RV Polarstern
German icebreaker and research vessel
RV Polarstern (meaning Polaris) is a German research icebreaker of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. Polarstern was built by Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Kiel and Nobiskrug in Rendsburg, was commissioned in 1982, and is mainly used for research in the Arctic and Antarctica. The ship has a length of 118 metres (387 feet) and is a double-hulled icebreaker. She is operational at temperatures as low as −50 °C (−58 °F). Polarstern can break through ice 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in) thick at a speed of 5 knots (9.3 km/h; 5.8 mph). Thicker ice of up to 3 m (9.8 ft) can be broken by ramming.
History
On 7 September 1991, Polarstern, assisted by the Swedish arctic icebreaker Oden, reached the North Pole as the first conventional powered vessels. Both scientific parties and crew took oceanographic and geological samples and had a common tug of war and a football game on an ice floe. In 2001, Polarstern together with USCGC Healy reached the pole again. She returned for a third time on 22 August 2011.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q558338. VIAF identifies the subject as 133778687. The Library of Congress control number is n86147248. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1991, 2001 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “RV Polarstern” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.