Longer than Croke Park, taller than the Cusack Stand
Once fully commissioned, the Australian Antarctic Division's RSV Nuyina will be the biggest scientific icebreaker in the world.
It is designed in such a way that the nose will rise up out of the ice and as it comes downward, it will crush through depths of up to 1.6m by its weight.
While most ships have a pointed hull for slicing through waves, the rounded front of an icebreaker is designed to break through ice and ride over it.
To give a sense of the scale of the Nuyina, the Mullingar man who is project manager for the build, Ronan Maguire, relates it to Croke Park: “So,” he explains, “it is 160 m long; Croke Park is 145 m long, so it's about 15 m longer than Croke Park.
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The Nuyina, being towed into harbour in Holland for final fit-out after its 6,800km journey from the shipyard in Romania in which it was built.Image 2 of 3
Mullingar man Ronan Maguire, in front of Nuyina, the Australian government's new icebreaker, which is intended to serve on Antarctic missions for the coming thirty years. Ronan is the overall project manager for Nuyina – which means he is overseeing the overall build, equipping, testing and eventually management of the ship.Image 3 of 3
Ronan on board the ship, with the crow's nest in the background.“It is 25 m wide. Croke Park is about 80 m wide so it would go about one-third of the way out in the field.
“Then the Cusack stand is the highest stand in Croke Park and it is about 35 m high, and the ship is about 50 m high.”
The ship has 11 decks and even includes a hospital area.
Because of the distance it will travel, the numbers who will be on board and the work in which the scientists among them will be involved and the challenge of accessing the Antarctic, Ronan sees the ship in four guises: an icebreaker, a hotel, a science ship and a cargo vessel.
“First of all, it’s a ‘hotel’, because it has 117 passengers and 32 crew,” he explains.
The passengers will be largely scientists, plus a doctor; the crew consisting of the engineers, deck officers, deck hands – and of course, cooks, chefs, cleaners: “Essentially you are running a hotel and everything that involves from cleaning the toilets to fine dining.
“It has got a gym it's got a sauna; it's got a movie theatre – everything you would have in a hotel.
“The second part of it is a science ship, so it has state-of-the-art technology. It does everything from tracking the numbers of whales in the world to marine life and krill.
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The Australian government's massive new icebreaker - the RSV Nuyina - for which the project manager is Mullingar man Ronan Maguire, filmed in the Bay of Biscay last week alongside the British icebreaker the RSV Sir David Attenborough which coincidentally happened to be doing sea trials in the same area. The Sir David Attenborough was the ship that the British public, in a popular ballot, voted to name "Boaty McBoatface". Footage courtesy of Flying Focus and the Australian Antarctic Division.
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The Nuyina is the only ship in the world to have a watertight room or ‘wet well’ to process seawater for krill and other fragile marine organisms, at up to 1,800 litres per minute. Other state-of-the-art scientific equipment includes acoustic instruments to map and visualise the sea floor and organisms in the water column, and instruments to measure atmospheric gases, cloud properties, wave heights and ice conditions
“There are a lot of laboratories on the ship, and it has a very interesting thing called a ‘moonpool’, which is like something out of a James Bond movie.”
The moonpool is essentially a cavity in the bottom of the ship through which autonomous vehicles or submersible craft can be launched.
“The third thing is it's an icebreaker: it needs to be resilient to go into the most remote zones in the world. There won't be a ship in sight for weeks around it,” says Ronan.
“If you go to the Arctic, it's actually much more busy with shipping routes around Russia and Canada and North Europe. It's actually quite a busy place - in a shipping sense anyway – but the Antarctic has 90% of the world’s ice and nobody can go near it unless they have an actual icebreaker, so this ship has to be polar-code compliant, and we have to be able to reverse through ice. It is designed to be operated and resistant in low temperatures.
“Australia has five research stations on the Antarctic and sub Antarctic region run by the Australian Antarctic Program. There is a team of scientists that lives on the Antarctic all year round and they only get one visit a year, and that is us.
“We will turn up and we will take their rubbish and we will give them all their supplies and equipment and fresh food and everything that they want to last them for a full year.
“We have up to four helicopters on the back deck and there can be many reasons why we can't get the ship all the way in to the station, so if we can't, we use our helicopters to send in the cargo and provisions because otherwise there are people's lives at stake - we are the only people that they will meet in a year.
“The fourth thing is that it's a cargo ship. It carries 94 containers and almost two million litres of fuel.
“Because it's such a mixture of purposes, being a passenger ship and a cargo ship and an icebreaker all rolled into one, it's been really difficult to classify the ship to comply with the shipping standard requirements, so it’s certified as a 'Special Purpose Ship'.”
Logistics
The ship has recently been in the Netherlands, where it was being fitted out with all the equipment it needs, including the high-tech science equipment for its several science labs. The construction of the ship was, initially, undertaken in Romania.
The arrival of Covid both complicated and delayed the process: “In the Romanian shipyard the restrictions hit us hard. If you turned up in Romania you would have to self-isolate for 14 days. So you would go in there do a day's work and then go back to, say Germany and you would have to quarantine for 14 days there. You couldn't do it.”
Eventually work did resume: then came the mammoth task of getting the vessel to Holland: “We essentially towed the ship out of Romania - which was 6800 km - and it took a whole month to tow it all the way out to the Black Sea, all the way around to Istanbul; through the Bosphorus and round the Mediterranean down around Sicily to the Bay of Biscay and then up towards the Netherlands.”
Because of Covid, some of the ship’s testing had to be done remotely, but there is still more to be done: “We have done most of the ship’s tests but there are a few tests left to go to ensure that it does what it says it should do.”
Homeward bound
Ronan expects the ship to depart Europe for its 56-day voyage to Australia in August.
“In November we will sail down to the Antarctic for the maiden voyage down to the ice, so it is just going to be a very busy remaining six months of the year.”
Before departing Europe, the ship intends to establish itself as a Covid-free “citadel”, and to maintain the ship’s occupants’ Covid-free status, the Nuyina cannot stop at any port before Australia.
https://www.westmeathexaminer.ie/2021/07/27/mullingar-antarctic-mystery/