He reports: 'The ice is up to one and a half metres thick here', but adds that the crew had supplies enough to last until an ice-breaker reaches them in around a week. The Mikhail Somov is identified in the Telegraph's text as 'one of the ships stranded along the Northern Sea Route' and Gil describes the situation as 'quite dire'.

The captain of the Mikhail Somov, Viktor Gil, is actually cited, his quote attributed to the news agency Tass, although it doesn't appear in the agency's report. Their plight is attributed to an 'inaccurate forecast' from the country's Met Office, which failed to predict the earlier ice formation than has been recently experienced. The text tells of 'more than two dozen cargo vessels' stuck in Russia's Arctic ice, waiting for ice-breakers to come to their rescue.

Leading the charge yesterday was the Telegraph with the headline: 'Dozens of ships stuck in Arctic as ice freezes early in reverse of recent warming winters', with a picture captioned as 'the research and expedition ship' Mikhail Somov, apparently stuck in the ice in the Vilkitsky Strait the passage between the Kara and Laptev Seas. The coprophagic tendencies of the legacy media were well in evidence yesterday, and more so today, as the papers finally wake up to what has been going on in the Northern Sea Route (NSR) a story we covered over a week ago, in greater depth.

Icebreaker in pirates tides of fortune