Coast Guard icebreaker that watched Chinese ships in the Arctic stops in Juneau

The Coast Guard icebreaker Storis is in Juneau this week for a brief port call, near the end of a 134-day deployment in which it kept watch on Chinese research ships in the Arctic.

The ship covered more than 17,000 miles in the Arctic Ocean and what the Coast Guard calls the Alaska Theater of Operations, the Coast Guard's Arctic District said. It heads next to Seattle, its temporary home port, until the Coast Guard is ready to base it in Juneau.

The Arctic District had the Storis this year but not the Healy, Lt. Cmdr. Jedediah Raskie of the district told the North Pacific Fishery Management Council on Oct. 8. The Healy, another Coast Guard polar icebreaker, suffered what the Coast Guard called a significant engineering casualty off Washington state and was towed back to its home port July 13 for major repairs.

Four Chinese research ships were in the Bering Sea and Arctic from July through October, Raskie said. He showed their tracks over the U.S. extended continental shelf claim, an area of seafloor beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast. "It's apparent that the U.S. extended continental shelf claim is a primary area where they operate," Raskie said.

The Storis consistently monitored the ships there and passed along State Department language on the prohibition against marine scientific research without approval, he said. The Coast Guard did not say that any violation occurred. The Storis also made runs along the U.S.-Russia maritime boundary line, Raskie said. The crew's missions also include search and rescue and fisheries law enforcement, according to the district.

The Storis didn't start out as a Coast Guard ship. It was built in 2012 as the Aiviq, a 360-foot commercial icebreaker that supported oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea and went to Antarctica twice. The Coast Guard bought it in November 2024 for $125 million, the first polar icebreaker added to its fleet in more than 25 years, to help fill the gap while it waits for new icebreakers to be built.

As the Aiviq, the ship was towing the drilling unit Kulluk through the Gulf of Alaska in December 2012 when the towline parted. After the tow was reconnected, the Aiviq's engines failed. On New Year's Eve, the Aiviq and a tug lost the tow, and the Kulluk ran aground off Kodiak Island, according to state situation reports.

The Coast Guard commissioned the Storis in Juneau in August 2025 and plans to base it there permanently once shoreside facilities are ready. "The current lack of a definitive plan for housing in Juneau jeopardizes the timeline to homeport the Storis," Juneau City Manager Katie Koester wrote last month in asking an Assembly committee to back a partnership with Tlingit & Haida and the Tlingit-Haida Regional Housing Authority to open land for Coast Guard housing.

The Coast Guard also plans to base three new Arctic Security Cutters in Alaska, two in Kodiak and one in Seward, once infrastructure is complete. That would bring the state to four icebreakers. The first is scheduled for delivery in 2028.

The name comes from an earlier cutter Storis, which was based in Juneau from 1948 to 1957, according to the Coast Guard Historian's Office. In 1956, its crew fought a fire at a Juneau cold-storage plant. In July 1957, it left with two other cutters to look for a deep-draft route across the top of North America, the first American transit of the Northwest Passage, and became the first U.S.-registered ship to sail around the continent. It was later based in Kodiak and served in Alaska until 2007, earning the title "Queen of the Fleet" as the Coast Guard's oldest commissioned cutter.

Storis means "great ice" in Scandinavian, the Coast Guard says.