Western Drifting Stations

The history of drifting stations in the West is much shorter than that of the Soviet program. While the Russians had established an extensive and ongoing North Pole Drifting Station program as early as the 1930s, U.S. scientists and military personnel had to lobby hard for resources to establish experimental stations in the Arctic Ocean. Below are brief descriptions of the major U.S. drifting stations. Data from these drifting stations, as well as more information about them and about the drifts of the Maud and the Fram (Norwegian expeditions) can be found in the "Data and Documentation" section of the Atlas under "Floating Platforms."

Drifting stations were usually established on thick floes of sea ice (multiyear ice has an average thickness of about three meters), but were sometimes established on "ice islands," which are very large pieces of glacial ice that have calved off ice sheets in the Canadian archipelago. A drifting station can also be maintained on a ship drifting with the ice pack. The Maud, the Fram, and most recently, the Canadian icebreaker Des Groseillers, platform for the SHEBA experiment, are examples of ships that supported meteorological observations in the Arctic.

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T-3 (also called Fletcher's Ice Island)

In 1950 the U.S. Air Force identified three huge ice islands drifting with pack ice in the Arctic Ocean. Most of the arctic ice islands come from the Ellesmere Island ice shelf in the Canadian Archipelago north of 80 degrees North, although this fact was not known in 1950. One of these islands, named T-3, ("T" stands for "Target") was located using radar by Lt. Col. Joseph Fletcher's 58th Weather Squadron on July 29. T-3 was then a 4.5 by 9 mile kidney-shaped piece of ice located at 75 degrees 24 minutes North, 173 degrees 00 minutes West.

Fletcher became convinced that ice islands would make excellent platforms for research stations. It took him over a year to convince the Air Force to fund a project to establish a base for a U.S. scientific drifting station on one of the ice islands, but he finally received approval in January 1952 to go ahead with Project ICICLE. The Soviet arctic drifting station program was not known in the West until late 1952. Undoubtedly it would not have been so difficult for Fletcher and his colleagues to gain support for establishing ice stations had the scale of the Russian North Pole Drifting Station program been known.

Fletcher's team chose T-3 for a research camp because of its favorable location near the North Pole. Starting on 19 March 1952, the team took about a month to set up the island base and then began gathering meteorological data and transmitting weather reports to Thule, Greenland every six hours.

The drifting station remained in continuous operation for over two years. On 14 May 1954, as the island approached the weather station at Alert on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, it lost its geographical advantage and was abandoned, but not for long. The station was reoccupied for about five months starting in April 1955. As part of International Geophysical Year activities T-3 was established as a research station once again and renamed Bravo. Later, it was used as a refueling point for planes that were ferrying supplies to ice station ARLIS II. After ARLIS II was abandoned in 1965, research activities on T-3 were once again increased to take advantage of its proximity to the North Pole. It was abandoned permanently in the early 1970s.

The map below was given to the National Snow and Ice Data Center by Joseph Fletcher. It shows where T-3 drifted over the many years that it was occupied and monitored.

T-3 Drift Map

View a full-size T-3 Drift map (1.5 MB).

Alpha and Charlie

Fletcher was also involved in establishing Ice Station Alpha. Alpha began operations in April 1957 as part of the United States contribution to the International Geophysical Year. Ice Station Alpha was built on a sea ice floe rather than on an ice island and was therefore more vulnerable to storms. The ice floe eventually split in two pieces and continued to break up until it was too dangerous to continue occupying the station. In November 1958 it was abandoned. Alpha was the longest of all the western drifting stations, and supported the most extensive science program until the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment in the mid-1970s.

After Alpha was lost, Ice Station Charlie was established in April 1959 on a 5 mile wide by 7 mile long ice floe at 75 degrees 02 minutes North, 158 degrees 30 minutes West. The crew built an air strip so that supplies could be delivered, but it was a warm summer, and the runway quickly became slushy and unusable. By the end of September, the runway was in working order again. For a few months it was possible to deliver supplies, and personnel were able to rotate on and off of the station. Between mid December 1959 and early January 1960 two violent storms swept over ice station Charlie. The storms caused so much damage to the ice floe that it was reduced to one-quarter of its original size. This threatened the stability of the remaining ice floe, and Charlie was abandoned on January 15, 1960.

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ARLIS I

The U.S. Office of Naval Research established the Arctic Research Laboratory (ARL) near Barrow, Alaska, in 1947. The Arctic Research Laboratory Ice Station I (ARLIS I) was established with the aid of an icebreaker in 1960. The icebreaker Burton Island traveled 210 miles into the ice pack to 75 degrees 10 minutes North, 136 degrees West where the crew set up the camp for ARLIS I. Scientists gathered data through the winter for studies in meteorology, geophysics, oceanography, marine biology, and ice physics. As they worked the station drifted in a westerly direction, which gradually diminished its scientific usefulness. In March 1961 ARLIS I was evacuated. The total cost of operating the station for nearly seven months was only $75,000 and it was generally agreed that ARLIS I endeavor had demonstrated that drifting stations could be operated on a modest budget.

ARLIS II

Arctic Research Laboratory Ice Station II (ARLIS II) was established in 1961 on a large ice island which was discovered during an air reconnaissance mission to find a replacement site for ARLIS I. At the time of its discovery the ice island was an hour north of Barrow Alaska at 75 degrees 01 minutes North, 156 degrees 05 minutes West. This was farther south than the mission coordinators would have preferred, but even as the camp was being built, the ice island cooperatively drifted northward. All supplies were brought in by aircraft for the next four years until the station was abandoned in the Denmark Strait off Iceland in May 1965.

AIDJEX

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The Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment (AIDJEX), a collaboration between the United States, Canada and Japan, took place in the Beaufort Sea in 1975 and 1976. During the summer of 1975 AIDJEX maintained four manned camps on ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. Meteorological and ocean data were collected both from instruments located on the ice floe camps, and from instruments on floating data buoys. The experiment was designed to collect, for the first time in the West, coordinated measurements over at least one year, in order to have the right combination of data with which to understand atmosphere and ice interactions. The submarine USS Gurnard participated in the AIDJEX experiments by collecting ice draft data from upward-looking acoustical soundings (sonar). Ice draft (the depth of the ice below the water surface) is an estimator of ice thickness.

Subsequent Experiments

Since AIDJEX, numerous large-scale science experiments have been performed in the Arctic, such as Marginal Ice Zone Experiment (MIZEX), Coordinated Eastern Arctic Experiment (CEAREX), and Sea Ice Mechanics Initiative (SIMI). Here we highlight only a few.

U.S. military interest in ice stations for arctic research began with the Air Force, because of the perceived threat of a Soviet air attack over the pole. With the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles Air Force interest in the Arctic lessened, but was replaced by U.S. Navy support for research as the Arctic Ocean was increasingly valued as a theater for submarine operations. In the 1970s, scientific concerns grew in importance. The science plan for AIDJEX, for example, points to the need to understand the Arctic's role as a heat sink. Funding by the Navy for AIDJEX, and subsequent large experiments, including Lead Experiment (LeadEx) conducted in 1992 to study the effect of leads (cracks in the ice) on the polar ocean and atmosphere, evidences continued national security interest in the Arctic. This interest diminished with the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the major contributions of the U.S. Navy to arctic research have since culminated in the Scientific Ice Expeditions (SCICEX) program from 1995 to 1999. Navy and civilian scientists collaborated in SCICEX on research that made use of Sturgeon-class nuclear-powered attack submarines for unclassified science cruises. The SCICEX program is an astonishing development for Navy researchers who, until the mid-1990s, were sometimes required to keep basic meteorological and oceanographic data classified.

Two science expeditions with international participation have produced data that are enormously valuable in light of recent changes in arctic climate and oceanography. Scientists aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Polar Sea and the Canadian ice breaker CCGS Louis St. Laurent conducted the Arctic Ocean Section (AOS) of hydrographic and other measurements along a track from the Bering Sea toward Svalbard. On 22 August 1994, the ships became the first surface vessels from the Canadian and U.S. governments to arrive at the North Pole. (The North Americans were surprised to find the Russian icebreaker Yamal at the North Pole as well, with a group of tourists onboard.)

The Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) experiment (September 1997 to October 1998) was similar in concept to Nansen's Fram expedition of a century earlier. Like the Fram, a Canadian icebreaker frozen in Beaufort Sea pack ice drifted for more than a year as an international team of scientists onboard collected over 300 types of measurements. To learn more about SHEBA, visit the SHEBA web site (http://sheba.apl.washington.edu/). Major funding for SHEBA came from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. SHEBA's international investigations were coordinated through the Arctic Climate System Study (ACSYS) of the World Climate Research Programme. Data collected during SHEBA appear to support observations that sea ice is thinning and the Arctic Ocean's salinity distribution changing. The logistic support capability that made SHEBA possible was developed in the course of operating western drifting stations that began with T-3.


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