ships. McMurdo’s scientific value lies in its isolation: From there you can get an unobstructed glimpse into the deep history of the universe by looking out, or the deep history of the earth by looking down. A trip north means studying climate change, but also supporting an area becoming more economically, politically, and strategically valuable. So the future, in many ways, is tucked away at the top and bottom of the world, amid the ancient ice.
But oh, there are troubles. First and foremost is that the past is catching up. Both Polar Star and Polar Sea are nearly 40 years old and well past their 30-year retirement dates. Which leads to a second issue: Polar Sea, owing to damage to its propulsion system, is in what’s called “inactive commission,” meaning it’s sort of broken at the moment. Polar Star, then, is the only ship the United States has that’ll go pretty much anywhere.
“The U.S. as a superpower, as a military power, should be able to access any part of the world we need to, at any time of the year. Only with a heavy icebreaker can you get into the Arctic and the Antarctic,” said Executive Officer Kenneth Boda from the bridge of Polar Star at the end of March, a few weeks before the ship sailed to Vallejo, Calif., for a few months in dry-dock, where an annual overhaul will prepare it for this year’s Operation Deep Freeze.”
Polar Star has stuff breaking all the time. That’s the nature of a ship that goes through the roughest seas in the world to smash through miles of ice every year. (That’s partly why half its crew works in engineering.)
“Engineering challenges are plenty,” says Boda, the ship’s second in command, who has served on both the Polars Sea and Star over the years and is considered, at least by fellow officers, the Coast Guard’s “ice guy.” “Everything is old. We have some new upgrades. For instance, our machinery control is upgraded, but the machinery plant is still old. So we have new computers controlling the old equipment.”
It’s a typical lament: A newer generation has problems communicating with an older one. This explains why Polar Sea is now tied up and crewless at Pier 37, awaiting judgment on her fate. “Polar Sea got an ‘upgrade’—I use upgrade in air quotes—to her propulsion plant. It was supposed to make it more efficient and give you more horsepower and this and that,” says Boda. “Well, actually, the metal of the engines couldn’t take the upgrade. . . . So some significant money has to be invested in Polar Sea’s engineering plant to get that back up to speed compared to where Polar Star is today.”
Thus, the third trouble, uniting past, present, and future: money. Budgeting issues have vexed the icebreakers for 15 years or so even as they needed more and more funding to stay afloat.
In the mid-20th century, both the Coast Guard and the Navy shared icebreaking duty across about a half-dozen boats. Eventually that responsibility got handed to the Coast Guard, and over time the fleet was pared down to just Polar Star and Polar Sea . Healy was commissioned in 1999 and began going north, primarily as a science platform.
In 2006, due to engineering problems, Polar Star was put into “caretaker” status and tied up in Seattle, its crew reduced to 35. Polar Sea and Healy both mostly went north for the rest of the decade while the National Science Foundation contracted with Swedish and Russian icebreakers to clear the way to McMurdo in Antarctica. The propulsion woes mentioned by Boda started in 2010. The Coast Guard had already started to reactivate Polar Star at that time, and decided to put Polar Sea’s crew on Polar Star .
Polar Star was reactivated at the end of 2012 after a $57 million renovation. Its intended shelf life is seven to 10 years. But as a March congressional report on the icebreakers notes, in 2010 then-Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Robert Papp, said, “We’re getting her back into service, but it’s a little uncertain to me how many more years we can get out of her in her current condition.”
So nobody’s overly optimistic about the long-term prospects of rotating the tires on Polar
Star and trusting that basic maintenance will carry it through the mid-2020s. Complicating the issue further is the reopening of the Arctic for exploratory oil drilling for the first time in two decades—which Shell Oil has been quick to exploit by dropping drilling rigs along the Alaskan coastline to search for, according to a National Geographic story, what is estimated to be “13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its undiscovered natural gas.”
As Seattle Weekly reported last week (“Port of Stall,” May 6),Shell plans to use Terminal 5 in Seattle for its oil-exploration fleet. That includes drilling rigs like the Kulluk, which in December 2012 ran aground after Shell decided to tow the giant rig away from the coast of Alaska to avoid tax liabilities, a move which required the Coast Guard to rescue the Kulluk’s crew and which could’ve resulted in an ecological disaster. The subsequent Coast Guard report pointed a lot of fingers at Shell’s judgment. So if Shell does get its permit to use Terminal 5, its Arctic drilling operation and the icebreaker that may have to come save it could be located just down the maritime block from each other.
And make no mistake, the increased Arctic traffic introduced by Shell and other companies adds a whole new role for the icebreakers.
“Drilling in the Arctic is a big deal right now. If you were to have an oil spill and you would need to get people on scene, the best way to do that would be from a ship,” says Boda. “You put ’em on a ship like Polar Star any time of the year, and we can get there. If the oil spill happens late in the season and then it goes over the winter—God forbid, if it’s a long one like Deepwater Horizon—this ship could be on scene the whole time. I don’t think you can say that about any other asset. Once the ice comes in, other ships have got to go. And once the temperatures drop, flights get really restricted with the weather. This ship can be on scene in any weather, any time of the year.”
All of which means that Shell is in a unique position to go to bat for the Coast Guard in requesting a new icebreaker, and the Coast Guard stands to benefit from the interest of an industry that might also introduce new messes for it to clean up.
The icebreaking mission is a tiny part of the Coast Guard’s overall priorities, which include search-and-rescue, drug interdiction, and patrolling U.S. borders. Its total annual budget for acquisition, construction, and improvements is $1 billion, which is about what a new icebreaker is estimated to cost. So securing funding to build a new one—or even just to bring Polar Sea back online ($100 million, Boda guesses) and maintain her and Polar Star for the 10 to 15 years it’ll take to approve and build a replacement—is no sure thing.
That’s the conversation that the Coast Guard, the president, and Congress are having now. But Adam Murray, a research fellow at the University of Washington’s Arctic Law & Policy Institute, wrote in a February op-ed in The Maritime Executive that there’s no clear path to a decision. While Congress has decreed that Polar Sea either be repaired or decommissioned, it “stands poised to appropriate just $1.2 billion for 2015 Coast Guard acquisitions. For 2016, the Coast Guard proposes to spend only $4 million on icebreaker acquisition. If the U.S. is to have a new polar icebreaker, someone needs a new position.”
The Coast Guard, he tells me, is “uncomfortable with it, but they have all these other boats to build.” So the organization has to accept, for now, relying on only Polar Star—durable old Polar Star—to go absolutely anywhere. “They don’t want to be seen as not being able to complete their mission,” he says. And if one of the two icebreakers breaks? “They’re ready until they’re not ready.”
Meanwhile, Healy and Polar Star continue their lonely missions. Healy heads north in June to an ever-busier Arctic, while Polar Star heads south at year’s end to support research into big questions about the origin and fate of the world while its own past and present churn away, deep in the darkness and the cold.
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