The objective of the proposed project is to assemble historical data on the characteristics and causes of encroachment events on man-made facilities and the natural shoreline in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. The method involves:
In FY2009, BOEMRE and Shell International E&P co-funded a study to analyze real-time ice conditions that prevailed during the 2009-10 winter freeze-up season in the Alaskan Beaufort and Chukchi Seas to better understand the formation and origin of new ice and it's subsequent flow patterns during the winter and spring seasons. This information provides insight on the potential impacts that ice formation and flow have on offshore facilities and operations and will influence the design and use of new equipment.
The objective of this study was to evaluate meteorological and oceanic trends to identify safe time windows to transport and set platforms, to establish the abilities and limitations of the equipment used to transport these platforms and support their operations, to assess the risk and environmental impact associated with an oil spill, and to identify weaknesses in personal safety equipment for use in cold and offshore environments.
This project studies the effects of ice on Arctic offshore structures. It aims to present a common and documented approach to achieve acceptable safety levels for offshore structure designs in cold climate regions, by adhering to the normative provision of the ISO 19906 Standard, and by supplementing it through the provision of practical design recommendations and case studies.
The objective of this study was to advance our understanding of the Arctic Ice conditions and formation in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas offshore Alaska. The study had six (6) individual goals:
Describe the ice conditions at several stages during the freeze-up seasons;
Document early shear zone and landfast ice development;
Locate and map ice features for the design and operation of offshore facilities;
Locate and map ice encroachment and measure ice thicknesses associated with ice pile-ups;
The purpose of this joint industry project is to build a database of Ice Island and/or extreme ice feature motions, trajectories, and physical changes as they travel from the high arctic into the Beaufort Sea. Having this information will allow a better determination of the risks involved in putting a structure in the Beaufort Sea in different locations. Results from this project will also be compared with Ice Island and extreme ice feature information collected in the 1970s and 80s.
The overall objective of the proposed research is to advance our understanding of the relationship between the strength and fracture of sea ice on scales small (laboratory) and large (field). The specific objectives of the research are: to measure the effects of temperature and sliding speed on the kinetic coefficient of friction of first-year sea ice; and
to measure the effect of temperature on the brittle compressive failure envelope of first-year sea ice and to derive (from the slope of the envelope) the internal friction coefficient.
During the 1980s the probability of impact by an extreme ice feature, or EIF, that would generate extreme loads on a production platform in the Southern Beaufort Sea, was identified as a key design criterion. In recent years the effects of climate change on the arctic climate and ice cover has received increasing attention. The changing climate already appears to be contributing to the deterioration of the ice shelves of the western Arctic Islands with the increased calving of ice islands (II).
The technical effort will focus on discovering and validating by proof-of-concept testing a reliable cost-effective method or methods and equipment to significantly reduce lateral noise in the marine environment from seismic activities and operations. This research project was conducted in two parts.
Part 1 of this project contained six tasks:
The objective was to study factors affecting soil and pipeline deformation below scouring ice ridges in the Arctic environment. The study provided:
detailed characterization of moving ice-ridge morphology on the basis of available observations and measurement reports,
response simulations of ice-ridge-soil-pipeline systems by means of computational-fluid-dynamics representations and finite-element models that capture flow and deformation in porous media, and
