Icebreakers and Arctic ice melt

Matala replies: The question Peter Steur asks , whether it is reasonable to advocate the use of icebreakers “to gauge global effects of the polar region’s diminishing ice cover,” would be better answered by a climate change expert.

As a historian of technology, not a trained climate scientist, I consider what information the contemporary actors had. The Helsinki shipyard contracted for the first Moskva-class polar icebreakers in the mid 1950s, before climate change was seriously considered in ship design.

My article emphasized the ability of polar icebreakers to “cut through multiyear Arctic sea ice” because length constraints restricted discussion of other features that differentiated the polar icebreakers from the previous Finnish design. Getting through multiyear ice is a heavy task even for modern icebreakers. Most of the shipping activities in the Northern Sea Route take place during the summer season when sea-ice cover is lower.

Polar icebreakers also make the Arctic Sea accessible for research vessels gathering information essential to improving climate models. As historian Melvin Kranzberg famously put it, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”