Supplying Greenland’ is an appropriate title for an article on the Royal Arctic Line, which is owned by the Greenland Authority and operated from Aalborg in Denmark.
The Royal Arctic Line fleet consist of five ice-class modern vessels built especially for operations in Arctic waters in winter conditions. The Plimsoll mark on the vessels’ hulls states that the vessels are built to the ‘WNA’ standard meaning ‘Winter North Atlantic’, the toughest standard for cargo vessels. Apart from supplying the 57,000 permanent inhabitants of Greenland with oil products, the Royal Arctic Line takes care of everything else from the port of Aalborg, appropriately named ‘Greenland Terminal.
The vessels, classed by DNV, are all purpose built to operate in a trade which can only be called the toughest in the world, with strong winter gales, ice, icing and total darkness during the winter season.
“I was pleasantly surprised about the smooth ride on our newest container ship, the Mary Arctica, during a recent winter storm. The design of the compact (113 m overall length) vessel is ideal for the wave length in the North Atlantic as well as complying with the requirements of the port of Ilulissat, located next to the world’s most ice producing glacier – where the glacier meets the ocean. The vessel must be able to turn in the port to get stern first out again into Disko Bay on Greenland’s West Coast. This is due to ice conditions in the bay. That port limits the length of the hull,” says Lars G. Pedersen, deputy fleet manager and superintendent. He is joined at our meeting by Jens Boye, the fleet manager, and John Ploug from the newbuilding department who can confirm that the Royal Arctic Line has two sister ships of the Mary Arctica on order from Germany.
“Supplying Greenland is a costly operation, as we have to provide all the services and necessary equipment ourselves. We have container handling equipment that makes us independent of any port-based cranes and other equipment. When that is said, we own barges, trucks, tugs and ports as our vessels do not even have a proper port to get into at most locations. Containers have to be lowered down to a self-propelled barge with a truck on board. Once a container has been lowered from our ship onto the truck, the truck is then ferried back to shore where it moves on to a small landing with the container and discharges it there – or the other way around when containers are to be loaded onto the vessels. We have some very specially made Scandia trucks that we operate on Greenland for container transfers from vessels to shore,” says Jens Boye, who adds that truck manufacturer Scandia sent a public relations team to Greenland to photograph and write about this rather novel use of its trucks.
“The whole system we operate is a closed transport system – there is not very much to gain from our system in pure commercial terms. This may of course change in the future,” adds Boye. “Greenland’s natural resources are diverse, with gold and olivine as a couple of examples.”
“Our ships are not icebreakers by design, but they can break and crush ice,” says John Ploug. Looking at the specifications of this 572-teu vessel which was built in 2005, its ability to handle ice is confirmed: the Mary Arctica has the highest ice class notation 1A*, which means that (in addition to the ice belt along the ship) plates in its forward part are up to 30 mm thick and its stem plate is 50 mm. Additionally, there is an ice knife above the rudder blade and ice fins in front of the propeller. In order to enable the ship to slide onto ice (to crush it with its own weight), the bow has the shape characteristic for ships sailing in polar regions.
The Mary Arctica is also equipped with 231 reefer plugs for food transportation – temperature-controlled cargoes are one of the Royal Arctic Line’s specialities. Another speciality is the group of five persons loaned out to the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI). The vessels are heavily equipped with weather registration instruments and the data is uploaded on a continuous basis to DMI. Every six hours, a weather balloon is sent up from the vessels when on an Atlantic crossing.
Being specialists in Arctic operations, the Royal Arctic Line has also been hired by the German authorities to supply a German research station in the Antarctic – literally on the opposite side of the world from the Greenland area. “The mission here included lifting containers and cargo from Bremerhaven to the edge of the Antarctic ice. When you know that the vertical height from the ice edge to the sea level is 18 metres and the containers had to go 10 metres in from the edge, there is no need to say that this was a special task indeed,” says Jens Boye, the fleet manager. The operation required calm seas …!
The Royal Arctic Line crew are either Danish, Greenland or Faroe Island nationals. In total, the shipping line has 700 employees, with some 100 in Aalborg, some 250 are on the vessels, and the remaining 350 in Greenland, where the company has its headquarters in the Capital, Nuuk.
A few facts about Greenland: It borders the Greenland Sea to the east, while to the south is the Arctic Ocean, to the west is Baffin Bay and to the north is – the North Pole. The nearest countries are Iceland to the east and Canada across Baffin Bay to the west. “The trade between Greenland and Canada/the United States to the west is very minute in spite of the proximity to these huge countries,” says Boye. Greenland’s total area measures 2,166,086 square kilometres and the Greenland ice sheet covers 81 per cent of this area. The coastline of Greenland is 39,330 kilometres, about the same length as the Earth’s circumference at the Equator.