Science: Submarine Captain Recounts Voyage Under Arctic Ice

Capt. Alfred S. McLaren and the crew of the USS Queenfish took their submarine in 1970 beneath the perennial sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean to explore and map the Siberian Continental Shelf for the only time in history, encountering extreme dangers and discoveries along the way.

It’s hard to believe that a year after humanity reached the moon, a U.S. Navy submarine captain still could explore uncharted and virtually unknown areas of our own Earth. Yet that was what Capt. Alfred S. McLaren and the crew of the USS Queenfish did in 1970. They took their submarine beneath the perennial sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean to explore and map the Siberian Continental Shelf for the only time in history, encountering extreme dangers and discoveries along the way.

“Over two months at sea, most of it submerged, we successfully explored and charted a significant portion of the world’s oceans,” says McLaren, author of the recently published Unknown Waters: A First-Hand Account of the Historic Under-ice Survey of the Siberian Continental Shelf by USS Queenfish. “And we did it successfully despite the life-threatening obstacles in our way.”

Unknown Waters, published in 2008 by The University of Alabama Press, has entered its third printing. It prompted a March 18 full-page feature article in The New York Times. In the book, McLaren recounts his command of the 1970 voyage of the Queenfish, the first of the Navy’s 37 Sturgeon-class nuclear attack submarines designed to operate beneath Polar Region sea ice year-round.

The mission surveyed more than 3,100 nautical miles of the Siberian continental shelf north of the Soviet Union while always remaining in international waters, according to McLaren.

Initially retracing the USS Nautilus’ 1958 trans-polar voyage across the Arctic Ocean collecting and comparing ice thickness data for global warming research, Queenfish surfaced at the North Pole on Aug. 5, 1970. Queenfish then moved through the mainly uncharted, ice-covered and shallow waters of the Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi seas, ending just north of the Bering Strait. The crew used a variety of sonar equipments to navigate beneath the ice and take readings of ice thickness and the features of the ocean bottom.

The voyage earned Queenfish and its crew a Navy Unit Citation and the captain the Legion of Merit.

Many surprises awaited the crew. For example, McLaren says, some geographers had speculated that uncharted islands or even a sunken continent might lie beneath the sea ice that covered the vast Siberian continental shelf.

“We were doing a unique piece of exploration in an unknown area of the world,” says McLaren, 75, who now lives in the mountains of Colorado. “We had no idea what we might encounter, and no one has been up there since.”

McLaren, a 1955 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, had entered the nuclear submarine service under the legendary Adm. Hyman Rickover. McLaren was the executive officer, navigator and training officer for Queenfish during its development, construction and testing in the late 1960s; he returned to take command of Queenfish on its historic mission. He and the Queenfish crew drilled constantly to practice for possible dangers they might encounter beneath the Arctic ice. Any kind of hesitation or a problem with command could spell trouble.

“Essentially, on a submarine, you’ve got to have options,” McLaren says. “My father was a naval aviator. There were several things he taught me very well. One was that you always have to know the truth of the situation. You can’t play wish poker. You had to follow through to the maximum, and you could never be confounded, particularly as a commanding officer. You couldn’t panic.”

McLaren emphasizes that the danger was constant. Many times Queenfish moved through a corridor between the ice and the bottom where there was only a few feet of clearance above and below.

“The bottom was highly irregular,” he says. “This, combined with very thick ice above us, always made it very exciting hour after hour after hour. It was a very oppressive environment, but we all were well-trained, and we operated as a team.”

At one point, the Queenfish came within feet of hitting an iceberg, sending the crew into emergency maneuvers that tested its training and nerve. Icebergs weren’t supposed to be in the Arctic Ocean, but Queenfish found a big one.

“It was a very dangerous moment,” McLaren says. “Years later, I looked at how close we passed beneath an iceberg when I was digitizing the data for my Ph.D., and I couldn’t believe it. We were within 13 feet of that damn thing.”

In another situation, McLaren was called away from a screening of Shane with some of the crew when he learned that the submarine had ended up in a trap he calls “an ice garage.” Most of the crew had to remain completely still while McLaren, the diving officer, and the watch section carefully executed a series of intricate maneuvers designed to get out of the jam without touching the ice or the bottom.

Despite the fact that the mission occurred during the Cold War, McLaren says chances for contact with Soviet forces were minimal. The submarine kept in international waters – outside the then-recognized 12-mile zone off the coast. Queenfish did detect and observe a six-ship Russian convoy, but it was not counter detected.

“The Arctic is six and a half times size of the Mediterranean,” McLaren says. “Where we were, they (the Soviets) would have had no way of detecting or monitoring us. They couldn’t have gotten in there in the first place. The ice averaged between 40 and 70 feet thick - not much one can do with that.”

Once the voyage was completed, McLaren put the data they collected to use in his subsequent research. After McLaren left the Navy, he used the data he and the crew had collected on Queenfish in research, first at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the department of geography and geology at Cambridge University in England, where he designed a submarine capable of transporting oil from Canadian Arctic islands for a master’s degree in philosophy, and then for a doctorate in physical geography of the polar regions at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The data McLaren and his crew collected are now entered into current bathymetric charts of the Arctic Ocean.

McLaren later served for four years as president of the world-famed Explorers Club. More recently he’s participated in deep-sea dives in the Russian MIR submersibles to the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck.

McLaren says the voyage of Queenfish and the data it collected revealed the need for further study of this vast, unknown region, especially in light of recent global climate change findings and their effect on the Arctic Ocean and the species that live there.

“The Arctic Ocean contains the largest continental shelves in the world,” McLaren says. “We need to bring them and the vast deep sea bed under international treaty as soon as possible, not just to be able to preserve the Ocean’s pristine quality, but also to prevent contamination and pollution. The Arctic will be of increased importance in the years to come, especially as global warming progresses. All the world’s scientists will need complete access to monitor what is going on and to determine how it might affect the rest of the world, particularly the northern hemisphere.”

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