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• ANNUAL REPORT 2013
can then take the images to study how the ice behaved
during the experiments they conducted aboard Oden.
“You can see how the ice interacts with the structure,
what happens in the interaction zone, how the ice breaks
and cracks,” he said. “This is a real field of innovation.”
A multinational group
The cruise participants came from 14 different insti-
tutions/businesses: NTNU, the University Centre
in Svalbard (UNIS), TU-Delft in the Netherlands, St.
Petersburg State Polytechnical University, the Technical
University of Catalonia BarcelonaTech (UPC) in Spain,
the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, the University of
Delaware, the Norwegian oil company Statoil, Maritime
Robotics, ASL Environmental Sciences in Canada,
Marine Observers in Denmark, and the Ship Modelling
and Simulation Centre AS in Norway.
The cruise was made possible in part by a memorandum
of understanding between NTNU and the Swedish Polar
Research Secretariat, and was conducted with support
from Statoil and in collaboration with the Swedish
Maritime Administration, which owns Oden.
LANCE 2013, real ice experience
The Department of Arctic Technology at UNIS regularly
hires RV Lance for research cruises in the waters
around Svalbard. In 2013, Professor Jukka Tuhkuri and
Dr. Arttu Polojärvi, researchers from Aalto University,
one of SAMCoT’s partners, were invited to join a ten-day
expedition to the western Barents Sea. The cruise was
headed by Professor Aleksey Marchenko. Researchers
from different SAMCoT work packages and other inter-
national collaborating institutions also joined this
expedition.
LANCE 2013 is a clear example of research-based
education and of how we successfully strengthen inter-
national research collaboration. The following partici-
pants played a key part in the cruise activities: Evgeniy
Karulin (Krylov Shipbuilding Institute), Jomar Finseth
(SINTEF), SAMCoT PhD candidates David Wrangborg
and Renat Yulmetov, Åse Ervik (UNIS), and UNIS
students from the Ice Mechanics, Loads on Structures
and Instrumentation course (AT-211).
As a SAMCoT postdoc, Polojärvi´s perspective on the
LANCE 2013 cruise exemplifies SAMCoT´s efforts to
compile and squeeze every amount of value from full-
scale data.
“My participation was initially due to an invitation of
ProfessorHøyland (NTNU),” Polojärvi explains. “I believe
his first idea was to get me away from my computer to
see real ice rubble, which I have been studying since the
start of my doctoral studies, and to get me more famil-
iarized with fieldwork.”
Field experience and numerical modelling
But gaining field experience was not the only goal that
Polojärvi had in mind. “Professor Tuhkuri and I had a
clear goal for the cruise: to study the freeze bonds that
form between adjacent ice blocks in ice rubble. More
specifically, we wanted to find an ice ridge, saw through
the intact ice and collect some ice blocks that had frozen
together. The idea for this study arose directly from
the numerical modelling of ice rubble and ridge keels
that we have been doing at Aalto. We aimed to collect
samples that would help us to answer a question: `How
do we realistically bind together ice blocks in a discrete
element method simulation?’”
Spring 2013 was fairly warm and it was not easy to find
the type of pressure ridges the researchers wanted
to observe so they could proceed with their research.
Polojärvi, during his participation at LANCE.
Photo: Jukka Tuhkuri