A nuclear powered submarie, USS Pargo, made a scientific cruise to the Arctic Ocean during the late summer of 1993. This was the first cruise of a nuclear submarine to the arctic in which the U.S. oceanographic community was openly invited to participate in the planning and implementation of the cruise. The data from the cruise will be placed in the public domain and results published in the open literature. During the cruise, called SCICEX-93, 9,080 km (4,900 nm) of underway data (bathymetry, gravity anomaly, temperature, salinity, ice draft, and images of the underside of the ice) were collected in the deep Arctic Ocean below the ice pack. Surface stations were occupied at 20 locations along the track. At these stations 35 CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) casts were made in the shallow water of the Arctic Ocean (400-600 m), and 31 vertical current profiles were made using an expendable free-fall device. Bottle casts collected 1,500 water samples for chemical and biological analysis. While submerged, 31 submarine-launched, expendable CTDs were deployed and 46 water samples were drawn through the submarine's seawater system. Four buoys were deployed in the ice: two were used for meteorological observations and two polar oceanographic profiling buoys were used to make long-term time-series measurements of temperature and salinity at six different depths in the shallow water of the Arctic Ocean. The SCICEX-93 cruise demonstrated the remarkable potential of nuclear powered submarines for oceanographic and geophysical studies of ice covered regions of the ocean.
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