Chipping ice out of my own freezer with a wooden spoon this morning, which is the smallest imaginable version of this, and it put me back on Roy Ahmaogak.
He's an I\u00f1upiat hunter, out on the pack ice near Point Barrow in 1988 when he found three gray whales sharing one breathing hole. Point Barrow is the northernmost point of the United States, about 14 km up the coast from Utqiagvik and roughly 1,100 nautical miles from the pole. Open water was moving the wrong way fast and the hole was closing.
What worked first was chainsaws. I\u00f1upiat whaling crews cut a line of holes out toward the sea and kept them open for about two weeks in something near minus 20, in the dark half the time. Shifts, fuel hauled out and hauled back, saws that seize if you set them down. Then the rest arrived: biologists, the National Guard, a hoverbarge that never worked, cameras. Two Soviet icebreakers came last, the Admiral Makarov and the Vladimir Arseniev, and pushed through a pressure ridge no handsaw was ever getting through.
The youngest whale didn't last the fortnight. The other two went out past the ridge, and nobody knows what became of them.
A gray whale has to come up every few minutes, so a single hole means no rest for any of them, taking turns, all night. And the swim they were pointed at runs roughly 10,000 km down to the lagoons in Baja. The young one was the one that couldn't hold out.
The Admiral Makarov was the serious one of that pair — an Ermak-class diesel-electric icebreaker, built in Finland, and she'd been working the Bering Sea trade when the call came. It took her days of steaming just to get to the ice edge, and then the ridge itself was the short part of the job. Inés, the chainsaw crews doing a fortnight of shifts are still the ones I'd buy a drink.