By Karen Robes Meeks
US Coast Guard Cutter Healy crewmembers recently finished their second mission of its Arctic West Summer 2018 deployment.
About 100 of Healy’s crew and 30 scientists and engineers left Dutch Harbor, Alaska, on Sept. 14 to learn more about stratified ocean dynamics in the Arctic for the Office of Naval Research. Understanding these environmental factors may help better predict ice coverage in the region.
The Healy, a 420-foot icebreaker homebased in Seattle, Washington, was made for these kinds of missions.
“The Healy is the only vessel we operate as a country that can get us this far into the ice,” said Dr. Craig Lee of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington, Seattle. “If we wanted to come this far up north, we need to have an icebreaker. For the Arctic, the Healy is the only choice other than chartering a vessel from another country.”
