| By Danielle Bochove At a shipyard in Finland last month, workers cut the first steel for a new icebreaker ship. Over the next three years, about 10,000 tons of the metal will go into the hull before the vessel is carried across the ocean to Quebec for completion. It will be the first heavy icebreaker built – at least partly – in Canada in more than half a century, with an estimated cost of C$3.3 billion ($2.4 billion) and the capacity to work in polar latitudes year-round. The Canadian government has funded two dozen new icebreakers, hoping to more than double its current fleet. China, Sweden, and other countries are also in the process of expanding their fleets, according to Finland’s Aker Arctic Technology Oy.  The Russian nuclear icebreaker Yakutiya during sea trials in St. Petersburg. Photographer: SOPA Images/LightRocket US President Donald Trump has icebreaker ambitions of his own – and they’re not modest. To the current US fleet of three, he wants to add 48 ships; his sweeping tax bill earmarked $8.6 billion to get started. “I have never seen a demand signal like this in shipbuilding for icebreakers,” said James Davies, chief executive of Quebec-based Chantier Davie Canada Inc., whose Davie Shipyards is building the new Canadian vessel in Finland and Quebec. The thawing of the top of the world from climate change has stirred a global competition to forge new, previously unnavigable shipping routes and access once-remote oil and gas fields and stores of minerals. The big melt also opens up formerly ice-bound areas to military activity. That’s where icebreakers come in. The need for the ships rises, counterintuitively, as sea ice declines. Shipping corridors that used to be frozen solid for much of the year now have less ice and can be made navigable year-round — with the right vessel. If geopolitical interest in the polar region has surged, so have US and Canadian worries about how to defend their vast Arctic territories. Alaska is by far the largest US state, twice as big as Texas, and Canada’s Arctic is more than two-and-a-half times the size of Alaska. Recent strategies released by both nations share concerns about Chinese and Russian activity and cooperation in the region. Russia is the clear world leader in icebreakers, with 47 in service, according to Mikhail Grigoriev, director of the Moscow-based Gecon consultancy. An additional 15 Russian vessels are under construction, Grigoriev said, and a contract has been signed for yet another. One appealing feature of icebreakers for countries rushing to acquire more of them is that they’re multi-purpose. They can keep harbors open and clear ice patches. They can signal a nation’s presence in a sensitive area, conduct surveillance, undertake scientific research or carry out search-and-rescue operations. But there’s a downside: They can’t track or evade submarines, because they’re too noisy.
“Having been on a ship on the ice, it sounds like you’re driving a 1970s pickup truck down a gravel road,” said Peter Rybski, a retired US navy engineer and icebreaker expert who served as US naval attache to Finland from 2017 to 2021. “From a naval perspective, they’re easy for submarines to find. And since they’re so noisy, they can’t find submarines.” Read the full story. Subscribe for even more news on the rapidly changing Arctic. | 
