Icebound passengers rescued
Vessel stuck in Antarctica more than a week
All 52 passengers trapped for more than a week on an icebound Russian research ship in the Antarctic were rescued Thursday when a Chinese helicopter swooped in and plucked them from the ice a dozen at a time.
The dramatic international rescue operation became possible once the weather finally cleared. Blinding snow, strong winds, fog and thick sea ice forced rescuers to turn back time and again.
The twin-rotor helicopter — its red and yellow colours contrasting starkly against the ice and snow — carried the scientists and tourists from the Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy to an Australian icebreaker, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Centre, which oversaw the rescue.
At one point, the passengers linked arms and stomped out a landing site in the snow next to the Russian ship for the helicopter, which is based on a Chinese icebreaker.
The eagerly anticipated rescue came after days of failed attempts to reach the vessel, which was trapped since Christmas Eve. The icebreaker Aurora Australis will take the passengers to the Australian island state of Tasmania, a journey expected to last two weeks.
“I think everyone is relieved and excited to be going on to the Australian icebreaker and then home,” expedition leader Chris Turney told The Associated Press by satellite phone from the Antarctic.
The 22 crew members of the Akademik Shokalskiy stayed with the icebound vessel, which is not in danger of sinking and has enough supplies on board to last for weeks. They will wait until the ice that surrounds the ship breaks up.
The Akademik Shokalskiy, which left New Zealand on Nov. 28, got stuck after a blizzard pushed the sea ice around the ship, freezing it in place about 2,700 kilometres south of Hobart, Tasmania.
Three icebreakers were dispatched to try to crack their way through the ice surrounding the Russian ship, but all failed. The Aurora came within 20 kilometres of the ship Monday, but fierce winds and snow forced it to retreat to open water.
While scientists expect and observe more extreme weather with man-made global warming, some say it’s not quite fair to blame the Antarctic blizzard that trapped the ship on climate change.
University of Colorado ice scientist Waleed Abdalati, NASA’s former chief scientist, cautioned, like many scientists do, that while researchers can spot a trend in extreme weather, they can’t immediately associate an individual event — like a blizzard — with changing climate. When scientists do attribute an individual extreme weather event to climate change, it is usually more than a year later after numerous computer model simulations and then published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Also, Antarctica, which is more governed by localized wind circulation and other characteristics, “is kind of its own beast,” Abdalati said. “Antarctica feels the changing climate a little differently than the rest of the world. I myself can’t point to the weather and say ‘it’s part of a changing climate.’ ”