The Wet-Donning Problem: Why Water Ingress Renders Most Immersion Suits Useless in Polar Conditions

Ergopro test facility, Trondheim, Norway — August 2022. The test subject immersed in 0°C water at −20°C air temperature with 10 m/s wind. By test end, the pool had frozen solid around the suit.

Published by White Glacier Manufacturing Corp.

There is a question that every polar vessel operator should ask — but rarely does: What happens to my crew's immersion suit the moment seawater gets inside it?

For the vast majority of suits on the market today, the answer is straightforward and alarming. Thermal protection collapses. The suit that was supposed to keep a mariner alive for hours begins to fail at the precise moment it is needed most.

How Conventional Suits Are Built — and Why It Matters

Most commercial immersion suits use closed-cell foam as their primary insulating material. Foam insulation works by trapping air within its structure, creating a thermal barrier between the wearer and the surrounding water. Under controlled laboratory conditions, this works reasonably well.

But polar abandonment is not a laboratory.

In a real emergency — a vessel listing in heavy seas, a crew member going overboard, a rapid evacuation in darkness and wind — water enters the suit. Through the face seal. Through the zipper. Through any gap created by movement or donning under stress. Even a relatively modest ingress of water displaces the air that foam insulation depends on. The result is an immediate and significant drop in thermal performance that does not recover.

The suit the mariner is wearing is no longer the suit that was tested and certified.

500 grams of water — the maximum allowed ingress from a jump entry — added to the inside of the suit immediately before immersion. No measurable thermal loss resulted.

What Independent Testing Revealed

In 2022, White Glacier submitted the Arctic 10+ to independent testing at the Ergopro facility in Trondheim, Norway — one of the most demanding cold-weather validation environments in the world. The conditions were representative of genuine High Arctic abandonment: 0°C water temperature, −20°C air temperature, 10 m/s wind, producing an effective wind chill of −30°C.

During the six-hour test protocol, the Arctic 10+ experienced approximately 500 grams of water ingress — a realistic amount under field conditions. The result was unambiguous: core temperature of the thermal manikin dropped by just 0.5°C over the full six hours, and no measurable thermal loss was attributable to the water ingress itself.

This is not a marketing claim. It is documented, independently validated data.

The Arctic 10+ achieves this performance because its insulation architecture does not rely on air pockets that water can displace. The bubble insulation system retains its thermal properties whether the interior environment is dry or wet. Ingress is acknowledged as a physical reality of polar use — and the suit is engineered accordingly.

Why This Gap Has Safety and Legal Consequences

The IMO Polar Code Chapter 8 establishes a goal-based requirement: life-saving appliances must provide thermal protection sufficient to support survival for the Maximum Expected Time of Rescue — a minimum of five days in remote polar waters. The standard does not specify foam insulation. It specifies survivability.

A suit whose thermal performance degrades significantly upon water ingress cannot reliably meet that goal-based requirement in the conditions where it will actually be used. That is not a regulatory technicality. It is a survivability gap with direct consequences for crews, operators, and the organizations responsible for their safety.

Flag states, Recognized Organizations, and P&I clubs are increasingly asking how vessels demonstrate compliance with the goal-based framework — not merely whether a suit carries a certificate. The question of wet-donning resilience sits at the center of that inquiry.

The Standard That Was Not Built for This

Conventional immersion suits were developed and certified against standards designed for temperate and sub-arctic water rescue scenarios — environments where SAR response is measured in hours and where dry conditions inside the suit are a reasonable assumption. They were not designed, tested, or validated for polar abandonment conditions where ingress is likely, wind chill is severe, and rescue may be days away.

The Arctic 10+ was. That distinction is not incidental. It is the reason the suit exists.

The test pool after six hours. The suit had to be knocked loose from the ice. The test subject reported no significant cold discomfort throughout.

The Arctic 10+ is the only independently validated polar immersion suit on record to demonstrate five-day survivability under simultaneous cold water, sub-zero air temperature, and wind chill conditions. For technical documentation and fleet specifications, contact White Glacier Manufacturing Corp. at djacobson@whiteglacier.com.