throughout the world people go to extremes there's amazing Ingenuity and some stuff that's mind-bogglingly dangerous some people push
the limits because they have to others because they choose to in this
episode of the world's most extreme fast boats I'm taking off this is a classic launch
off a Runway boats that dive you were going places that man never was intended to go boats
that fly they have the speed of an aircraft but they're always flying only a few meters away
from a solid object
and Unstoppable boats just a little bit of of nuclear power can go a very
very long way these are the world's 10 most extreme half boat half plane fully Bonkers this
is sail rocket attempting to be the fastest wind powerered vessel afloat it's 2009 in wvis Bay
in Namibia sail rocket tries to break the world speed record of 51.3 6 knots or just over 59 mph
it begins the run with Skipper or Pilot p lasson at the helm but it hits a problem all of a sudden
the spray stops and the noise stops I'
m taking off the 180° flip ended the sail rocket Mark 1's
life and almost took PS with it I thought when I started that run I thought I was 15 seconds
away from getting our world record after that crash another 4 and 1 half years a whole
another build another really half a million euros of of effort and time and expenditure
to get to that point so it was uh wasn't as close as I thought Paul Larson is from Victoria
Australia and he's been designing and sailing boats since he was a child I wa
sn't taken to a
yach club and shown what a boat looks like and should be Dad one day brought up a piece of
wood that he sharpened a triangular bow into and stuck a margarine lid on the top and let
it go and blew over to the other side of the dam and that was uh that was fascinating so
then I just started making longer pieces of wood bigger margarine Lids putting KS on it
chopping and changing after years of sailing conventional Yachts lasson began to develop
plans for something different t
he fastest Sailing Boat in the world he decided to go
back to the drawing board with a radical design to sail fast you want to minimize
the drag of the hull by lifting it out of the water but as you rise out of the water
you run the risk of taking off the answer is a hydrofoil under the water's surface sail
Rocket's shape owes as much to aircraft as boats so the sail rocket is 50% boat but
50% plain it's constructed in such a way that it gets the benefit of both it has a rigid
carbon fiber
sail and that acts almost like the wing of a plane but it's tilted it's tilted at
30° so that the air that flows over the wing actually acts like it would on an aircraft
and it gives lift to the the vehicle itself sail rocket 1 was fast but unstable and
unpredictable as Paul was starting to find out the second boat was primarily designed by an
aerodynamicist who thought of it more of an aerplane we slowly morphed into this shape that
became the final boat we didn't start off looking saying
we think this is what the boat should
look like everything had to be Quantified and slowly this uh shape came out and we we I mean
there times we looked at and you know this is wacky to break the world record they had to
design a vessel that would get through the water equivalent of the sound barrier at around
50 knots when a boat hits 50 knots it actually makes the water boil around the propellers
or foils as bubbles form it slows The Vessel down the team tried different foil
shapes hopi
ng to find something that could help them speed through this 50
knot wall beating this slowing phenomenon they were stuck until they made one tweak oh it was the end of the sponsorship
it was the end of the record period pretty much the end of the season and the boat was
going extremely well we'd only just unlock this uh this key ingredient that made the boat
quickly jumped from 50 knots up to 60 knots and Beyond it was the last sail of the season they
decided to go for the record it's now
never just just hope it works and cheet on and uh took
off and and the boat just launches down the course the boat accelerates faster
and goes faster than it's ever gone before it doesn't drop down and not
de accelerating so I'm thinking the average is fast with the speed of 60
kn Nots over 500 M Paul and his sail rocket broke the record and with a top speed of
67 had smashed the 50 knot wall that was it that was the run that was 11 years work the sail rocket
is about pure speed but some j
obs just need muscle around the world oil rigs pump power to the
people but what happens when they've had their day you can't just pick up several thousand tons
of oil platform and pop it into recycling or can you in the North Sea off the coast of Norway
this is pioneering spirit with a top speed of 14 knots just over 16 mph it may not be
fast but it's strong steady and very very big the largest construction vessel on the planet
the mindboggling thing about this ship is her sheer size she's
just absolutely enormous when
she's ballasted down and fully loaded she has a displacement of a million tons there it's just
it's colossal it's it's about 10 times bigger than an American Navy aircraft carrier and it's here
to move an oil platform there are hundreds of oil drilling platforms and um pumping platforms
around the world they need to be removed at the end of their lives because otherwise they'll just
form hazards of navigation but cutting a platform up at Sea is an incredibly d
angerous task so
by removing the whole platform in one piece and carrying it ashore uh pioneering Spirit
allows that decommissioning work to be done in almost entirely ashore which is much much
safer for everyone involved the platform the ship is here to move belongs to a 13 half th000
ton oil rig which never entered service after cracks were found in its legs with a lifting
capacity of 48,000 tons this should be a walk in the park for pioneering Spirit but it is its
Maiden lift it begins
by ballasting its unique split Hull so it sits deeper in the water the
ship straddles the rig like a giant oceangoing forklift robotic arms are
extended to take the weight of the platform they allow for the ship to rise and fall
with the waves while the rig is still anchored to the seabed pionering spirit stability mostly
comes from being enormous she's just so big uh that she can weather high waves um much
better than most smaller ships but even then uh she has an active compensation syste
m the
beams which the the platform she's lifting sit on are are controlled so as pioner Spirit Rises
or or falls in the water those beams compensate their position so that the the load is held
steady once the ship has taken 80% of the weight of the platform the rig's legs are
amputated and the top s is quickly lifted clear a compressed air system does this in
a matter of seconds pioneering spirit is De balast by pumping water back into the sea
raising the ship and separating the platform f
rom the legs it's then off to lutanda
Norway where 97% of its materials will be recycled leaving nothing
behind but a handy perch for seagulls you might think this is a plane from the
future or at least the past version of the future it reminds me of the vehicle they used in Star
Wars the land Speeders that floated just above the icy surface of ho but this is technically
a boat it's registered as a marine craft but it spends most of its time in the air and
it's powered by a car engine so w
hat is it well the answer is in single po the airfish
is basically a boat that can fly it has wings and like any aircraft the pressure above the
wing is actually lower than below and that's what gives lift to any aircraft the airfish
can only be operated safely and legally on water and that makes it a marine Vessel
it flies just above the water exploiting something called the wig effect nothing
to do with tupes it stands for wig in in ground when an airplane starts to fly when
it's close t
o the ground it's easier to fly because there's kind of a cushion of air
between the wing and the ground a plane can fly more efficiently just above land or even
water thanks to increased lift and decreased drag when a wing flies low enough over a surface
the air between is more tightly squashed which increases lift wings also create drag caused
by vortices swirling Columns of air that slow the craft down but close to a surface these
vortices can get interrupted and drag can be reduced clev
er birds like the albatross know all
about this science it conserves energy because of the reduced drag these ground effect Vehicles
can be more efficient than PLS and they can also be much faster than boats cuz they're not having
to force their way through the incredibly dense water it helps helps the airfish hit 80 knots over
90 mph using less fuel than a boat but without the huge cost of a plane because it's only a
couple of meters from the ground crashing is less of an issue if it loses
power it just lands
back in the sea no need for airports or runways so it's perfect for fast lowcost travel between
islands it sounds like a perfect Transportation solution this takes us back to to crafts at the
right Russians built in the 60s that Ed the same effect now it was a novelty then they thought
it might change the world but it never really did turns out that Wing in ground vessels often
create as many new problems as they solve moving at these low altitudes at very high speeds c
an
have disadvantages because it makes it very hard to evade obstacles like a ship or a wave coming
the other way main difficulty with wing winging ground effect Vehicles is that they have the
speed of an aircraft but they're always flying only a few meters away from a solid object which
is quite a that's not a position you'd want to be in an aircraft ideally but perhaps the most
difficult issue facing airfish is the wave size it can safely fly fish is quite a small wi in
Grand effect vehi
cle um she can't operate when the waves are very big uh she's limited to I think
about just over one meter wave height um which is which corresponds to C State 3 uh and actually
it's relatively common for the Seas to be higher than that so there's only a certain amount of the
time she can operate it's why the airfish could one day P its trade as a high-speed Ferry for
Harbor Crossings or for island hopping over calm Waters but there's one
vessel that's made for rough Seas off the Pacific co
ast
of the USA a ship begins to sink the crew cling on help won't be coming because sinking is exactly
what this ship was built to do based off the coast of San Diego California
this is flip a 108 M long research platform that turns 90° so that around 90 M of its length is
underwater like All Ships it's essentially a long tube but one end of it is not at all intended
for any habitation it's just ballast tanks so once they get it in location they start to flood
those tanks and the ship grad
ually sinks at one end the other end is full of air and bullant
and ultimately it becomes a vertical pole in the water in the 1960s scrips institution of
oceanography and the Navy wanted to devise a research vessel to study submarine Acoustics they
were trying to see how precisely sound propagated in the ocean uh people in submarines would see
sound coming from a certain direction and they would find that the ship that was making the
sound wasn't in that direction at all it was in a differe
nt direction and they realize what
was going on underwater was a lot like a mirage and people wanted to quantify how big that effect
was and so an experiment was designed that used a lot of acoustic receivers a source uh computers
recorders and other such things they couldn't just launch a ship bristling with acoustic receivers
regular boats bob up and down with the rise and fall of waves which isn't ideal for acoustic
research work from a a a ship that was rolling on the surface of the oce
an uh was very difficult
to make precise measurements down in the interior given how violent the surface was and at that
time there were a core of people who had been through World War II and submarines and knew that
you could go down beneath the waves and it would be calm and the trick was to make uh a platform
that accessed that calmness of the interior of the sea flip is designed to Heap up and down at
a natural period which is longer than the longest swirl consequently she barely moves
with waves
only 3 in in a 30t sea that's a physicist's way of saying it doesn't bob up and down with every
wave so it only Rises 3 in even in a 30-footer the crew Quarters on board flip need to work in
horizontal and vertical positions some solutions are ingeniously technical some are a little more
obvious prior to flipping there's a whole series of things that have to be done anything that
is loose like this not bolded down the tables and so on get moved to what you call the lower
lower c
orner of each compartment that's a corner that's going to be on the downside when you're
in either position walking around the ship is like being in a surrealist painting shower drains
are on the wall step and railings outside shoot off in multiple directions yeah well this is the
captain's cabin the bunks are on tracks and they pivot so that they're running what now would be
vertically so that the crew can sleep in them when the flip is in its vertical position during
the flip everyone sta
nds out on Deck Captain will flood the ship slowly down and you start out
holding on for dear life in the waves as the ship rolls and as it slows does its flipping
you end up working so that you're uh sitting like this enjoying the view looking out over
the water 15 or 20 m above the sea when you started right off right down pretty much at
water level looking at the waves eyeball the eyeball originally designed for a one-off
project more than 50 years ago today flip continues to serve scien
tists who take advantage
of its unique perspectives the ability to go out to see and just watch the ocean without having
to hang on and even in very rough weather uh is completely unique even today and that was uh just
a joy and allowed us to do things that you could not think of doing on a regular ship even today
but sinking 90 m is just scratching the surface 7 miles beneath the Waters of the Western Pacific
the Mariana Trench is the deepest known point in the world's oceans more people h
ave been to
the Moon to go this deep you need a unique [Music] vessel the bathy scaff triest may look like a submarine but it had no living
quarters and going deep was its only job invented by Swiss physicist August peard the
triest would attempt to carry his son jack and oceanographer Lieutenant Don Walsh to the bottom
of the ocean triest had two distinct sections the top part is packed with fuel and machinery
and the only bit people went in was here an incredibly strong sphere made with s
teel up to 18
cm thick as you dive deeper under waterer pressure increases dramatically every 10 m of depth that
you go down you add one more atmosphere sphere of pressure if any part of that pressure sphere had
failed it would have been instantly catastrophic the the pressures that they were under would
have meant the inrush of water would have been instantly fatal to both men on board the pressure
at the bottom of the Marana trench is more than a thousand times the pressure felt at sea le
vel or
the equivalent of having 50 jumbo Jets piled on top of your head triest used weights to make it
sink and had a brilliant fail safe for releasing the weight if anything went wrong they had 16 tons
of metal shot in Hoppers which were held in place by magnets electromagnets so they could drop shot
by turning the magnets off and allowing it to flow out of The Hoppers or if power failed completely
then the electromagnets would release um all the shot would uh would flow out and then the
vehicle would become light enough to float to the surface on the 23rd of January 19 1960
Jack Picard and Don Walsh descended for almost 5 hours but at around 9
half th000 M they heard a loud noise the plexiglass hatch was cracking they checked their
instruments and decided to press on and at a depth of nearly 11,000 M hit
the B botom of the Pacific Ocean sadly they didn't see very much apart from a Milky
cloud of sediment which failed to clear in the 20 minutes they spent on the ocean floor
unsurprisingly no one has gone this deep again many who have tried to break the water
speed record have been killed in the attempt in 1967 Donald Campbell died trying to beat his
own record a feat he'd accomplished six times before Dave warie isn't put off
by the odds he's even built his own boat a DIY job you don't want to mess [Music] up the current record of 318 miles an hour is held
by a pilot who also made his own boat literally in his backyard Dave's dad Ken Ken built his boat
from
scratch there's not too many people in the world alive today that can tell you what it's all
about really over 200 Ken set his record in 1978 40 years ago and now Dave is out to beat dad's
record nothing like a bit of friendly family rivalry at the man River in t New South Wales
they're preparing for Trials of the spirit of Australia too the support team includes the boat's
designer dad Ken but Dave built the boat himself by hand he has done an amazing job on a shoestring
budget uh he was t
here every every day in the weekends building this boat there's not a lot
of carbon fiber in this boat uh there's a lot of fiberglass a lot of wood and a lot of pine inside
this Monument to D Y is a Rolls-Royce orus jet engine previous owner the Italian Air Force uh we
check for cracks we check for fuel leaks we check for oil leaks um and we check for corrosion and
vibration marks very good anything else to worry about the other thing with a Rudder too is if you
hit a stick or you hit a bir
d or you hit a duck you can pull the back of the transom off at 200
mph what would happen then um we would sink every time we've taken Spirit of Australia out too and
we've had it out about five or six times now we've had a problem that we've had to overcome if I'd
uh put it in the water uh the first time we run it and tried to floor it I'd probably be in hospital
or something now it wouldn't have worked out it is the same design as Spirit of Australia but that
doesn't mean you take it for
granted it's going to do what Spirit of Australia done it's just a
matter of getting enough time on the water to keep running it and and um solve the problem all the
while avoiding the number one obstacle affecting water speed record attempts death thankfully the
team have placed a heavy emphasis on not dying if uh you have any doubts as to the running for
whatever reason and I don't care what it is stick the red flag up and then try the radio next okay
the key words on the radio Nets are a
bort abort abort and then we will stop we've got to 200
mph and the boat almost becomes uh un steerable uh which is very dangerous un steerable today's
Target is 175 mph which is already in the death zone Dave gets set for the first run of the
day where some Daredevils have balls of steel Dave has Buns of insight you you get a feel
for a sense of what's right if it's heavy on the on the front of theat boat or it's light at
the back you can literally feel it through your rear end so you driv
e a boat through your
ass and that's where you get the feel for it that's where you become part of the boat
this run is all about the center of gravity of the boat well our objective today is to test
the boat we've changed a lot of the trim on the boat so we've put some weights down the
back of the boat and we've also put some aerodynamic modifications to the rear of the
cing of the boat what we need to do today is to find out if those modifications that we've
done to the boat have actuall
y improved its [Music] handling that looked really good it's um it's
pretty rough out there he's doing about 130 on the way back um we'll get probably um not much
more out of that today we probably just going to pull it out re fuel it and turn it around and
put it back in again there's not much we can do about the wind a late introduction of fuel to the
jet engine caused a dip in power so it spooled up and it sounded like it was going to slow down
again right and then um once you introduced
the fuel it took off basically Dave has to hit
a button sooner but that's easily solved okay and now that the boat's more stable there's
less anxiety about pushing it [Music] harder yes slightly right of Center to avoid the seagulls
the possibility of a bird strike is a slight worry though 188 M an hour teams actually are lighted I
mean they're they're just buzzing that we didn't expect to go beyond 175 mph and now that
we have it's just fantastic we we're just so elated it's wonderful ste
p by step the spirit
of Australia 2 Team inched towards Dave's dad's leld 38 mph record it's significant that he
offered to pay for lunch but not the beers tonight and now for power output
that even Dave can only dream of the fjords of Norway untouched natural
beauty pristine Waters clean fresh air not necessarily one study put the air
quality in the popular ganga On a par with Central London Norway's idilic scenery
is attracting ever more Cruise tourists where their numbers trebling in th
e last 15
years and with tourists comes pollution hundreds of thousands of visitors come into the
area each year and they arrive on ships and these ships are polluting the atmosphere it's not just
one cruise ship coming up the fields it might be three or four to go and see the wonderful
landscape that these fields have created but they're chugging out nitrous oxide with their big
diesel engines and that means that air is getting trapped the air quality is getting to dangerous
levels and th
e area's natural geography adds to the problem it's these steep-sided field
walls that although very beautiful actually cause a particular problem it's very difficult to
circulate the air within this structure in 2018 the Norwegian Parliament announced it would make
its world heritage fjords a zero emission Zone by 2026 Olstein a Norwegian ship Builder is
tackling the problem with massive batteries at a shipyard neans in Poland they've been
working to reduce emissions which may also help th
e fs a rechargeable ship it'll be powered
up at Port as long as they've brought the right charging cable with them the ship will be 160
m long it'll have 10 decks and carry 2,000 passengers and more than 500 cars between sford
in Norway and strad in Sweden 48 huge lithium batteries will allow the ship to operate at a
speed of up to 12 knots for 1 hour per charge these fairies runoff batteries they are just
like the ones in your cell phone lithium ion batteries only a 100,000 times larger it
's like
you had a ton of phones strapped together you'd somehow get close to the amount of power stored
on these boats more higher than me and also wider than me and it's 48 pieces of them inside of
the hle so it's really big it's a huge array and will generate 5 megawatt hours that's about a
third more power than an average UK home uses in a whole year but it's still not enough to power
the ship for its entire 2 and 1/2 hour Crossing doing that with current technology would mean
filling t
he cargo space with batteries the new ship will only be battery powered for the first
and last half hour of every Crossing but that's the crucial period when it's closest to port
or the fs the hope is that it's only a matter of time before the crossing will be fully
electric this vessel will be a game changer in the market and a lot of ship owners and ship
designers will follow this technology and now for a record nobody wants to break [Music]
aquanuts are an elite group of extreme sea prof
essionals to qualify as one trainees need to
remain underwater in a pressurized environment for at least 24 hours but for their work they'll
often stay underwater at pressure for weeks at a time because they only decompress once
there's less risk of decompression sickness or the bends most aquanuts are highly
trained pros at the top of their game but on the 26th of May 2013 an untrained
ship's cook accidentally joined their number May 2013 off the coast of Nigeria
a dive team was searching
the wreck of the Jason 4 Tugboat which had sunk 2 and
1/2 days earlier it lay on the seabed 30 m down the divers had recovered the bodies of
four of the crew and were working their way through the boat at the top of the helium in
their breathing gas Alters the pitch of their voices what's that then an unbelievable Discovery
found one yeah he's alive he's alive okay keep him there keep him there all right holder without
food clothes water or an Air Supply Harrison aini the ship's cook was s
till alive in an
air bubble trapped in the upside down Hull so it's really quite remarkable that somebody
survived for that length of time at that depth so typically recreational divers if they were
going to 30 m of depth they'd only spend about 20 minutes down there before they then slowly
had to come back up Harrison was is exceptionally lucky this is another of those really fortuitous
sets of circumstances the size of the bubble afterwards was estimated to be about 6 cubic M
of air now
a human exhausts about 10 cubic meters of air it's worth of oxygen per day so that's
not enough to survive more than half a day but because he was at 30 m that air was pressurized
four times to what it would normally be so 6 cub M was containing 24 Cub M worth of oxygen so
actually there was about 2 and 1/2 days worth of oxygen in that bubble just long enough for him
to survive as long as he did Harrison had air to breathe just enough but he also faced another
danger poisoning himself one o
f the things that very quickly happens when people are in confined
spaces is as we breathe out carbon dioxide um the carbon dioxide concentration in the air goes up
as much 5% carbon dioxide will be fatal to human beings but because the water was there and he was
splashing about in the water it allowed the carbon dioxide gas that he exhaled to be absorbed into
the water so it meant that it was a less toxic environment for him what's wrong with it this say
his gold uh what's called the water
the water cold Harrison's survival for so long in a deep sea
air bubble was already extraordinary but there was another killer to overcome hypothermia
one of the other things that was vital to his survival was that he managed to assemble a
sort of raft from things he found in the cabin which meant he could be out of the water um and
while he was cold in the air if he'd been in the water it would have cooled him down so quickly
he'd lost so much heat that he would have died of hypothermia l
ong before he was rescued what
is what is your rank you're the cook they always survive but they couldn't just take harison up
to the surface he was now a saturation diver an aquanut if he had surfaced at any speed then the
nitrogen bubbling out of his bloodstream around his joints uh would probably have been fatal the
divers needed to get Harrison to the diving bell where he could begin the process of controlled
decompression he could be the first diver to become an Aquino before completin
g his first
dive okay Harrison you mustn't take your hat off okay you must just breathe nicely yeah okay
all right let's go you hold your umbilical and you listen to me okay all right we're going now
put your head under water and breathe comfortably okay okay how's that just take him nice and
slowly okay hold your umbilical harison don't let go okay we're bringing you home quickly all
right stick his head in Harrison reaches the diving bell but gets a telling off from his new
commanding of
ficer how are you feeling Harrison all right very good you scared me there all right
you must say Roger when I'm talking to you but he takes it on the chin because you're a Survivor
get calm I know is life and death the the RO the the line is already draw I thought of my family
thought of my my mom my brothers my wife you put two different people in the same survival scenario
and often one will survive one will perish what the Survivor has that makes the difference often
is a better Outlook
a a commitment to stay alive he did what he had to do to keep himself fit
both psychologically and physically until help came catching drug traffickers is like keeping
up with the Joneses if the Joneses were heavily armed and up to no good on the high seas
with radar systems high-speed boats and even submarines at their disposal the cartels
are continually developing new ways to avoid detection law enforcement needs something
that can keep up and stay under the radar something like a high-
speed stealth boat but when
where'd you get one of those from who knows it's a secret between you and me rural Island
might be a good place to start it may be fairly sleepy on land but off the
coast are some of the world's roughest Seas although that's no problem for the
thunderchild this is a prototype of the boat squaring up to storm Doris which bought
94 m hour winds to the British Isles now the designers are taking the latest model on a
trip right around the Irish Coast powering around
the entire 1,250 Mi best of luck guys
have a good run okay thunderchild has a top speed of 54 knots or 62 mph it's shape allows it
to slice through the water most boats and ships have a a fairly broad v-shaped bow which
means when a wave runs into them it lifts the bow up and the ship pitches up and over it
uh wave piercing bowels are much more slender uh sharper points so when a wave reaches them
they they pierce the wave and and push through it rather up and over it and that means that
instead of the ship rising over the waves it it gets to go in more or less a straight
line that's important for a small ship in big waves because it means it's not being tossed
around as much and it's got one more trick up it [Music] sleeve the ability to self-right if it capsizes the self-writing feature is really
interesting there aren't many boats which can do that there's really two important components
to that she has a very low center of gravity most boats when they roll over to about
120° or
thereabouts they they reach what we call the their angle of Vanishing stability and that's
the point where if you let them go they won't return turn to Upright they'll carry on falling
over but thunderchild doesn't have an angle of Vanishing stability she's stable all the way
up to completely upside down so you can let her go from any angle of roll and she will snap
back to Upright the other half of it is that um she has a completely watertight cabin most ships
have what we call do
wn flooding points which are things like air intakes for ventilation or for
the engines and if those are big holes in the ship if they go under water the water floods in
the ship will flood and and they probably won't [Music] cover stealth designs for ships
have been around for decades though mostly restricted to the military the aim is to
reduce a vessel's radar profile as much as possible when a radar signal is sent
out the reflections that rebound back can tell the operator how big anoth
er ship is
by adding lots of angles to your ship you can bounce much of the the radar signal up into
the air or down towards the sea making the vessel appear much smaller the materials the
vessel is constructed out of also make a huge difference because they are made out of a
modern carbon fiber material rather than a steel or aluminium material that most boats
might be made out of uh it means that they don't deflect radar in the same way and because
of the shape of the boat and the angles
of the boat and they're more difficult to detect
on radar it's not enough to be invisible you also need to be able to see in the dark
so thunderchild has night vision infrared cameras radar and GPS meaning it can operate
effectively at night the most dangerous part of their Journey round Island through the
treacherous Waters of Rockall was in the dark but the technology on board meant that
thunderchild barely had to drop its speed they circumnavigated the entire Coastline in just 30
hours
traffickers around the world might want to watch out or maybe we just need to hope they
don't get one themselves and now we're going nuclear global warming means the Arctic Ice
is shrinking we've noticed particularly during Summer and Autumn when we we see the the keep
minimum of CI extent in the Arctic a drop of 40% over recent decades and this is leading
to parts of the Arctic actually opening up um for shipping lanes that normally wouldn't have
existed in the past but some ships make th
eir own [Music] Lanes Russia has a lot of ports and
infrastructure um up in the Arctic Circle which require Icebreaker support for
ships to get in and out and also they have some research stations up in the Arctic area
which require an icebreaker to get to at all so they they've led the world in development
of large and particularly nuclear powerered icebreakers since the 19th century the sez Canal
has been the preferred route between Europe and Asia but the shortest route is actually throu
gh
the Arctic if you can get through it can save 10 days if you can get through so just how do these
ice breakers power through the ice short answer they don't most ice breakers operate in the same
way um they actually break the ice by pushing down on it the ship rise rides up and over it and then
it's the weight of the ship pressing down that snaps the ice off they are very heavy in terms of
their design because they've got these very thick double holes so that if they do have a problem
w
here the whole cracks they're still watertight the average nuclear ice breaker weighs well
over 30,000 tons with an outer Hull about 5 cm thick but to break through or rather over
the ice takes a huge amount of power a diesel engined ice breaker clearing a path through
3 m thick ice could use more than 100 tons of fuel per day what a nuclear powered ship can
do that a typical ship cannot do is stay afloat or in the case of submarines stay submerged
for very very long periods of time without
having to refuel I mean just a little bit of
of nuclear power can go a very very long way that allows them especially when you're in
these desolate environments like the Arctic tundra to survive for long periods of time
without having to travel back these ships can stay at sea for months on end docking
mainly just to restock food supplies with two nuclear reactors on board they can travel
for up to 5 years without refueling with Russia the only country currently operating nuclear ice
brea
kers it looks like this cold war is rather one-sided [Music]
Comments