On a dreary November day in Seattle, the U.S. Coast Guard put its past and future on display.
Within sight of the Space Needle, three eye-catching red icebreakers towered over Pier 36. It was the first time since 2006 that the Coast Guard has had three active icebreakers in the same place at the same time.
In the coming years, that scene will become more common, and not just in Seattle. After years of underfunding, the Coast Guard’s icebreaker fleet is undergoing a massive expansion, with almost $9 billion for new ships.
On Tuesday, the U.S. government signed the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort — or ICE Pact — a three-nation agreement with Finland and Canada that will see some of those ships built in Finland, whose shipyards will train Americans to build more.
“It’s an exciting time to be a polar icebreaker sailor,” said Capt. Jeff Rasnake, commanding officer of the Polar Star, America’s only heavy icebreaker.
So many ships are about to join the Coast Guard’s fleet that the agency isn’t yet sure where it will put them all. The Coast Guard has earmarked millions for a port expansion in Seattle to accommodate three heavy icebreakers, plus another $300 million for Juneau to serve as a port for a medium icebreaker.
More space will be needed on top of that, and Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said his intent is to have as many of the new ships based in Alaska as possible.
“We want home port decisions on these icebreakers sometime in early 2026,” he said. “That is my goal.”
The need for new icebreakers is clear: As the Earth warms amid climate change, no place is warming faster than the Arctic. Melting ice is opening new routes for shipping, places to mine and drill, and seas to fish or view from the deck of a cruise ship.
In many cases, control of those new routes is being disputed among nations.
“Right now, things are heating up in the Arctic, and not just on the ice,” said Capt. Kristen Serumgard of the icebreaker Healy.
Russia is expanding its military presence in the Arctic, including with icebreakers, and as NATO confronts Russian aggression in Europe, there’s been international concern that the United States and NATO should be prepared to match Russia in the Arctic as well.
China is operating significant numbers of icebreakers in the Arctic, as are European nations, each interested in maintaining their right to access the area.
“It’s a geopolitical hotbed up there,” Serumgard said.
Rasnake, who typically works in the comparatively calm Antarctic, said that “with lines being drawn and a lot of different contested (seafloor) land claims, it’s — I wouldn’t say the wild, wild West, but maybe the wild, wild North.”
Shipping traffic through the Arctic Ocean is on the rise, with more ships traveling Russia’s Northern Sea Route and the Canadian-American Northwest Passage each summer.
As yet, the Northwest Passage isn’t regularly used by commercial shipping, said Steve White, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Alaska, which monitors the area for safety risks.
While that’s the case, “we are seeing a trend of more and more traffic, though, going through the Bering Straits, both on the US side and on the Russian side,” he said.
With more ships comes more risk. On Sept. 6, the Dutch cargo ship Thamesborg ran aground in Franklin Strait, part of the Northwest Passage. The accident didn’t release any pollution and no one was injured, but it took 33 days for the ship to be freed and sent on its way.
The Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route each funnel through the Bering Strait, which is split between American and Russian control.
“The reason this is so important for people to understand is that the Bering Strait — you’ve only got about (51) miles between the US and Russia, and you have the biodiversity, the wildlife that’s there,” White said. “This comes at a time where we’re getting more storms, the communities are struggling up there with food security and the top priority, the salmon returns … the fabric of our Alaskan communities up there is under threat, and it’s under threat from what’s going on with the weather changing and increased traffic.”
The U.S. Coast Guard is the federal government’s nautical Swiss Army knife — it performs rescue operations, enforces fishing laws, stops drug smugglers, runs border patrols, performs safety inspections, anti-pollution patrols, counter-piracy patrols, and enforces America’s maritime laws.
The U.S. Navy runs submarines under the Arctic ice, but it doesn’t operate icebreakers. It leaves the Coast Guard to do that — on the Great Lakes, on American rivers, and in the Arctic and Antarctic.
But for years, the national icebreaker fleet has been underfunded.
When Nome, home to the endpoint of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, ran short of fuel in 2012, the U.S. Coast Guard struggled to muster a single icebreaker, the Healy, to escort a Russian icebreaking tanker to the town.
At the time, the Healy was the Coast Guard’s lone operating icebreaker. Soon afterward, it reactivated the Polar Star, which had been mothballed because it was old and needed maintenance.
While both ships continue to operate, they’re less capable than modern ships and have suffered mechanical breakdowns, some significant.
Last year, the Healy caught fire and had to abbreviate its summer patrol. While it returned to service in the fall and went on to discover a volcano-like mountain on the Arctic seafloor, it’s now due for an extended period of maintenance.
“She’s 25 years old and been breaking ice for 25 years, right? That is hard on a ship,” Serumgard said.
Two American icebreakers in the Arctic Ocean in 2025
If America’s icebreaking fleet is near a low ebb, this summer saw the first steps toward the planned resurgence.
As a stopgap until new ships arrive, Congress last year ordered the purchase of the Aiviq, an oilfield services ship designed to work in the Arctic Ocean.
Eight years ago, following a disaster that saw the Aiviq lose control of a drilling rig during a storm, the Coast Guard deemed the ship “not suitable for military service without substantial refit.”
Since then, the ship has been overhauled and the Coast Guard’s opinion has changed.
After Congress appropriated the money, the Coast Guard purchased the Aiviq, quickly converted it, and in August this year, commissioned it as the icebreaker Storis.
At the time of that commissioning, commanding officer Capt. Corey Kerns said the ship and its crew would “need to learn to crawl” before they could get fully up and running.
In addition, there were unanswered questions about how well the Storis would handle the kinds of storms that troubled the Aiviq.
In October, Kerns sat down for another interview after returning from the Arctic.
“One of the things that kind of surprised me was that it went smoother than maybe I would have expected,” he said.
“She was able to perform, get through the whole thing without any major issues,” Kerns said of the ship’s first patrol.
As a result, Kerns felt confident enough to guide the Storis into the Arctic Ocean, where it worked with the icebreaker Healy to shadow two Chinese research ships in parts of the ocean that the United States claims.
The presence of those Chinese ships and others that have operated in conjunction with Russian shipshas alarmed some American officials.
If China and Russia are present in the region, it behooves the United States to be there too, Kerns said in August.
“The ability to be present guarantees your ability to to maintain sovereignty. And that’s what we’re trying to get at here in the Arctic. We need more icebreakers to be present in our waters and be clear what is our waters,” he said.
The Coast Guard cutter Waesche, a “thin-hulled” ship, also monitored the Chinese ships. Both it and the Storis participated in Arctic Edge 2025, a military training operation near the Russian border that also included Canadian forces.
There’s still work to be done with the Storis, Kerns said. It hasn’t been certified to host Coast Guard helicopters yet, and it hasn’t done a full icebreaking test.
“We got into the ice and we showed that she could break flat ice to some extent, at certain speeds, but … probably not a fully worthy test of capability in the ice, so we’re discussing that now,” he said.
Thirteen years ago, the Aiviq lost control of the drilling rig Kulluk, causing it to run aground on Kodiak Island. That disaster took place after rough seas flooded the Aiviq’s fuel tanks and caused it to lose power.
This summer, as the Storis sailed across the Gulf of Alaska, it again encountered rough seas.
“There were a few nights where you didn’t sleep as well, but it was perfectly safe,” Kerns said.
He said his crew are already overhauling equipment and preparing for next summer in the Arctic, working in conjunction with the Healy.
That ship spent 129 days at sea this summer, primarily focusing on science, according to an official Coast Guard description of the patrol.
“We know more about the surface of the moon than we know about the seafloors, so it’s kind of a really amazing area of exploration,” Serumgard said.
En route back to Seattle, the Healy was diverted to help search and rescue efforts in Southwest Alaska following Typhoon Halong, which devastated the region and left hundreds of people homeless.
In Seattle, the Polar Star was preparing to leave on a five-month roundtrip to Antarctica, where it will help supply research outposts across that continent.
Rasnake said he believes the Polar Star is in the best shape it’s been since being reactivated in 2013, and he looks forward to it possibly breaking the record of the most Antarctic missions by any Coast Guard icebreaker. That would come — if all goes well — in December 2026 or January 2027.
A huge expansion of the fleet is on the horizon
If the Polar Star does break that record, it may not have many opportunities to expand on it. The Coast Guard’s first new heavy icebreaker since the Polar Star is now under construction in Mississippi.
Named the Polar Sentinel, it’s expected to be complete by 2030. The Republican-backed budget plan that President Donald Trump nicknamed the “Big Beautiful Bill” includes funding for two other heavy icebreakers after the Sentinel.
Thirteen other icebreakers were funded in that bill, said Sullivan, the Alaska senator.
“There’s funding for three to four Arctic Security mediums. Those are the target ones for our state. And then there’s 10 light icebreakers. Those are smaller. Those do work in the Great Lakes and other things like that,” he said.
The medium icebreakers, known as “Arctic Security Cutters,” are among 11 planned ships being built by two separate industry groups. Canada’s Davie Shipbuilding is planning to build five ships — two in Finland, and then three at a to-be-expanded Texas shipyard.
The second group, which includes American, Canadian and Finnish firms, will build two ships in Finland and a third simultaneously in the United States, then build three others in the United States.
The first five ships are expected to be delivered to the Coast Guard within 36 months of a contract being signed, meaning they could be patrolling the Arctic Ocean before the end of the decade.
The newly commissioned Storis will also need upgrades to complete its conversion from a civilian ship. First on the docket may be additional military communications gear, but Kerns said the Coast Guard is also considering how to fit more crew aboard.
In the longer term, Kerns — who has a nautical engineering background — is working with his crew on plans for a deeper refit that could allow the Storis to serve as a kind of “logistics ship.”
As currently built, it carries several large holds originally intended for drilling mud and other materials needed for oil wells at sea. Those could be repurposed, he said this month, and his crew is coming up with ideas for the ship’s first major refit, expected sometime after summer 2026.
The new ships and the changes to the Storis are only part of the Coast Guard’s plan in the coming years. Each ship will also need people and equipment ashore for maintenance and support. The Coast Guard is involved in an ongoing struggle to acquire acreage to expand its Seattle base, which the port authority is reluctant to cede.
Pier space at the Coast Guard’s Alameda base, in California, is also constrained.
“We’re looking for space in all possible areas,” said Capt. Brian Krautler, chief of operations for the Coast Guard’s Pacific Area.
The Big Beautiful Bill included $300 million to build a base in Juneau to host the Storis. Other places in Alaska — Seward, Kodiak, Nome, or Dutch Harbor — might also accommodate one or more of the new Arctic Security Cutters. Kodiak is home to the largest Coast Guard base in the country.
Speaking this week at the signing of the so-called ICE Pact, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said that the Trump administration sees the expansion of the icebreaker fleet as a top priority.
“Today is a major milestone in the race to secure the Arctic for all of our countries,” she said. “The Arctic is the world’s last, most wild frontier, and our adversaries are racing to claim its strategic position and its rich natural resources for their own. If we give up that high ground, then we will condemn future generations to permanent insecurity, and we’re not going to let that happen on our watch.”