The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Healy have embarked on their third science mission of the 2011 season following a port call in Dutch Harbor Sept. 28 to resupply.
On this mission the science team will deploy several types of hydrographic moorings and recover hydrographic moorings deployed on earlier missions. During the second mission, Healy and the Canadian coast guard ship Louis S. St. Laurent crews used seismic and bathymetric techniques to survey more than 4,600 miles of Arctic seafloor including the Nautilus Basin, Alpha-Mendeleev Ridge and the Extended Continental Shelf. The final mission will be a biology-based mission studying the behavior of copepods in the winter months.
The Healy crew is scheduled to spend a total of seven months underway in the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean to complete these four science operations during the crew’s Arctic West Summer/Winter 2011 deployment.
The Seattle-based Healy is a 420-foot polar icebreaker with 80 crewmembers and is the nation’s largest icebreaker. It was commissioned in 2000. The crew’s primary mission is scientific support in addition to enforcing U.S. laws and treaties in the Polar Regions, search and rescue, ship escorts and environmental protection.
For more information visit the Arctic West Summer 2011 webpage.
