MV Xue Long

Xue Long (Chinese: 雪龙; pinyin: Xuě Lóng; literally Snow Dragon) is a Chinese icebreaking research vessel. Built in 1993 at Kherson Shipyard in Ukraine, she was converted from an Arctic cargo ship to a polar research and re-supply vessel by Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding of Shanghai by the mid-90s. The vessel was extensively upgraded in 2007 and was expected to go through another upgrade in 2013, but it is not known if the latter refit was carried out.

As of 2012, Xue Long is the only Chinese icebreaking research ship in service. A second Chinese polar icebreaker, slightly smaller but more capable than Xue Long, is currently at the design stage and is expected to enter service in 2016.

Description

Built at the Kherson Shipyard in Ukraine and completed on 25 March 1993, Xue Long started her life as a Project 10621 icebreaking cargo and supply ship designed for the Russian Arctic. She was purchased by the People's Republic of China and converted to a polar research and re-supply vessel in 1994. In 2007, the ship was extensively upgraded to extend her service life by another 15 years. During the mid-life refit, the ship received a new superstructure that considerably changed her external appearance. She received another technical update in 2013 which included replacing her main engine.

List of Arctic expeditions

This list of Arctic expeditions is a timeline of historic expeditions in, and explorers of, the Arctic.

Pre-expedition

1400s

1500s

1600s

China

China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a sovereign state in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population of over 1.35 billion. The PRC is a one-party state governed by the Communist Party, with its seat of government in the capital city of Beijing. It exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces; five autonomous regions; four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing); two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau); and claims sovereignty over Taiwan.

Covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometers, China is the world's second-largest country by land area, and either the third or fourth-largest by total area, depending on the method of measurement. China's landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes and the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts in the arid north to subtropical forests in the wetter south. The Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third- and sixth-longest in the world, run from the Tibetan Plateau to the densely populated eastern seaboard. China's coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometres (9,000 mi) long, and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East and South China Seas.

Snow dragon

Snow dragon may refer to:

Monday or Tuesday

Monday or Tuesday is a 1921 short story collection by Virginia Woolf published by The Hogarth Press. 1000 copies were printed with four full-page woodcuts by Vanessa Bell.Leonard Woolf called it one of the worst printed books ever published because of the typographical mistakes in it. Most mistakes were corrected for the US edition published by Harcourt Brace. It contained eight stories:

Six of the stories were later published by Leonard Woolf in the posthumous collection A Haunted House, those excluded were "A Society" and "Blue & Green".

Title

In her 1919 work Modern Fiction, Virginia Woolf explains her new approach to writing :

This last phrase "the life of Monday or Tuesday", is what Woolf believed to be at the core of fiction; and from it came the title of this, her first short story collection, and the only selection she published herself.