Not Your Grandfather’s Immersion Suit

In 2008, FV Alaska Ranger, a 190-foot fish processing vessel, sank in the Bering Sea. The crew had time to don their survival suits and rescue helicopters showed up to pull the first survivor from the water in just 50 minutes. But four crewmembers died in the sea that night; they were the last four individuals to be pulled from the water, more than five hours after the sinking.

“If you need to put on an immersion suit, it’s not a bright, sunny day; normally, it’s a storm, or it’s nighttime—it’s poor conditions,” Jacobson describes. “When you are operating in those conditions in waters which are more than two or three hours away from rescue, that’s a danger.”

Sweating in the Ice Tank

Brian Horner, director and founder of Learn to Return Training Systems (LTR) in Anchorage, has spent a lot of time in Gumby suits. The longest he’s stayed in one, immersed in ice cold water for testing, was 20 hours. He knows firsthand what it’s like to swim for survival.

To stay warm inside the Gumby suit, he says, “I had to swim more every hour. At hour 12, I’m swimming, like, 10 minutes. By hour 18, I’m spending 40 minutes flopping and swimming just to keep my core above 95°F. If I dropped below that, they would have pulled me from the experiment.”

“The neoprene suits—let’s call them your grandfather’s immersion suit—haven’t changed very much since the 1960s,” Jacobson points out. “If those suits get wet on the inside, which often happens, it drops thermal protection by 40 to 45 percent.”

This was one of the first fixes Jacobson’s team at Puerto Rico-based White Glacier sought to make when developing the Arctic 25, an early predecessor to the Arctic 10+ immersion suit. First, instead of relying on neoprene to create thermal protection, they used a metalized fabric full of air bubbles—sort of like bubble wrap for mailing breakables—to line the inner layer of the suit. This “bubble technology” reflects heat back to the body.

The design is extremely effective. In testing at White Glacier, a subject was completely soaked in ice water before donning the suit and entering an ice bath. Within ten minutes, the subject’s body temperature had stabilized; within two hours, his clothes inside the suit were nearly dry.

Thermal protection licked, Jacobson set out to fix the problem of eventual degradation of the glue and stitching that hold neoprene suits together. A layer of durable, waterproof plastic encases the Arctic 10+’s bubble fabric; to create a seal, the seams of this fabric are bonded by melting the plastic together, making the suit airtight.

Horner first donned the Arctic 10+ immersion suit during an open house at Eagle Enterprises Safety Solutions, an Alaska safety equipment retailer. Along with LTR instructor Patrick Nephew, he climbed into a tub full of ice.

“We were floating next to each other, just sweating in full clothing inside those [Arctic 10+] suits in the ice tank,” Nephew recalls. “We were like, ‘This thing’s amazing.’”

Jacobson gave the LTR team one of his suits, encouraging them to run it through a gamut of test-case scenarios.

So they did.

A Personal Life Raft, with Extras

Floating on the sea encased in the Arctic 10+ is a little like being inside a sleeping bag on top of a waterbed, says Clint Homestead, another LTR instructor.

To increase survival time, the Arctic 10+ has additional features other suits don’t offer.

First, the suit includes a “splash tent”—a dome made of clear, durable plastic film—that can be deployed from the chest and neck, creating a fully enclosed personal habitat. The suit’s unique bat-wing sleeve design allows the wearer to pull their arms fully inside the ample chest. From there, the suit can be unzipped from the inside, and the wearer can sit up in the splash tent, completely protected from the elements.

While cold is the biggest danger in a frigid ocean, Jacobson wanted his suit to respond to changing conditions. Even in cold water, when the sun comes out, a neoprene suit can grow uncomfortably warm. The wearer can cool off by flushing the suit with water—but when conditions change again, being wet increases the risk of hypothermia.

In the Arctic 10+, the wearer can open the splash tent and let in fresh air. Fully zipped, the splash tent warms quickly; Homestead likens it to a greenhouse, rapidly warming the inside of the suit so that, while testing the Arctic 10+ in an ice tank, he found himself “yelling at them to toss more ice in.”

When abandoning a ship, a crew may be confronted with fires, or they might find themselves needing to leap from a height into the ocean. Jacobson designed the Arctic 10+ with these scenarios in mind, too.

While the USCG requires that an immersion suit provide protection for jumps into the water from a height of 4.5 meters, or almost 15 feet, the buoyancy of the Arctic 10+ makes it possible for its wearer to jump from about 10 meters—nearly 33 feet—into the ocean.

The outer layer of the Arctic 10+ is made of treated, fire-resistant nylon. This layer increases flame protection from two seconds (the minimum USCG requirement) to ten seconds. The wearer of the suit can also deploy the splash tent to protect against smoke and gain minutes of fresh air.

Survival for Days

Homestead and Nephew have had ample opportunity to test the Arctic 10+. They jumped off the pier in Whittier to test for buoyancy, popping like a cork to the surface of the water. Nephew opened the splash tent and shot flares from inside the suit. Homestead learned from experience that a urination kit used inside the suit works well, but it should only be emptied by passing the bag through the chest—not through the neck, just in case the bag breaks.

In addition to the urination kit, pockets inside the Arctic 10+ can be stocked with survival equipment, first aid supplies, light, and food.

While demonstrating the suit for a group of fishermen in Kodiak, Homestead heard one observer snark that he wouldn’t be impressed with the suit unless you could eat a sandwich while inside—so Homestead grabbed the guy’s sandwich, jumped from the 25-foot-high dock, then deployed the splash tent. He floated on the water, perfectly comfortable while enjoying his snack.

Comfort was an important factor when Jacobson was developing the Arctic 10+. “If you are wet and cold and scared, your survivability will be negatively impacted,” he observes. “But if you’re comfortable and you’re warm, your survivability increases.”

Their experience with the suit has convinced the instructors at LTR that an Arctic 10+ could significantly impact cold-water survival in Alaska for the better.

“This suit is definitely taking survival from hours to days,” Homestead says.

While the Arctic 10+ marketing materials state that an individual can survive for up to five days in the suit, Homestead adds, “Our opinion, for Alaska waters, in the environments we’re in, we see about two days of survival on the water from this. That’s a lot. You’re taking the average Gumby suit and quadrupling the survival.”

“Someone Needs to Have the Worst Day of Their Life”

Jacobson’s biggest sale to date has been to Ponant, an expedition cruise company based in Marseille, France, that bought 600 suits for its icebreaker. Using the Arctic 10+ suit, in 2021 the company organized the first international rescue exercise in a polar region, collaborating with teams from the United States, Canada, Greenland, and other Arctic nations.

In Alaska, both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and UAF have purchased White Glacier’s immersion suits. The company was delivering suits this summer to Dutch Harbor for a Seattle-based fishing company.

While use of the Arctic 10+ suit isn’t widespread in Alaska yet, Jacobson is hopeful.

“[I] expect Alaska to be a very strong market for us because of the nature of their cold water. Anyone that operates in the Bering Sea will require this type of equipment,” he says.

However, trying to convince Alaska fishermen that there’s something better than the traditional Gumby suit is going to take an extreme situation, in Nephew’s opinion. “The cold, hard truth about it, when it comes to survival equipment, is someone needs to have the worst day of their life for everybody to realize this thing is going to work,” he says.

The cost of the suit—an Arctic 10+ goes for about $1,800—may be one daunting factor. The familiar Gumby suit, by comparison, retails for $750, on average. To provide more—and cheaper—options, White Glacier is developing the Arctic 6, which will still offer increased protection but at a lower price point.

Already, LTR has started incorporating demos of the Arctic 10+ into its Offshore Cold Water Survival course. Eventually, Horner would like to outsource what LTR does by offering “train the trainer” courses. He wants actual mariners to learn how to don the suit quickly and then take what they’ve learned back to the rest of their crews, able to say, “I was in the suit, and it works.”

This year’s Governor’s Safety and Health Conference in April honored White Glacier and LTR with a Governor’s Innovation in Safety Award, which recognizes companies that have developed products that significantly contribute to improving environmental protection in the workplace.

“The market’s going to have this at some point. This [suit] is coming, and the Gumby is going to be an obsolete thing,” Homestead predicts.