| 摘要 |
A means of creating a navigable path, passage, canal, or channel, for marine craft, boats, or ships, through solid ice, during seasonal, arctic, or natural wint er freezing conditions by the use of loose, or captive, hollow, or solid, balls, spheres , or discs made of plastic, rubber, metal, wood or wood composite, packed and nested togethe r at a specified depth and placed on the surface of the water within the width and length of a proposed navigable channel, formed by existing concrete, or steel walls, or by cutting a path through solid ice with rotary or chain saws, or creating a passage with vertical, floating mesh netting, at the beginning of the winter freeze. The inventor has established that loose of captive, frozen, closely packed nested balls, create a web of interlocking filaments of ice structure between them, but having no consistent thickness in any direction, the structure remains weak and susceptible to pressure. or direct force and is easily broken up by weight, or the bow of small harbour craft. Larger balls create a similarly weak ice structure. Although still subject to freezing, continuous use of the channel will change each time to break-up an d churn the mush of water, ice fragments and moving or sliding balls, ensuring there is no impenetrable solid ice barrier to open water. Ball traps at each end of the channel determine that very few balls are lost, or drift away.
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