The ice floe they were living on had split into smaller floes.
Russia's main federal investigator, the Investigative Committee, said another possible cause was that the ship had struck an ice floe, tearing a hole in the hull.
Angular shards of concrete lie marooned beneath the bridge like fragments of an ice floe cast adrift.
Then, when snow or rain wash them onto an ice floe, they darken its surface and thus cause it to melt faster.Reducing soot (and also ozone, an industrial pollutant that acts as a greenhouse gas) would not stop the summer sea ice disappearing, but it might delay the process by a decade or two.
Others have suggested that it could be used as a weapon, a tool to stir the ocean floor in search of food, a means of propping the whale's head on an ice floe to sleep, or as a spear to catch fish although how the narwhal would get its prey off its tusk and into its mouth remained a riddle.
He had staggered to the South on an ice floe across the Imjin river in 1950, stripped of all except the clothes he stood in.
(Quaxelrod, a duck @MayorEmanuel befriends while on an ice floe in the Chicago River yes, the events are absurd was meant as a "one off" tweet but was so popular that Mr Sinker developed him into a regular character).
The station, now known as North Pole 1, drifted south for nine months and was taken off its melting ice floe in the Greenland Sea.
A second ship, the Hansa, became separated and was crushed in the ice, and the crew drifted south on a floe around Cape Farewell, reaching the settlement of Frederiksdal in safety.
March 6 Twelve Russian scientists whose research station was destroyed when the ice shelf on which it was located began breaking up are rescued from an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean; the station had been built in April 2003 to study climate change.
A party of 19, including an Inuit mother with a two-month-old baby, became separated from the ship and drifted all winter on an ice floe before being picked up by a whaler off the coast of Labrador in April 1873.
