The development of Arctic areas raises new challenges in many fields of expertise. This thesis deals with the design of berm breakwaters in such areas.This thesis investigates through experiments how the different ice behaviour such as ride up and pile up to evaluate mainly how efficient are the piling up events to prevent the ice to ride up further. The possible damage to the berm are also listed.In the experiments, the ice has been modelled with paraffin. This modelling itself was also investigated to see if it could represent the full scale behaviours. The model ice was pushed against a model berm breakwater and apart from direct observations the force required to push the model ice was also recorded.This showed that this kind of modelling can actually be used to some extent and that piling up events can be efficient to prevent the ice from riding up.