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Canadian soldiers check-in on planet’s best-preserved disaster scene

Few places in the world demand missions like this one.

A team of highly trained soldiers maneuvers through the unimaginable cold and hostile elements more than 800 km north of the Arctic Circle. Destination reached, they cut through 1.2 m of ice using a special heated water saw.

The hole has to be big enough to send an unmanned probe 105 m underwater. There lies one of Canada's most famous shipwrecks — and the planet's best-preserved disaster scene thanks to its icy final resting place.

The Toronto Sun covers this week's Operation Nunalivut 2012, a major security and sovereignty operation in Canada's High Arctic.

Part of this year's itinerary includes checking up on the H.M.S Breadalbane, the merchant ship that sank to the bottom of the Northern Passage in 1853 while carrying supplies for the Franklin rescue expedition.

Early on that August 21 morning, the three-mast ship was trapped and then crushed by slow moving ice.

As the article notes, all crew members were able to escape to the Breadalbane's sister ship, from which they observed that the pressure from the ice splintered the vessel's beams and caused the ship to "shudder" before she sank.

More than a century and a half later, the Breadalbane is still considered the world's northernmost shipwreck and has been declared a national historic site in Canada.

Because of its remote and challenging location, costly missions to check on the ship's status don't happen often. In fact, the Sun explains, no one has been down to see how well she's been holding up since the early 80s.

But this year's operation involves testing how well man and machine fare in extreme conditions and the robot appears to be doing a solid job, checking for iceberg damage along the ship's submerged surfaces.

The men are also doing well. A team of navy divers braves the temperatures to check on equipment. Senior diver Chief Petty Officer Cameron Jones, a former Winnipeg police officer turned reservist, told the Sun they're working against conditions that turn an easy mission into a difficult operation.

It's why they've come well prepared, bringing two 11.8 kg submersibles with them.

Because, as he explained, "If we don't bring something with us, we can't just go downtown and pick it up."