When Finnish automotive magazine Moottori visited Turku Repair Yard recently, its photographers found two icebreakers sharing a graving dock in Naantali: Arctia’s Polaris, built in 2016, and Sampo, built in 1960. Sixty years of Baltic Sea icebreaking history, side by side in the summer sun.

Links to the Moottori articles:

Jäänmurtajien kehitystä 55 vuoden ajalta –>

Tältä näyttää Polariksen jäätä halkova pohja –>

Both articles are in Finnish and the other article is partly behind paywall, but there are still plenty of superb photographs showing the two beautiful icebreakers


Sampo belongs to a generation when icebreaker design advanced incrementally, each new vessel drawing heavily on the experience of its predecessor. Polaris represents something different. When Railotech (formerly Aker Arctic) developed the ARC 130 concept for the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency, the brief was not to refine the existing approach – it was to challenge it entirely. The result was the first icebreaker with azimuthing bow propulsion at this scale, a configuration with no parent design to fall back on.

Thanks to advanced design tools and Railotech’s in-house ice laboratory, the team already had a well-founded understanding of how the concept would perform before construction began. When Polaris entered service, she turned out to perform slightly better than initially predicted – information that was fed back into the correlation database to improve future performance predictions.

A decade on, Polaris remains the most advanced and most efficient icebreaker operating in the Baltic Sea. From a naval architect’s perspective, however, the design has not stood still. The ARC 130 concept has been developed further, and Railotech has already developed more advanced, capable and efficient designs for both Sjöfartsverket in Sweden and Väylävirasto / Trafikledsverket / Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency in Finland. The next generation Baltic Sea assistance icebreakers will therefore be even more advanced and will one day work the same waters as Polaris and Sampo.

A full article on Sweden’s next-generation icebreaker is coming soon.