Hunting Icebergs From Oil Platforms in Arctic Seas
Attention is locked on icebergs in Russia as well. But in our country, they don’t just watch the movement of ice, but also adjust it. Russian oilfield workers are now developing a system for managing ice conditions in the Arctic. And the participants of the Kara-Summer 2017 research expedition continue working on towing icebergs off the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. We'll talk more about this with a meteorologist, Yekaterina Grigorova PhD, Geography Science.
- Katya joins us in the studio. Hello!
- Good morning! How do you determine which icebergs are dangerous for drilling rigs, and which ones aren't? First, we watch icebergs from space. In addition, during the Kara-Summer 2017 expedition, we have already accumulated knowledge of how icebergs behave, what routes they follow, and how they’ll behave in the Russian Arctic sector.
The first thing we did during the Kara-Summer-2017 expedition, organized by Rosneft, was towing an iceberg weighing 200,000 tons. It was discovered as a result of decoding pictures from space.
Two satellite beacons were installed on the iceberg, which is 75 by 35 meters. Based on the job specifics, Russian specialists came up with a unique way of their installation. Inside a zorb, there is a whole floating laboratory. For the safety analysis of towing operations, a 3D model of the object was constructed.
Also, a network of operational monitoring of the hydro-meteorological situation in the field of work is being developed. The problem of iceberg dangers to the development of offshore deposits in the Arctic seas became relevant after the discovery of an anomalously large number of icebergs in the Shtokman gas and condensate field in the Barents Sea in 2003.
There were more than 100. The largest had a mass of more than three million tons. In 2004 and 2005, the first experiments on affecting icebergs were performed. And their results were used in the development of technology for changing the ice blocks' trajectories.