August 21, 2003
‘Ice man’ sets up, supplies camps in coldest places
“Showdown in the Arctic: Polar bear attacks nuclear submarine!” blared the headline in the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News last month.
“The crew of a powerful U.S. Navy submarine were shocked to find themselves under attack by their strangest foe ever: A polar bear who tried to eat their vessel,” the paper reports.
Having the submarine’s rudder protrude several feet above the surface — the rest of the end of the sub remained under the ice — did indeed prompt a passing polar bear to make a few investigative bites.
“It was a pretty young bear,” says Applied Physics Laboratory’s Fred Karig, who was in charge of running a month-long ice camp last spring supporting Navy test operations and work by civilian scientists monitoring changes in the Arctic.
Having participated in ice camps since 1972, including being in charge of logistics for eight camps in the 1980s and overall program manager for seven since 1990, Karig has seen his share of polar bears, storms and ice shifting so forcefully that it breaks up air strips and splits camps apart.
The camp was one of two operations on the ice overseen by Applied Physics Laboratory engineers this spring. The UW is among a select handful of universities tapped by the U.S. Navy, National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research to build and supply ice camps for use by scientists from many institutions and to support Navy testing.
Running the four-week camp was a $3 million endeavor that involved flying 90,000 pounds of equipment — including a Bobcat loader and snow machines — 60,000 pounds of fuel and 10,000 pounds of food out to the ice. Setup started two weeks before scientists arrived and “haul back,” or tearing down the camp, took a week. At its busiest, there were 70 people staying at the camp.
Erected on the ice were 17 heated buildings — a mix of plywood, prefabricated and insulated-tent structures. The largest was the cookhouse with seating for 50. The smallest were the 4 feet by 4 feet unheated outhouses of plywood.
“We’re essentially providing a research ship, if you think about it,” Karig says. “Doesn’t move very fast, but it’s floating.” Various instruments measured atmospheric and ice conditions or were deployed in the ocean below.
The two weeks of Navy testing involved firing unarmed torpedoes from the U.S.S. Connecticut and monitoring their performance. Unarmed, the 20-foot-long 2,500-pound torpedoes are buoyant enough to float up under the ice after they stop moving forward. Costing $1 million each the torpedoes had to be retrieved. The Applied Physics Laboratory diving team had special dry suits, backup tanks and regulators and were connected with tethers and communications lines while under the ice.
The divers were among the 16 direct, temporary and retired Applied Physics Laboratory employees hired for the camp. Karig says a smooth operation takes having staff members you have confidence in and who can do the job.
The most nerve-wracking moments for Karig come when selecting a suitable site for a camp. The decision has a lot of ramifications.
Such as? “Will it hold together.”
Buildings need to sit on a sizable older floe that is less likely to break up as the ice moves, sometimes quite violently. Nearby needs to be a runway’s worth of first-year ice, which is smooth compared to older ice, so planes can land without snapping off the landing gear.
Karig used a small plane to land at potential sites in the vicinity of the deep waters of the Beaufort Sea. He selected one about 225 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and 1,200 miles from the North Pole. The older ice was between 5 and 20 feet thick, up to 80 feet in places. The first-year ice was quite thick at 5 feet, Karig says, still the last 500 feet of the runway cracked apart at one point. Luckily planes could still land on what was left.
Planning started a year before the camp. Karig says it’s always an “evolving process.” For instance just the month before camp was to start, the Navy found it necessary to switch the two halves of the camp so the civilian scientists worked the first two weeks of the camp instead of the second.
This involved a lot of calling about aircraft availability and a scramble to get enough divers because the other program overseen by the Applied Physics Laboratory, near the North Pole with Andy Heiberg in charge of logistics, needed divers at the same time.
Heiberg and Karig have both received commendations for their arctic-logistics expertise. Most recently Karig received a Meritorious Public Service Award from the U.S. Navy that stated, in part, “Mr. Karig has faced polar bears, life-threatening cold and the most extreme weather imaginable. He has never failed to deliver the crucial support necessary to carry out the Navy’s mission.”
The lone polar bear hanging around for a couple weeks near this year’s camp never came into camp and confrontations were avoided, other than the encounter with the submarine’s rudder as watched through the periscope by those inside the sub. As the Weekly World News related it “The bear chomped for a while and then gave up, loping across the ice to find a more cooperative snack.”
