A warm homecoming Friday for the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star, which returns home to Seattle after its departure last November.
The Polar Star and its 150 crew members have been on a four-month mission to Antarctica. It was tasked with breaking up thick ice chunks so other research supply vessels could reach McMurdo Station. The ship carved a navigable path through 15 miles of ice in the Ross Sea, sometimes 10-feet thick.
This video gives you a sense of what a big mission that is.
Their mission was far from a cake walk. The cutter’s shaft seal failed on January 16, sending water into the engine room at a rate of 20 gallons-per-minute.
Fortunately, crew members were able to stop the flow of water and dewater the engine room.
Just five days before, one of the cutter’s three main gas turbines failed. The turbine power is necessary for the cutter’s propellors to break through the ocean ice. In this case, crew members were able to solve a programming issue between the engine and the electrical system.
