The Sampo icebreaker is retired from active duty and nowadays takes tourists out into the icy waters of the Gulf of Bothnia. But right now it could probably be more useful assisting ships trapped in the ice...
The Baltic Sea has is covered by ice from the north down to the Swedish Öland island. On Thursday, 310,000 square kilometres of the sea were covered in ice, and the area is growing. This is the most extensive ice cover in 24 years, according to the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. Scores of ships lie iced in and icebreaker assistance is not available until next week, the YLE Finnish TV news reports. The situation is most difficult south of Kvarken, the narrowest part of the Gulf of Bothnia, where about forty vessels have been iced in.
A couple of days ago Russian authorities reported that a nuclear icebreaker is on its way to free ships trapped in the ice in the Gulf of Finland.
PS
Of course, the deep freeze is all a sign of global warming, if we are to believe Nobel Prize laureate Al Gore.
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