Ice is the new frontier
For research communities, engineers, students of offshore structures and fossil-fuel energy professionals, arctic is the new challenge. It now seems to be drawing more crowd than ever before. Anyone who has read Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra would know what I am talking about.
There will be a series of conferences, this following year, with exclusive focus on this topic—in both as primers and, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to see some researched stuff, various hands-on approaches tested in these limited waters, or should I say, frost. The industry is just waking up to it.
Ice poses the ultimate challenge. Its sheer magnitude, both in spread and in depth, threatens the very existence of structures. Combine that with tricks that steel molecules begin playing at subzero temperatures, and you’ve got danger, non-compliance and disaster written all over.
Anyone remotely familiar with metallurgy, in temperatures of the negative kind, would know how (molecular) grain distribution of steel becomes uneven, making molecules concentrate at the edges and thin-out at the center. This is the prime reason why qualifying a steel specimen in a charpy test in the center of a plate, unlike at the edges, in controlled subzero temperature is such a pain. Would it surprise you that mankind does not yet have the technology to go below -40 degree celsius without compromising on the integrity of steel.
While Titanic taught the industry to build ice-class vessels, we have very few structures1 designed to resist and survive in extreme environments such as the arctic.
If I am lucky and if things go as planned, then I will be attending the kick-start of this process at this conference in Oslo this coming January. Is Ice your challenge? Does it fascinate you? Then why not join a group of technologists meeting up there?
Update: As luck would have it, I couldn’t attend—thanks to the amount of (residence permit related) paper work I was buried under.
- Molikpaq, offshore Sakhalin Island, Okhotsk Sea, Russia is one of the very few ice-class structures ever built. [←]