ABSTRACT

Over the past 50 years, Eastern Canada has served as a hub for pioneering ice engineering research, development, and practice aimed at enabling and supporting safe marine and offshore activities in this region. In this paper, recent developments in ice engineering technology, such as rapid iceberg profiling systems, improved physical and machine learning (ML) models of iceberg drift, and the rapid high-impact test apparatus (RHITA) are discussed in the context of how such technologies may be applied to enhance ongoing and future marine operations in Antarctic waters.

INTRODUCTION

Eastern Canada, particularly Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), has served as an international hub for research and development (R&D) in ice engineering and practice since about 1975. This research has been primarily driven by industry needs to enable, support, and improve safe and efficient offshore operations in the harsh ice and marine environment in this region. The main industries behind this activity in Eastern Canada are offshore oil and gas exploration and production, and shipping. More recently, there has been increased focus on offshore renewable energy development in this region, namely wind energy.

In recent years, remote sensing and geophysical-scale modelling methods, as well as tools for capturing high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) geometries of icebergs in the ocean have rapidly advanced. These new technologies have supported the development of innovative new approaches for supporting safe operational activities in this region. This encompasses a diverse array of engineering tools and risk-based approaches to support the design and operation of ships, structures, and systems developed for the harsh, cold conditions prevalent off the coast of NL. Such applications are underpinned by innovative risk-based design methodologies, structural analysis methods, experimental modelling, and extensive numerical modelling efforts for a wide variety of ice engineering and ice-structure interaction scenarios.

Much of the coast of Eastern Canada, particularly the coast of Labrador, is a sub-Arctic marine environment. Icebergs up to hundreds of meters in waterline length are prevalent, often drifting south to the coast of Newfoundland in the late spring. Icebergs can remain year-round along the coast of Labrador and are locked in pack ice during the winter months in this region. Pack ice, including land-fast ice, forms seasonally along the Labrador coast in the winter months and melts out completely in the late spring to early summer. Multi-year ice floes can occasionally drift into the region from the high Arctic through the Nares Strait. In 2011, large fragments of the ice island that calved from the Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland drifted along the Labrador coast to the waters offshore Newfoundland. These fragments were large tabular icebergs similar in shape to those often found along the Antarctic coast.

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