Surface at the Pole
by
James Calvert, USN
***
On a Sunday morning in August
1958, two groups of men clustered around instruments in the control center of
submarine USS Skate. One group
watched as a moving pinpoint of light shone through the glass top of the
control center’s plotting table and the chart paper covering it, following the light's path with a pencil. The other group stood before a metal
stylus drawing two irregular parallel lines across a moving paper tape.
Attending to both was US Navy
Captain James Calvert, who didn’t dare show the crew how nervous he was.
The plotting chart indicated the Skate’s path under the Arctic ice pack.
The stylus indicated the thickness of ice over the submarine. Calvert’s orders
were to find a way to make the first surfacing of a submarine through the ice
of the North Pole.
And, by the way, to surface
without damaging one of the world’s first nuclear powered submarines. He could,
of course, attempt ramming the underside of the ice pack with what the Navy
oddly called the Skate’s sail – the
fin-like projection at the top of the submarine that housed its sensory
equipment, as well as the vents that allowed it to take on fresh air from the
surface. Damage to the sail would leave the Skate
to complete the rest of its voyage effectively blinded beneath the arctic ice.
At last, the stylus lines
converged, indicating an area of open water – one of the polynyas (pronounced pull-een-yuhs) – the temporary lakes that open between ice floes during the Arctic summer.
But was the opening big enough to
accommodate the Skate’s length and
width?
Calvert ordered the periscope up.
He turned it right, then left, hoping to see the edge of the ice. There was nothing
in sight except a jellyfish, “waving his rainbow-colored tentacles in the quiet
water of a sea whose surface is forever protected from waves by its cover of
ice,” Calvert writes in his 1960 account, Surface
at the Pole: The extraordinary voyages of the USS Skate.
The previous year had been one of
embarrassment for the United States, pummeled by its Cold War rival,
the Soviet Union, in the race for space. Worse, the USSR’s launching of Sputnik
1 happened during the International Geophysical Year (July 1, 1957 – December
31, 1958), which was supposed to mark a new rapprochement in the sharing of
scientific information.
The USSR launched Sputnik 1
October 4, 1957, following it a month later with Sputnik 2. And for all that
the less than two-feet across satellites looked more like toys than spaceships,
there they undeniably were, visible to all as they orbited the Earth. What was
the US to do? Launching the world’s third orbiting satellite (accomplished in
early 1958) only gave it the equivalent of bronze medal. It needed something
bigger, something – dare I say – splashier?
How about going low instead of
high? Low under ice that is, at the top of the world? How about not only a
nonstop voyage across the top of the world (accomplished by USS Nautilus in August 1958) but an
actual surfacing at the North Pole?
Enter USS Skate, named for the fish, as were many of its sister nuclear
submarines of the era, and captained by James Calvert.
The Nautilus’s name was a nod both to a marine life form and the heroic
ship of 19th century science fiction writer Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
But though Nautilus grabbed the glory
of the first naval transarctic transit, Skate
managed the feat of first surfacing at the Pole.
Its crew's’ work of mapping portions of the Arctic Ocean as well as doing
extensive testing of the nature of the underside of the polar ice also tied in
neatly with one of the IGY’s emphases on oceanography.
Reaching the North Pole by ship
had been attempted for more than a century, never successfully. Even Australian
adventurer Sir Hubert Wilkins’ expedition aboard the diesel-powered submarine, Nautilus, was turned back at the edge
Arctic ice pack in 1931. Not until the post-World War II era of nuclear-powered
submarines did venturing under the Arctic ice become feasible.
What was there to fear now?
Nothing, except a virtually uncharted ocean and, oh, yes, the deadly ice.
(I’m never more enthusiastic
about adventures at sea than during August in Texas, when temperatures below
100 degrees F. qualify as a cold spell. Hope you’re reveling too in the oh so
cool adventure of Arctic submarines, which continues next Friday with more of
James Calvert’s Surface at the Pole, as well as with photographer Paul Gierszewski’s glorious photo of pack ice which
illustrates this post.)
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