Two men, a hovercraft, and a year adrift on Arctic Ocean ice

The central Arctic Ocean is one of the least-visited surfaces on the planet and one of the most argued-over. Five states have coastlines on it, seabed claims overlap, and the water is transited by vessels that do not publish their positions. It is also, for most of the year, physically almost impossible to be in.

In October 2014, a wire story went round under the headline that a mystery submarine sighting had given a clue to Russia’s Arctic ambitions. It was republished across a long tail of aggregator sites, and the durable trace of it now is a media-coverage list on the University of Bergen’s geoscience pages. Reports like that are seldom confirmable from open sources, and the expedition literature does not substantiate one, so it is worth setting the claim aside and looking at what the same page actually documents. Because Bergen had two people out there at the time, and their expedition is on the record in detail.

The platform

Yngve Kristoffersen, professor emeritus at the University of Bergen’s Department of Geoscience, and Audun Tholfsen spent about fifty weeks on the ice of the Arctic Ocean. Their platform was a research hovercraft named Sabvabaa, which had arrived in Longyearbyen on Svalbard, at 78°14’N, in June 2008.

The reasoning behind the vehicle is set out in a 2014 paper by Kristoffersen and John K. Hall on hovercraft as a mobile science platform over sea ice. A hovercraft resolves a problem that has constrained Arctic fieldwork since Nansen: sea ice is neither a surface you can drive on reliably nor water you can sail through, and the boundary between the two moves. An air-cushion vehicle crosses ice, open leads and the rotten margin between them without caring much which it is on. It can also be shut down and left on a floe, at which point it stops being a vehicle and becomes a station.

The drift

The station was established at 87°20.7’N, 153°58.8’E, about 296 km from the North Pole, and then went wherever the ice went. Total drift: roughly 2,200 km.

That is the essential and slightly disorienting feature of the method. A drift station has no route. Nansen’s Fram was frozen in deliberately between 1893 and 1896 for exactly this reason, and the 2014–2015 hovercraft track is routinely shown against the Fram track, a hundred and twenty years apart, because they are the same experiment with different equipment.

The scientific payoff of going where the ice goes is coverage that no icebreaker cruise can buy. Over the year the station crossed the Lomonosov Ridge five times. The ridge is an undersea mountain chain rising around three kilometres from the basin floor, and repeat crossings of the same structure from a slowly moving platform produce a kind of data that a ship transiting once cannot.

Getting home required help. The sealer Havsel met Kristoffersen at 81°N and escorted Sabvabaa back to Longyearbyen, where the hovercraft came in to Kullkaia on 22 August.

Why a ridge is a political object

The Lomonosov Ridge is where the science and the sovereignty argument meet, and the connection is not rhetorical.

Under the law of the sea, a coastal state’s rights over the seabed can extend beyond the standard limit where the seabed is a natural prolongation of its land territory. Whether the Lomonosov Ridge qualifies as such a prolongation, and of whose landmass, is therefore a question about geology with direct consequences for who may exploit a large area of Arctic seabed. Russia, Denmark and Canada have all filed submissions bearing on it.

That is the reason bathymetric and geophysical data from the central Arctic is not merely academic, and the reason a two-person drift station crossing the ridge five times is doing something more consequential than it looks.

The part worth keeping

A syndicated headline about an unidentified vessel is, thirty seconds of reading later, gone. What remains from the same water and the same year is a documented fifty-week occupation of the central Arctic by two people and a hovercraft, with a track, a set of crossings and a published rationale for the vehicle.

It is also a reminder of the scale mismatch in that region. The Arctic Ocean is the object of competing claims by several of the largest states on Earth, and for a year the human presence at its centre was two Norwegians on a floe, drifting.