'Polar rollers' -- the U.S. lifeline to Antarctica

Instead of working pier-side while his ship, Polar Sea, is being repaired, Coast Guard Capt. Bruce Toney would rather be under way in Antarctica, up in the "aloft con."

2 ships' future is on thin ice

It's a crow's nest control room on a thick mast 104 feet above the waterline. There, Toney, an Idaho farm kid who went to the Coast Guard Academy and to sea 26 years ago, practices the arts and sciences:

The art of icebreaking to study science in the polar regions.

"It gives you a 12-mile horizon to pick and choose what's ahead of you," he says of the high tower.

It also gives a wider sway to those inside, requiring stronger sea legs and stomachs as the round-bottomed vessel, which lacks bilge keels and fin stabilizers, drives through ice, rolling 45 to 60 degrees in 10-second increments.


		Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
	Capt. Bruce Toney is the skipper of Polar Sea, docked behind him. The Coast Guard cutter is undergoing repairs at Todd Shipyards in Seattle.

"That's why they call them the 'polar rollers,' " Toney says with a grin.

His ship, its twin sister, Polar Star, and the newer Coast Guard cutter, Healy, built mainly for the Arctic, together constitute the nation's polar ice-breaking fleet, based in Seattle, the U.S. lifeline to studies in the polar regions.

With 60,000 horsepower each from their three big turbines, Polar Star and Polar Sea are the most powerful non-nuclear ships in the world. The 5-year-old Healy, though modern and with more research space, has 30,000 horsepower.

The "Polar" sisters can break 6-foot-thick ice continuously at sustained speeds of 3 knots, or about 5 mph. They can break up to 21-foot-thick ice by backing and ramming.

The Healy can sustain the same speed through 4.5-foot-thick ice, and break up to 8-foot-thick ice by backing and ramming.

The difficulty is determined not only by the thickness of ice but its age.

"The older the ice, the more sea salt drains from it, and the more salt is drained, the harder it is," said Cmdr. Tom Wojahn, the Coast Guard's ice operations program manager in Washington, D.C.

Icebreaking is just that, and it requires some tricky driving. The propulsion system pushes the ships' extensive sloped bows over the ice; the weight cracks it. The wide bow pushes ice to the side and back of the ship.

In many cases, however, chunks go underneath, threatening the rudder and three propellers. Often, the outer of the three 45-ton propellers take a beating by chopping blocks the size of a car like a blender.

"Icebreakers are the one ship in the fleet where the round end and the pointy end are opposite" of the way other ships are built, Toney said of the vessel's design, which allows "squirm room" to turn.

A trip into Antarctica's austral summer begins in early November. The icebreakers usually travel from Seattle to Hawaii for a shakedown, go to Australia to refuel and move through the rough Tasmanian Sea to begin icebreaking by Christmas. It took more than a month this year to reach McMurdo Station.

A full contingent totals about 180 people, including 35 scientists led by a designated "principal investigator," and a helicopter crew. Mobile labs and storage containers are fitted to the decks.

The icebreaking lifeline is important because the polar region environments are considered early indicators of changes for the whole planet.

The icebreakers also are research platforms, plumbing the depths of the ocean for biological and oceanic information.

Antarctica, which has grown colder while the Arctic ice cap has declined, is protected by international treaty from natural resource exploitation and military bases.

The continent's ice yields answers -- and raises some questions -- in the core samples that measure world events in eons instead of decades, in genetic alterations to ice creatures, or in energy from subatomic neutrino collisions.

McMurdo Station, where the huts of explorers Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton are still frozen in time, is the logistical center of the Antarctic program. Balloons aloft check the ozone layer.

The "dry valleys" of the Transarctic Mountains, 350 miles away, have not seen precipitation in 2 million years. Mount Erebus, a 12,444-foot active volcano on nearby Ross Island, has been continuously active since 1972.

A new South Pole space observatory is expected to shed light on the existence of the mysterious dark energy that fills most of the universe, and the fingerprints of its beginnings.

"If we don't get (the supply ships) to McMurdo each year," Toney said, "the whole program comes to a standstill."

P-I reporter Mike Barber can be reached at 206-448-8018 or mikebarber@seattlepi.com

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