August 24, 2024:
China recently put into service Jidi, its third icebreaker ship. This 5,600-ton vessel can break through ice up to a meter thick and do so while moving at a speed of about three kilometers an hour. The ship has accommodations for 60 personnel, which includes crew and specialists to operate the air, surface and subsurface drones carried. Jidi has sufficient fuel and other supplies to stay at sea for 80 days. The surface drone can transport 250 kg of supplies for trips to nearby bases surrounded by shallow or otherwise unsuitable conditions for Jidi to get close enough to unload cargo.
China’s first icebreaker, Xue Long, entered service in 1993. This ship was built as an Arctic cargo icebreaking ship in Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. Xue Long was a 21,000-ton vessel that could carry up to 160 crew and passengers along with a helicopter. This ship was converted by China in the 1990s to operate as a polar research ship. The ship underwent a major refurbishment in 2007. A second icebreaker, Xue Long 2, entered service in 2019. Similar but slightly smaller than Xue Long , the new ship was more capable and served as the model for Jidi. This was a remarkable achievement for China, which built these ships in part to make effective used of the new Russian ice-breaking design.
In 1899 Russia pioneered the design and production of ocean-going icebreakers when it introduced the 10,000-ton Esmark. The United States, Canada and most European nations with Arctic waters also obtained icebreakers so they could enter and explore iced over waters and provide resupply for Arctic, and later Antarctic bases.
Chinese coastal waters are largely ice free. But in the north, the Bohai Sea (near the capital Beijing) and the Shandon Sea to the south, there are iced over waters during the winter months. This ice is usually no thicker than a meter or so and without icebreakers there are some periods during the winter that ships must either wait for the ice to melt or land their cargo at an ice free port and have it moved by truck or train to its destination. After the Chinese communists took power in 1949, they found northern China had no icebreakers and was unable to support all the shipping activities in those areas when there was ice. Until 1945, Japan handled ice breaking activities off the Chinese northern coast but only had one icebreaker, which the Americans captured in 1945 and later turned over to Japan to be used as a Museum Ship. Currently, Japan has two icebreakers.
Until the 1980s, political disputes within the Chinese government as well as money shortages prevented China from developing its own Arctic research program, or obtaining icebreakers to handle winter periods when coastal waters are iced over. Some cargo ships are built to break through thin (less than a meter thick) ice. Some cargo ships that operate in areas that are sometimes iced over are built with reinforced hulls to handle some ice but depend on icebreaker ships to open ice-free channels.
The nations with the longest Arctic coastlines are Canada, Norway, Danish Greenland, Russia and the United States. Russia has the longest Arctic coastline that is regular in use for commercial traffic. This is the 5,600 kilometer long Northern Sea Route (NSR), which became operational in 2010. For cargo moving by ship between East Asia and Europe, the NSR cuts transit time by about a quarter. Its predominant users are China and Russia. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Western shipping ceased to use the NSR, leaving the NSR handing mostly Russian and Chinese ships. There are no fees charged for using the NSR and Russia is trying to revive Western use of the NSR despite the war in Ukraine. The NSR is a cheaper alternative to the Suez Canal for many northern hemisphere countries. Currently Yemen Houthi rebels are firing on shipping headed north towards the Suez canal, so most commercial shipping has stopped using the canal and taken the longer and more expensive route around the southern tip of Africa.