Icebreaker prepares for next voyage

SEATTLE – The Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, just back from its annual research trek to the Arctic, is already preparing for next year’s voyage – a joint venture with Sweden in the white world of the polar north.

The U.S. vessel will be working with the Swedish icebreaker Oden, plowing through sea and ice to take deep sediment samples from the ocean floor at the top of the world. The Healy, which is based here, will set out from Barrow, Alaska, and the Oden from Tromso, Norway.

For the past three seasons, scientists aboard the Healy have been focusing on “shelf-basin interaction,” the area where the continental shelf meets the sea floor.

The 420-foot icebreaker accommodates several teams of scientists – multidisciplinary and multinational – every six-month season, to make best use of the access it provides to one of the planet’s most hostile environments, said Margo Edwards, a marine-geology researcher from the University of Hawaii who heads the Healy’s academic advisory committee.

“It’s beautiful up there – very spare,” Edwards said Friday, displaying computer-screen photos of the pink, blue and white landscape of sea, snow and ice.

This year’s focus was water, with scientists measuring nutrients, temperatures, salinity and pollution as water moves from the shelves to the deeper ocean. The results will be discussed at an American Geophysical Union meeting Dec. 13 to Dec. 17 in San Francisco.

Next year is geology. Edwards will be following up on a 1999 expedition on a Hawaii-based nuclear submarine. The work with the Tromso is to “see what the structure is” beneath the sea. In 2006, polar bears and other Arctic wildlife will be in the limelight, with researchers using the Healy’s two helicopters to collect census data.

She and other scientists met on the Seattle waterfront Friday with the Healy’s executive officer, Cmdr. William Rall, and other officers to plan for next year’s voyage on the vessel, whose motto is “420 feet of icebreaking steel.” The ship, operated by a Coast Guard crew of 99, can carry up to 51 guest scientists.

In 1999, Edwards and a colleague determined that glaciers – long a subject of land-based research and speculation – had in fact moved north from Canada and Europe into the polar region. They found glacier footprints on the sea floor – “flutes” left by passage of the grooved ice and “moraines,” the piles of rubble left when a glacier stops pushing across the landscape and withdraws.