Profound changes in Arctic sea-ice, a growing desire to utilize the Arctic's abundant natural resources, and the potential competitiveness of Arctic shipping routes, all provide for increased industry marine activity throughout the Arctic Ocean. This is anticipated to result in further challenges for maritime safety. Those operating in ice-infested waters require various types of information for sea-ice and iceberg hazards. Ice information requirements depend on regional needs and whether the stakeholder wants to avoid ice all together, operate near or in the Marginal Ice Zone, or areas within the ice pack. An insight into user needs demonstrates how multiple spatial and temporal resolutions for sea-ice information and forecasts are necessary to provide information to the marine operating community for safety, planning, and situational awareness. Although ship-operators depend on sea-ice information for tactical navigation, stakeholders working in route and capacity planning can benefit from climatological and long-range forecast information at lower spatial and temporal resolutions where the interest is focused on open-water season. The advent of the Polar Code has brought with it additional information requirements, and exposed gaps in capacity and knowledge. Thus, future satellite data sources should be at resolutions that support both tactical and planning activities.

with the rapidly melting sea ice in the Arctic, and developing shipping traffic, emerged the idea, popular with the media, that sea ice would soon be completely dominated by first-year ice, and would thus be comparable to ice present in the Gulf of St. Lawrence: this would allow for the setting up of shipping year-round along Arctic passages. In fact, contrary to this idea, even with the vanishing of multi-year ice, ice conditions will remain very different in the Arctic from ice prevailing in the Gulf. Besides, naval technology certainly helps overcoming challenges of ice navigation, but they do not mean it is economically or technically much easier. Year-round shipping in the Arctic remains a difficult challenge to overcome.

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Pack ice pressure events and heavily deformed shear zone and land-fast ice conditions can cause serious disruption to vessel navigation through ice-infested waters, resulting in operational delays and increased costs due to downtime. Understanding the causes behind ice-related vessel navigation disruption events is critical to efforts to build predictive models for such events. These models will help offshore operators prepare for and avoid such events, thus decreasing downtime, lowering operational costs, and improving safety. This paper examines a three-day period during which operations of the Umiak I, an ice-strengthened vessel owned and operated by Fednav Limited, were repeatedly disrupted by extreme ice conditions in the shear zone offshore Voisey’s Bay, Labrador. During March 29–31, 2016, the Umiak I was unable to make significant progress through the 9–10/10ths concentration ice in the shear zone and land-fast ice east of Voisey’s Bay, and engaged in prolonged backing and ramming maneuvers in order to break through the pack. This study examines the regional metocean factors during the two months prior which led to the extreme conditions in the shear zone and caused the vessel navigation disruption event.