Otto Schmidt (ship, 1979)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Otto Schmidt ( Russian Отто Шмидта ) was the first Soviet research icebreaker . The ship was put into service in 1979 and made a total of 40 research trips. It was launched in Murmansk in November 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved . In 1996 it was sold for scrapping, ran to India under its own power and was then scrapped at the Alang scrapping yards .

The ship was named after the Soviet politician , mathematician , geophysicist and Arctic researcher Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt (1891–1956).

Construction and technical data

The ship ( "Project 97N") was on 27 December 1977, the hull number 2783 at the Admiralty Shipyard in Leningrad to put Kiel and ran exactly one year later from the pile . The client was the State Committee for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Control.

The design of the ship was based on that of the "Dobrynja Nikititsch class" ("Project 97"). The bow thruster has been omitted and the deck superstructures have been lengthened to create space for equipment, laboratories and living quarters. With a length of 73.0 m, a width of 18.6 m and a draft of 8.3 m , the fully equipped ship displaced 3700 tons . The diesel-electric propulsion system developed 4800 hp and enabled a top speed of 15 knots in open water via two four-bladed screws, each 3.5 m in diameter . The crew consisted of 54 men and up to 30 scientific personnel could be accommodated on board.

The Otto Schmidt was equipped with all the most modern navigation and rescue equipment of its time and had a total of 14 laboratories for oceanographic , physical , hydrochemical, geodetic , bathymetric, gaziological and meteorological research as well as a large number of scientific devices and instruments. Special cable winches were used to lower instruments into the water. A shaft with a diameter of 80 cm ran from the upper deck to the bottom of the ship, through which instruments could be lowered into the water with a winch if the ship was surrounded by ice all around.

period of service

The Otto Schmidt was put into service on August 30, 1979 for the Hydrometeorological Service of the USSR. All three of Schmidt's sons took part. At the beginning of September the ship ( IMO number 7828671) moved from Leningrad to Murmansk, from where, after a short stay, it left for its first research trip to the Kara Sea on September 7th . In the course of the following years it undertook a total of 40 research trips in the European Arctic Sea , the Barents Sea , the Kara Sea and the Greenland Sea . In January-March 1989, the ship drifted in the ice of the Greenland Sea for more than 40 days and over a distance of over 1000 nautical miles , thus continuing the work of the North Pole-28 ice drift station ( Russian Северный полюс-28, СП-28 ), which had drifted there on the ice from May 1986 to January 1989.

On November 11, 1991, the ship returned from its 40th and final research voyage to Murmansk. The Soviet Union was in the process of dissolving and there was a lack of financial resources to overhaul the ship and keep it in service. It was frozen in Murmansk for almost five years. Then it was sold to a private company for scrapping. On August 8, 1996, Otto Schmidt left Murmansk for the last time. She drove to Alang in the Indian state of Gujarat under her own steam . There she was put on the beach at high tide at full speed and then gradually scrapped.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Russian Государственного комитета по гидрометеорологии и контролю природной среды .
  2. ↑ Russian Мурманское управление гидрометеослужбы СССР

Web links