By Karen Robes Meeks
After 105 days deployed to Antarctica for Operation Deep Freeze, the 150 crew members of the US Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star recently returned to their Seattle homeport.
The crew left Seattle, Wash., on Nov. 27 for their sixth deployment and journeyed 11,200-nautical-miles to Antarctica for the annual joint military service mission supporting the National Science Foundation, the lead agency for the United States Antarctic Program.
The Polar Star muscled through 16.5 nautical miles of ice to open a channel to the pier at McMurdo Station and later guided the container ship Ocean Giant through the channel, which allowed the offloading of 10 million pounds of goods needed to replenish McMurdo Station, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and other US field camps for the coming 12 months.
