MV Aurora Australis, The bright orange icebreaker an all purpose built ship for clearing a path is designed to take logistical challenges head on. Well, technically as I learnt today from the top.
Icebreakers do not ram the ice as such. I've always assumed these ships split the ice front on dividing the remains aside, but hey you learn something new everyday.
The Australis and other icebreakers ride up onto incoming ice, allowing the dead weight of the ship to actually crack through the shelf.
Our very own big bright orange icebreaker can be found docked over the winter period at the AAD (Australian Antarctic Division) Headquarters in Kingston Tasmania, roughly 10 kilometers south of the capital Hobart.
The Australis was built by P&O Polar and sailed for the first time in September 1989 and nearly 20 years to date, it still remains one of Australia's most unique ships.
BRAD ESSON: Hello, my name is Brad Esson, I’m the chief engineer on the RSV ‘Aurora Australis’. We’re tied up at the moment at Princess Wharf in Hobart.
The ‘Aurora Australis’ is an icebreaker. It can cut ice up to about 1.6 metres at a speed of around one to two knots through the heavier ice and up to 6 knots in the thinner ice.
We’re laid up at the moment doing maintenance work to our main engines, ready for the start of the Antarctic season this year. The ‘Aurora Australis’ travels to Antarctica during the Antarctic summer which is roughly from about October through to about April. And it resupplies all the Australian as well as overseas bases.
We also take expeditioners and scientists down there for the summer. At the moment, I’m standing on the navigational bridge of the ship. The ship is navigated from here, obviously, and steered from here. The ship’s captain controls all the operation up here. I’m in charge of all the technical side of operations so I work down in the engine room.
To get to Antarctica it operates in the Southern Ocean, which is without a doubt the worst seas in the world. We’ve had instances where waves are up to 30 metres or even more. Makes it very unpleasant to try and sleep. A lot of the expeditioners suffer chronically from seasickness and they’ll be seasick for weeks.
Getting down there sometimes, you do feel sorry for them because they don’t eat, but you haven’t got to queue up as long to get your meals. Here we have a chart of the various places this vessel has travelled since it was built. The main places we go is – Hobart is here. That’s Macquarie Island.
Down here we have Casey Base, here we have Davis Base and here we have Mawson Base. As we go further south to around about Macquarie Island and Heard Island is where the extreme weather is, in this belt here. As you head further south you start to strike icebergs at around 60 south.
And at 60 south and further, it gets calmer and calmer because the sea is damped down by all the ice. There are two main types of ice. One of them is sea ice and the other is icebergs. Icebergs have been broken off off an ice shelf or off a glacier and they’re fresh water. And the other ice, we call it pancake ice or just sea ice, which is, basically, the top of the sea is frozen. Here we have the lifeboats. There’s one on each side of the ship. We hope we never have to use them, but they’re here just in case. Inside here you can see each of those black marks is a bottom, is one man.
So as you can imagine, it’d be very cramped in there in an emergency. So we like to spend as little time as possible in the lifeboats. The absolute last resort. This is my cabin where I live. I’ve got the same as the captain’s cabin, so he’s got one exactly the same on the other side of the ship. Most cabins are a lot smaller. We’ll show you that later. I’m standing now in the galley which is where all the food’s prepared.
There’s three cooks, and cooking for up to 140 people, three meals a day. This is one of the expeditioners cabins. Each of those two loungers fold out to bunks and those other boards at the top there fold down to be bunks. So there’s four per cabin. I’m now standing in the cargo hold. This is a twin-deck cargo hold, so these plates lift up, there’s another area the size of this below us.
We carry all our provisions for the Antarctic in here for all the bases. There’s bulldozers and containers and food and all sorts of things. These doors above me fold open and we use the crane to lift the cargo out of here and put it on the ice. Here we are in the engine control room. All the systems are controlled from here. Everything is monitored from here, pressures and temperatures.
If we have a problem, if something isn’t operating correctly, an alarm will sound in here. And if it’s outside working hours, it will sound in the duty engineer’s cabin. We also control all the hotel services. This vessel has over 100 people on board, so you are basically controlling a small town. So we have all the waters, sewerage systems, electricity, airconditioning.
Basically, what my day-to-day life on here is work, eat and sleep. I don’t do anything else. I don’t read books, I don’t… I watch the occasional video, but maybe less than five in a whole trip. This area is the engine room so it’s very noisy. You need earmuffs and ear protection at all times.
And you can’t communicate with people. The only way to communicate is by gesturing or take them to another quiet area. We can burn up to 60,000 litres of diesel a day. We can load probably up to 2,000 tonnes, or two million litres, of diesel.
Here I am standing back out on deck again. Just fore of the bridge, or forward of the bridge. I hope you have enjoyed our tour of the ‘Aurora Australis’ and, yeah, it’s a great place, Antarctica.
