A US Coast Guard icebreaker containing more than 50 scientists on an expedition to analyze the changing chemistry of the Arctic Ocean has become the first American surface ship to make it to the North Pole on its own, officials from the Armed Forces branch have confirmed.
According to Discovery News, the Seattle-based US Coast Guard Cutter Healy arrived at the top of the world on September 5, marking the fourth time that a US surface vessel successfully made it to the North Pole, but the first time that no other ships accompanied the ship on its journey.
The 420 foot (128 meter) long, 16,000 ton Healy uses a 30,000-horsepower engine is capable of breaking over 10 feet (three meters) of ice. It is one of the two icebreakers currently owned by the US that works, and one of three total, though last week President Barack Obama said that he would fast-track the construction of a fourth such vessel.
“As the Arctic region continues to open up to development, the data gathered on board Healy during this cruise will become ever more essential to understanding how the scientific processes of the Arctic work, and how to most responsibly exercise stewardship over the region,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.
Hunting for trace metals
Katlin Bowman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz and one of the 50 scientists and more than 130 total people on board the Healy, explained in a piece for The Huffington Post that she and her colleagues were collecting seawater, particles, sediment ice, and snow analyzing them for trace metals and other elements.
“Our mission,” Bowman wrote, “is a joint effort between the US GEOTRACES and Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) programs, funded by the National Science Foundation. The dataset will take years to complete and the final product will be the most comprehensive chemical survey of the Arctic Ocean.”
GEOTRACES is an organization whose mission is to monitor and analyze the distributions of key trace elements and isotopes in the ocean, establishing the sensitivity of these distributions to changing environmental conditions, the group’s website said. CLIVAR, on the other hand, is a group that is attempting to better understand the dynamics and interaction of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system by observing and predicting changes to the global climate system.
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Feature Image: US Coast Guard/Wikimedia Commons
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