After being submerged for two months under the ocean's surface and below a solid mass of ice, the USS Seawolf submarine has returned back at is Navy base. Its mission of exploration was completely successful, according to Navy reports.
As it has passed through the Bering Strait bordering Russia, USS Seawolf has steered around undersea ice formations more than 30 feet deep. When the American submarine finally punched through the Arctic ice cap nearly the North Pole, it took the crew five hours to break the ice off their submarine's key hatches before they could reach the fresh air.
The submarine's crew found their white and cold world of complete isolation and silence, with not even a bird in sight. According to the commander of the USS Seawolf submarine, Navy Cmdr. Jeff Bierley, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and opportunity that not many people have the chance to have.
Bierley said that it was nobody then them when Seawolf surfaced in the Arctic region, hundreds of miles from the nearest human. The first thing striking them when first opening the hatch was a complete silence.
The Seawolf has returned home after a total of six-month deployment from which two months were spent under the ice of the Arctic. During the two months when they were submerged, the crew had no communications with their families. From those two months they spent several weeks entirely under ice. The 154 member crew lacked fresh as well as fresh fruit and vegetables. Even if they had plenty of food stocks, the fresh veggies and fruit were eaten "in about a week", according to Bierley.
Bierly explained that their mission in the Arctic has important operational goals. One of the objectives was to demonstrate the ability of the submarine to surface through thick ice and prove that it can operate in that environment. The deployment allowed the American Navy to check its capacity to maneuver a ship anywhere on Earth.
This mission comes especially at a time when the Arctic region is growing in importance every year. The region's importance and the implications of climate change were also highlighted by Obama's first trip of a sitting president to the Arctic.
According to Defense Secretary Ash Carter's declaration to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March, the Arctic region will become a place of growing strategic importance and the Russians are already very active there, At the same session, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the Russians just decided to activate six new brigades, four of them being in the Arctic.
All these developments come at a time when the Arctic environment itself is rapidly changing. In this context, the Navy's Arctic Submarine Laboratory is using its high-tech resources in order to understand what exactly is happening in the region. The Navy's Arctic Roadmap project and task force on climate change are using a large array of robotic technologies and drones to study the sea, the ice and the atmosphere in the region.
