NSF PR 98-6 - January 28, 1998
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Newly Declassified Submarine Data Will Help Study
of Arctic Ice
A treasure-trove of formerly classified data on the
thickness of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, gathered
by U.S. Navy submarines over several decades, is now
being opened. Data from the first of approximately
20 cruise tracks -- an April, 1992 trans-Arctic Ocean
track -- has just been released, and information from
the rest of these tracks, or maps of a submarine's
route, will be analyzed and released over the next
year-and-a-half.
"The data opens up a magnificent resource for global
change studies," said Mike Ledbetter, National Science
Foundation (NSF) program director for Arctic system
science.
Climate modellers differ over the fate of the great
expanse of Arctic sea ice, which is about the size
of the United States. More than half the ice melts
and refreezes each year.
"The Navy has collected data for decades on ice thickness
in the Arctic, which was important to know for navigation
and defense," said Ledbetter. "But this information
is also extremely important to science, now giving
us a history of sea ice that we could not collect
any other way."
"The data is essential to building a baseline of sea-ice
thickness in the Arctic basin to examine how global
change affects ice cover," explained Walter Tucker
of the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering
Laboratory. Tucker is supported by NSF to process
and analyze all digital ice-draft data collected by
Navy submarines in the Arctic since 1986. The National
Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder
is handling the actual data release.
The Arctic Submarine Laboratory, on behalf of the
Chief of Naval Operations, approved declassifying
the sea-ice data within a specific swath of the Arctic
Ocean, roughly between Alaska and the North Pole.
The area is known as the "Gore Box" for Vice President
Al Gore's initiative to declassify Arctic military
data for scientific use.
The data will provide a historical context for current,
more intensive studies of Arctic ice by the Surface
Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) project, in
which NSF has frozen a ship into the ice to serve
as a floating science platform for 13 months. SHEBA's
aim is to chart the fate of the pack ice, ultimately
improving predictions of global change.
Attachment: Map of Gore
Box
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