BY ANY standards the Voisey’s Bay nickel mine is remote. Diamond prospectors found the deposit near the coast of Canada’s easternmost province of Newfoundland and Labrador in 1993 (see map); the mine, which is operated by Vale of Brazil, opened in 2005. No roads connect it to the outside world. Although a giant hydroelectric plant is just 365km (230 miles) away, at Churchill Falls, the mine gets no power from it. The 300 mine workers can be flown in and out. The nickel has to be shipped—no easy task when the bay is closed off by sea ice for six months a year. The only way to get ore out all year round is with a polar-class icebreaking bulk carrier, the Umiak I. It makes 12 trips a year.

The Umiak I is the world’s most powerful icebreaking cargo ship. It has a reinforced hull and a soupspoon-shaped bow that rides up over the ice, which can be as thick as ten metres in places. The ship is powered by a 30,000 horsepower engine, large enough to drive an oil tanker ten times its size. Satellite imagery helps identify where the ice is thickest. Even so, the Umiak I was stopped a few times by dense ice in the Gulf of St Lawrence and along the Labrador coast on a voyage last month. When the ice resists, the Umiak I reverses and tries again. The cooks put on ear protectors as the engine whines and the ship shudders.

The Umiak I operates a shuttle service from Quebec City, a 1,850km voyage that usually takes three-and-a-half to four days. On its final approach into Voisey’s Bay the ship takes the same route every time, with markers a few metres on each side, so as not to disturb Inuit. A group of hunters on snowmobiles wait as the ship passes, ready with a pontoon bridge to cross the open water that the icebreaker leaves behind.

On the trip out, the deck is covered with more than 150 containers carrying mining supplies and food for the people who work there. Sometimes a hold is filled with diesel for the mine’s 12MW electricity-generating station. On the return voyage it carries as much as 30,000 tonnes of nickel-copper concentrate, which goes by train from Quebec City to Vale’s smelter in Sudbury, Ontario. That makes for a precious cargo: the price of nickel is well off its peak but the load is still worth a cool $100m or so.