I was thinking more along the lines of navy warships cruiser ,destroyer, frigate etc, than I was about tankers and other merchies.
How dangerous now a days is ice in the northern atlantic , not the arctic ocean. I know that from reading about the titanic, there is an ice season I believe, where chunks of ice cleave from where ever and bob around the ocean till they probably melt, they can be seen on radar and thus avoided.
How dangerous now a days are ice packs.
Declan
I spent only a small amount of time up in cold water, and was in engineering rather than navigation or anything, but fwiw its still a navigation hazard that needs to be watched out for. Ramming into what is essentially a rock is a very bad prospect. Granted, a navy ship would fair much better than the titanic due to greatly improved compartmentalization, but it would still be nasty.
I made two deployments to the Arctic in a submarine years ago, which of course also involved traversing the North Atlantic.
You don’t want to run into ice. My sub surfaced through relatively thin pack ice several dozen times, and did a fair amount of (minor) damage to the hardened-steel sail structure as well as the sonar dome. We had to go into drydock to fix the damage a few months after the deployment.
As has been mentioned, modern (surface) ships have radar in addition to lookouts to detect icebergs and pack ice, better communications between ships, higher quality welded steel hulls (as opposed to the brittle, riveted steel plates used in the era of the Titantic), and greatly improved compartmentalization.
okay thanks all
Declan