Sub’s Arctic trip
a real winner
for scientists

There were thrills, chills
and some discoveries
on the expedition

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

An Arctic Ocean expedition on the nuclear submarine USS Hawkbill produced some great science and thrilling moments, said University of Hawaii geologist Margo Edwards.

"Everything went without a hitch -- better than I could have imagined," said Edwards, Hawaii Mapping Research Group director.

She was chief scientist for the research mission and broke a time record for a woman on a submarine, with two trips totaling 11 days.

The Hawkbill, based at Pearl Harbor, will return later this summer from the last of five science expeditions to the Arctic Ocean in a venture between the Navy and National Science Foundation. Operations are conducted from an ice camp about 150 miles northwest of Barrow, Alaska.

Lt. Cmdr. Dave Werner, public affairs officer with Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, reported some harrowing experiences in the Hawkbill's travels under a thick ice canopy.

In the Bering Strait, he said, "At times, crewmembers held their breath as the ship hugged the bottom maintaining a scant 20 feet of water under the hull while ducking under ice keels, sometimes missing their sail by 15 feet."

The crew reported ice keels -- when sheets of ice collide and raft up on each other -- measuring more than 90 feet deep.

Cmdr. Bob Perry of Aiea, Hawkbill's commanding officer, called the submarine crew members "true American heroes" for successfully navigating around the hazards.

Edwards said "the only scary thing that happened" occurred on top of the ice.

A chilling experience

She was walking from the ice camp to the submarine across thin ice with Mark Rognstad, UH mapping group specialist, and he plunged through the ice, she said.

"He had a wet suit on, so it was no big deal. I was having a heart attack personally. I pulled him out of the ice. He was completely nonplussed."

Edwards said she was standing on the edge of the ice when she pulled him out.

She wasn't wearing a wet suit and it was 20 degrees below zero.

Rognstad was a design consultant on a new sonar mapping system -- Seafloor Characterization and Mapping Pod -- used on the Hawkbill. He built the sonar system used last year to locate the USS Yorktown on the Pacific seafloor.

Software engineer Roger Davis, Edwards' husband, did all the programming to create maps while the submarine was under the ice.

Edwards said the mapping system worked better than expected, providing five times more information on the sea bottom than typical systems. A swath of up to four miles on either side of the submarine was surveyed.

'Some really dramatic terrain'

Researchers could see images of the sea floor as the submarine traveled across it.

"We had our real time display of the sea bottom scrolling all the time, so it was really neat," Edwards said.

Crew members would go by to see what they were picking up on the echo beams, she said. "They would come down and see it in color. We saw some really dramatic terrain."

Edwards is studying glaciation at the Chukchi Cap region with Leonid Polyak of Ohio State University and the Lomonosov and Gakkel ridges with Bernie Coakley of Tulane University.

She and Polyak were looking for evidence of a thick ice sheet, indicating the Arctic once had the kind of massive glaciers present in the Antarctic.

"I believe we found features that looked like they were caused by an ice sheet in water 1,200 to 1,500 feet deep," Edwards said.

"A lot of them looked like features you'd see caused by glaciers on land, but all under water. It was very unique, very exciting.

A reconnaissance survey of an area called Northwind Ridge produced a surprise -- an uncharted underwater volcano, Edwards said.

"The science was just great," she said. "I swear we're going to be working for years on the data we collected."

Researchers hope to understand the Arctic basin's geological evolution and determine whether changes are part of a natural cycle or caused by human activity.or me," she said.