In 2010, after almost 30 years of distinguished service, the (German) Council of Science and Humanities proposed a new research icebreaker to replace the Polarstern, the research vessel of the German Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). The Polarstern, which became operational on 9th December 1982, is deemed one of the most powerful research vessels ever built, if not the most powerful one, but at that point it was approaching obsolescence, while new technologies would have allowed a new ship to perform research which would have been difficult if not impossible with the old vessel. The recommendation was immediately accepted by the AWI, and at that point the Polarstern 2 – as the new icebreaker was called – was expected to start working in 2016, first alongside the old Polarstern and then alone.
In 2017, when it was expected to go into retirement, the old Polarstern would have been operational for 35 years already. The average lifespan of a ship ranges between 30 and 50 years, but the upper limit is achievable only with constant maintenance, repair and refit: for instance, the fleet of six 40-year-old icebreakers operating in the Great Lakes by the US Coast Guard is considered “aging”. But Germany needed a new icebreaker for two other reasons. On the one hand, with its capacity of just 124 people, the old Polarstern could not meet all the applications to take part in the expeditions it organised. According to Dr. Eberhard Fahrbach from the AWI, “for many expeditions there are applications from two to three times more researchers than we can accommodate”. On the other hand, as Germany’s only large icebreaker, the Polarstern has also to perform logistical tasks, such as bringing supplies to the Neumayer Station III and other Antarctic stations.
Projecting a new icebreaker, nevertheless, is not easy task. First of all, the designers should define its desired class. Since icebreakers are classified according to the thickness of the ice they can go through, on a scale ranging from PC7 (the lowest) to PC1 (the highest), we may suppose that the highest the class, the better it is. But, apart from the difficulties at building a high-class icebreaker (no PC1 icebreaker has been built so far, for instance), there is a trade-off between class and performance. The higher the class of the icebreaker, the more the steel required to build it, the heavier the ship will become and the more, in turn, will be the power required to move it. Likewise, ceteris paribus, the more an icebreaker is powerful on ice, the less will be its open water performance, its cargo capacity and so on.
Since both ice and open water performance are important for a vessel of this type, finding the right balance is very important, especially if we consider that research icebreakers may have to go through sea and ocean basins often characterised by very rough weather conditions, such as the Drake Channel between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula (see Drake Shake). Likewise, for a ship which spends more than 300 days a year at sea on average, the comfort of the passengers and the layout of the working deck are not definitely not irrelevant.
Designing a research icebreaker is such a complex task that it may at least in part explain the delays in its realisation. Needless to say, the 2016 deadline was not respected; but, further than the timing, the costs increased as well. In 2010, the cost for the project and the construction of the ship had been estimated at 450 million euro; in 2018, it had increased to 550-650 million euro. And, while the negotiations for the construction of the icebreaker were expected to end in 2019, on 14th February 2020 the tender for the building of the Polarstern 2 was cancelled by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This was just a few days before the spread of the Coronavirus pandemics in Europe; and, at that point, the German government had other priorities.
The Polarstern 2 project was resumed on 3rd June 2022, when its construction was approved by the Federal Government, with costs now estimated at 800-900 million euro, and expected to be completed in 2027. The relaunch of this plan was still accompanied by great expectations: the then-Minister of Education and Research Bettina Stark-Watzinger stated that “the polar regions are an early-warning system for the impacts of climate change and offer us invaluable glimpses into the future of our climate and weather”, while Detlef Wilde, chief of the newly formed AWI project group set to oversee the construction of the new icebreaker, stated that “in nearly 40 years of service, the one-of-a-kind Polarstern consistently set high standards”, which the new ship should even surpass.
How would the new Polarstern have differed from the old one? In 2022, it was stated that new model would have been bigger and able to penetrate at least some of the few ice banks which were off limits for the current model, such as those on the Weddell Sea. This was confirmed one year later by the head of the Polarstern 2 project team Heinrich Miller, interviewed by the Austrian TV broadcaster ORF one year later. During this interview, Miller stated that the increased icebreaking capability of the new model would have allowed the Polarstern 2 to perform research in such areas also in winter, and at the same time he underlined the scientific interest of the Weddell Sea for the study of the Antarctic Bottom Water, the coldest sea water in the world. Also, in order to perform such research, the new icebreaker would have had a moonpool on the bottom of the ship, through which a remotely-operated robot could have been submerged into water without having to rely on ice floe as with the current Polarstern. Last but not least, according to Miller, the Polarstern 2 would have been more eco-friendly than its predecessor, with tanks placed at the bottom of the ship, waste to be managed inside the vessel and even emissions retained inside the ship for a while, also in order not to impact with atmospheric measurements.
As we can see, the plans for the replacement of the Polarstern were quite ambitious, but at the moment its construction hasn’t started yet. On 8th May 2024, some members of the opposition CDU party, including its current secretary Friedrich Merz, submitted a written question to the government about the delays in the realisation of the project. The bidding process was opened one month later; and, as per EU rules, the procurement must be EU-wide, therefore including all shipyards of the EU member states. There are great expectations over the process, since the tender will create up to 2,000 new jobs according to some estimates, and Bremerhaven’s major Melf Grants hopes that the Polarstern 2 will be built in the shipyards of his home city (which, by the way, is also the home port of the Polarstern further than hosting the AWI itself). According to the last available information, dating back to the 1st November, all the tenders have been submitted; but no choice has been done yet.
Will the 2027 deadline be ultimately respected? During the aforementioned interview, Miller stated that, while in the early 80’s the Polarstern could be built in two years, the construction of the new model will be definitely longer, because new ships are more complex; but, at that point, he was still hopeful that the Polarstern 2 would be built by 2027. At the moment, nevertheless, this timeline is becoming increasingly unlikely. Therefore, if we consider that the old Polarstern will not be scrapped or withdrawn immediately after the Polarstern 2 will be put into operation, but that the two ships are likely to operate together for around a year, the good old icebreaker is likely to be operational until the end of this decade at least. To be fair, we must emphasise that we are still talking about a top-class research vessel: it is still able to spend over 300 days a year at sea, and between September 2019 and October 2020, when it was already almost 40 years old, it performed one of the largest polar expeditions in history, the first one to bring a research icebreaker close to the North Pole during polar winter. But the old Polarstern is starting to show its age, and according to Miller “the existing Polarstern can no longer be at sea, because the legal requirements have changed greatly”.
Giuseppe Cappelluti
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