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January 2013 www.sname.org/sname/mt The natural resources contained in the Arctic are widely acknowledged. Drilling and ship- ping activities in the area are expected to increase going forward, and increased activity means new requirements for environmental risk manage -ment. New technical solutions are required to manage the risk of oil spills and to keep vessel emissions as low as possible. e Arctic Council and its member states, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the industry are working on these issues to bring resources to levels required for future developments. e work being done by the Finnish icebreaking industry represents an operational solution to these challenges. Arctia Shipping, a Finnish icebreaking, ice manage- ment, and oil spill recovery company carries a 120-year legacy of maritime ice know-how. is experience, gained from Baltic Sea operations, can be viewed as a laboratory for current and future arctic needs. The companys icebreak er fleet assists thousands of merchant vessels annually to and from Finnish ports due to the Baltic Sea freezing every winter. Close to 90% of Finnish foreign trade (90 million tons annually) is trans- ported via sea routes. Due to the needs of Finnish and international trade, a year-round maritime and harbor infrastructure has been developed. ere are more than 60 commercial ports in Finland, of which 23 are kept open on a year-round basis. All these ports may have ice coverage during the winter. From this perspective, Finland is actually an island. e shoreline is restricted by the Baltic Sea, specically the Gulf of Finland in the south, the Sea of Archipelago in the southwest, and the Bay of Bothnia in the west and north- west. Conditions vary a lot from one year to another. e minimum ice coverage is approximately 50,000 square kilometers, when only the northern areas are covered by ice. During a harsh winter, the entire Baltic Sea receives an ice cover and we face a maximum area of 400,000 square kilometers, which is close to ten times more than during a mild winter. The winters of 2010 and 2011 provided a harsh reminder of how extreme conditions on the Baltic Sea can be. Sea ice grew thick during the long cold spells, and the onArctias Fennica tests herself against multiyear ice o the western coast of Greenland.