The 52 passengers of the Akademik Shokalskiy, the scientific research vessel that became stuck in heavy sea ice off Antarctica over Christmas, arrived back on dry land on Wednesday morning, after an international rescue operation and almost two months at sea.
On board the ship that had brought them back, the Aurora Australis, the passengers had cheered when they were given clearance, at 9am local time, to leave the vessel and make their way home. The Australian icebreaker had rescued the Shokalskiy’s passengers from the thick ice floes off east Antarctica’s Commonwealth Bay some three weeks earlier. Standing at the top of the gangplank, Leanne Millhouse, the Aurora Australis voyage leader, hugged each of the passengers as they filed past and made their way off the ship.
“It’s great to be back on terra firma and back in warm sunshine,” said Chris Turney, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales and leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), which chartered the Shokalskiy. “I’d just like to say a huge thanks to all the friends and family out there who have supported us. But particularly the Australian, Chinese, American and French Antarctic groups who have worked so hard to bring us all home safely.”
The Shokalskiy became trapped in pack ice about 1,500 nautical miles from Hobart, just over two weeks into what should have been a month-long expedition, from Bluff in New Zealand to Commonwealth Bay in east Antarctica. In addition to the Aurora Australis, the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, the French vessel L’Astrolabe, and the American icebreaker Polar Star were all tasked to help the Shokalskiy get free.
On 2 January, after 10 days stuck in the ice, the 52 passengers were airlifted, using the Xue Long’s helicopter, to the Aurora Australis. The 20 or so Russian crew of the Shokalskiy elected to stay with their ship.
At a briefing on Wednesday in Hobart, Tony Fleming, director of the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), welcomed the return of the Australian icebreaker and said that responding to the Shokalskiy’s distress call had over the new year been the “right thing to do”.
He added that the rescue operation could end up costing up to $2.4m (about £1.5m). “This includes cost of fuel, staff and the charter costs for the Aurora Australis. The government will be pursuing all avenues to recover costs [from insurers] and minimise the burden to the Australian taxpayer. It isn’t possible to quantify the final cost to the Australian government at this stage.”
Several days after the rescue, the Shokalskiy managed to escape the pack ice thanks to a change in the weather, and arrived back in New Zealand last week.
Alan Lloyd, search and rescue operations manager for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa), which co-ordinated the rescue of the Shokalskiy, said that despite the Russian-operated ship’s successful return to port, evacuating its passengers in early January had been the right decision at the time.
“We had a vessel in a very remote area, with a large number of people on board. While the situation did stabilise, the threat of the ice crushing the ship’s hull and causing persons to abandon, and with that large number of people, it was Amsa’s and the [Shokalskiy] master’s decision to reduce the risk involved and that involved the transfer of the passengers,” Lloyd said.
The Aurora Australis was halfway through its re-supply of the Casey Antarctic station when it was called on to help the Shokalskiy. Fleming said the diversion of the ship to the rescue effort had affected several ongoing science projects, though the AAD was doing all it could to minimise any further disruptions.
Researchers had been intending to get baseline data this season, for example, before the start of a big project due to begin at Casey next year. That study, to look at ocean acidification on the sea-floor environment, was interrupted when the Aurora Australis responded to the distress call. When the ship came back to Casey after rescuing the Shokalskiy passengers, researchers were able to complete much of their work but Fleming said there were “compromises to that programme and it will affect next year’s major science project”.
The Aurora Australis is two weeks behind schedule getting into Hobart, though Fleming said the delay would be reduced to a week by shortening the time the ship stays in dock before heading out again. The icebreaker has further voyages in the coming weeks to resupply the Mawson Antarctic research station, coming back via the Davis and Casey stations to pick up ice cores from a project already completed deep in the Antarctic interior.
“We always plan for contingencies – Antarctic weather doesn’t allow us to plan precisely the season,” said Fleming. “We’ve got flexibility in the season and this [rescue] incident has reduced that flexibility to zero.”
Fleming added that the rescue operation would have a lot to teach the AAD about its specifications for future icebreaker ships. “One of the criteria of a new vessel will be its requirement to be able to be deployed for search and rescue events and we’ll learn a lot from this experience. We’ll review this experience and learn a lot from this misadventure.”
Murray Doyle, master of the Aurora Australis, said his ship was rated for moving at 2 knots through 1.35m-thick ice that has up top 20cm of snow on top. “That’s been good for normal operations,” he said. “It would be very nice to have more icebreaking capability.”
Among the Shokalskiy’s passengers were scientists and paying members of the public who helped during the various oceanographic, ornithology and ecological experiments. They were following in the footsteps of the great Antarctic explorer and scientist Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911.
The ship had been sailing through the Southern Ocean, repeating and extending many of Mawson’s wildlife and weather observations to build a picture of how this part of the world had changed in the past 100 years.
