The ice floe they were living on had split into smaller floes.
But Velmeskin said the ice floes were not significant and that the weather had been manageable when the ship went down.
If the plan to rescue them by air fails, a large American icebreaker is about 10 days away and should be able to break through the dense ice floes that thwarted the Chinese and Australian ships.
For six months the trapped ship drifted over 1,000 miles with the floes.
The subject is bound to come up, at least in small talk, with Mr Ban.From floes to forestsWhen the South Korean trouble-shooter leaves Chile, he will head not for Brazil's political or financial centre, but to Santarém in the state of Pará, which includes both some superbly intact bits of rainforest and also areas that have been ravaged by illegal logging.
When eventually the floes began to break up in April 1916, Shackleton loaded his men into three small lifeboats and struck out for Elephant Island, an uninhabited speck of land some 100 miles distant.Back on terra firma after 497 days adrift, the ragged crew found their new environment as brutally inhospitable as the drifting floes.
Most extraordinary of all, ice floes floated down the Mississippi, past New Orleans and out into the Gulf of Mexico.The eastern United States recovered fairly quickly, but places farther afield were not so lucky.
Shell's attempts to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea this August were forestalled by ice floes which, though small by the scale of continents, were pretty large by the standards of human engineering.
It was 70 years ago, in 1937, that Ivan Papanin first landed on drifting ice floes and raised the Soviet flag over the North Pole-1 station.Joseph Stalin greeted the Soviet hero in the Kremlin, praising him for "overturning the outdated perception of the Arctic".
Ice floes are an impediment to sea navigation during the winter, and dense fog is a hindrance during the summer.
As a practical matter, floes arriving at the upstream edge will submerge and pass on downstream if the mean velocity exceeds about 60 centimetres (24 inches) per second.
