Posted on May 12, 2025
The Nordic nation, with deep Baltic Sea experience, has made and designed more icebreakers than any other country Finland has a long and storied history in producing icebreakers.
By Daniel Michaels | Photographs by Juuso Westerlund for WSJ
Updated May 11, 2025
HELSINKI—Smashing ice is straightforward—except when it is more than 10-feet thick and you’re using a ship, even one designed for the job.
If an icebreaker’s hull is the wrong shape, the ice bends but doesn’t break. Without the right paint, the ship grates against the ice like sandpaper. Spin the propellers too fast or too slow and deflected chunks of subsea ice can make the ship reverberate like a gong.
Knowledge of pitfalls like these is why Finland has helped design or build around 80% of the world’s icebreakers. Finns say they can churn out icebreakers more quickly and cheaply than anywhere else, putting them in prime position as countries race to access the Arctic’s thawing seas.
President Trump, who has pledged to buy or conquer Greenland, views the Arctic as a zone of future commerce and potential conflict. He has called for the U.S. to make a new fleet of icebreakers—and engineers from Finland are lining up to help.
“Ice is our playground,” said Mika Hovilainen, chief executive of Finnish icebreaker designer Aker Arctic. The company, which has a 246-foot-long ice-simulation tank, is now designing ships for countries including Canada and Sweden, and hopes to play a role in U.S. development plans.
“We want to be involved in every Western icebreaker,” said Hovilainen, who was lead designer on 10 icebreakers, including one that can operate sideways.
Aker Arctic, which has a 246-foot-long ice-simulation tank, is designing ships for several countries and hopes to play a role in the U.S.’s plans
Hovilainen has a shot at achieving his ambition because Aker is part of the world’s leading network of companies making Arctic-ready engines, heating systems, antennas and other frostproof equipment. Finnish engineers have spent decades studying ice and how to design ships for it.
“What does Finland have to offer the United States? Number one is icebreakers,” said Finnish President Alexander Stubb in an interview. “We build them faster than anyone in the world and at about half the price.”
Trump, after recently meeting Stubb, posted on social media that he wanted to boost U.S.-Finnish ties, “and that includes the purchase and development of a large number of badly needed Icebreakers for the U.S.”
The U.S. has struggled to build icebreakers. The Biden administration in July struck a deal with Canada and Finland called the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort Pact to share expertise. The three governments in March reaffirmed their commitments to the ICE Pact.
Finland learned to make icebreakers out of necessity.
Icebreakers are purpose-built, which drives up costs. Only a few are produced worldwide annually, and they can last half a century. In most countries, know-how evaporates in the generation or so between new ships. But in Finland, because it has helped design or build more than 120 icebreakers over the past century, knowledge has deepened.
Alongside Aker, Finland has three shipyards that can make icebreakers and has a network of suppliers. That equipment includes swiveling external engine pods that can pivot a ship in any direction and “mill” their way through ice like a blender. According to local industry lore, the concept was developed by engineers sweating in another ultra-Finnish design: the sauna.
“Wherever you look in icebreaking, you’ll find a Finn,” said Peter Rybski, a retired U.S. Navy officer now living in Helsinki.
While Japan and South Korea are advanced economies that can still compete in building big commercial ships in large quantities, Rybski notes, Finland is unusual in its ability to profitably produce complex ships in small runs.
Across town from Aker is Finland’s largest icebreaker producer. Helsinki Shipyard, which was owned by Russian investors for a decade from 2013, just signed a contract to build an icebreaker for Canada. The yard’s new Canadian owner, Davie Shipbuilding, wants to leverage the yard’s know-how to win orders from Washington and to produce icebreakers in the U.S. Designs, components and production savvy could come from Finland.
An icebreaker under construction in Helsinki in 1963
For the nation of 5.6 million people, which has Europe’s longest border with Russia, unique skills for operating in the high north are a valuable asset. Icebreaker expertise has put Finland in demand inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which it joined in 2023.
“It’s a significant capability whose value is only going to increase now with the…contested Arctic,” said Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen.
Finland learned to make icebreakers out of necessity because much of its trade with the West is via the Baltic Sea—one of the world’s busiest waterways but the only crowded one that routinely ices up.
Some Finns worry that icebreaker-production deals with shipyards in Canada or the U.S. could hand North Americans some of Finland’s valuable expertise, said Rybski. The fear is overblown, he reckoned, because Finns’ experience can’t easily be replicated.
During and after the Cold War, when Helsinki worked to stay friendly with Moscow, Finland was one of Russia’s top icebreaker suppliers. Helsinki Shipyard even made hulls for nuclear-powered models that were completed in Russia around 1989 and still operate. Petroleum and minerals in the vast Russian Arctic fueled orders for extreme-weather ships.
After Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that cooperation stopped. Finland forced Helsinki Shipyard’s Russian investors to sell. In swooped Canadian company Davie Shipbuilding, owned by British investors who have focused on making complex, specialized vessels and innovative financing.
The Niirala border crossing between Finland and Russia.
Davie already runs a large shipyard in Quebec and recently won a contract for one of two planned Canadian icebreakers, which will be partly designed and built in Helsinki.
Davie Chief Executive James Davies said a big part of what attracted his company to the Helsinki yard was Finland’s unusual system for beginning ship construction while plans are still being completed, which is how the country can slash the time and cost to produce an icebreaker.
“When you look at the data, their approach is so well supported,” said Davies.
Rybski credits Finland’s democratic approach to business and few administrative hurdles, which means almost anyone can resolve questions quickly.
Effective cooperation is critical because icebreakers are assemblies of complex systems built to handle some of the world’s harshest conditions. Designers must understand from the outset a ship’s mission, such as scientific research or bashing a path through ice for cargo ships.
Mika Hovilainen and Arto Uuskallio of Aker Arctic, components used in the manufacture of the ships, and the company’s simulation pool.
Many icebreakers can brave temperatures down to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, but if a ship won’t face such frigid conditions, the cost savings can be significant.
On top of that, every shipboard system must be engineered to withstand extreme cold. Plumbing for firefighting and cooling engines must avoid freezing. Air vents can’t get blocked with snow or machinery may malfunction. If a ship can’t handle the vibrations caused by bus-sized chunks of ice hitting propellers, said Aker’s Hovilainen, “you’ll be raining antennas” as they shake loose.
Adding to the complexity, icebreaking can’t be modeled on computers the same way as motion through water and air. Impurities in ice like dust and sand introduce randomness that makes it impossible to predict exactly how a ship will behave.
To understand which details are important, Aker runs scale-model ships through its tank repeatedly and sends teams out on actual icebreakers to compare real-world results with their predictions. Aker and its peers continually refine their computer models and understanding of how ships and ice interact.
“You cannot learn that from books,” Hovilainen said.
Helsinki Shipyard executives and a model of an icebreaker the company built for Russia
