26:14
Right now I'm standing in the middle of the Arctic Ocean on the frozen sea ice 200 miles north of Alaska. And right behind me is a US Navy nuclear submarine that just broke through the ice. On this episode of Access Granted, we're taking you to the far reaches of the Arctic Ocean. Over the next 2 days, we'll explore a top secret ice camp, spend a night on board a nuclear submarine, and watch that same vessel break through an entire sheet of ice. All to find out what it takes to be a part of one of the most extreme missions on Earth. Ice draft is 2 ft. master tenants under ice position, aye, sir.
Vertical surface, vertical surface, vertical surface. All vents are shut. Prepare for ice impact. 5 ft, stand by. Sam, Tom Hanks here. I've been keeping an eye on you. This might be your most ambitious mission yet. The Navy has invited you inside Operation Ice Camp, where submarine crews punch through the Arctic ice in some of the most unforgiving waters on Earth. But, I've seen you work, and I know you've got this. Now, I wouldn't let you head to the coldest, most remote corner of the planet Earth without one piece of essential gear, a good cup of hot coffee. And not just any coffee, Hanks coffee.
Check your bag. I left you a little surprise. And give my warmest regards to everyone out on the ice. Their mission means a lot to us back home. No way. Guys, I guess we've got ourselves a mission. Tom Hanks sending me a video message was definitely not on my bingo card, but he's right. This might be our most ambitious episode yet. We're heading to Operation Ice Camp, a top secret Navy base built on the frozen Arctic Ocean. It's a mission that only happens once every 2 years, helping support nuclear submarines breaking through the ice.
Standard radios and GPS can't penetrate the ice sheet, so this camp is the only way the Navy can monitor submarine movement. But getting there is its own expedition. Three flights just to reach Prudhoe Bay at the northern tip of Alaska before a final flight out onto the ice. We'll be taking you inside the entire mission, a place that cameras are almost never allowed. Welcome to Prudhoe Bay, which is home to the town of Deadhorse, Alaska. And we're officially north of the Arctic Circle. If you're wondering what there is to do out here, not much. But before we head out to Ice Camp, we have an appointment
with the Arctic Submarine Laboratory, where we're going to pick up a few more pieces of our Arctic gear, which is much needed because right now the wind chill is just a casual -21° Fahrenheit. And where we're headed soon is even colder. Out here in the Arctic, the threat of frostbite and hypothermia is very real. To make sure we're protected, there's a whole system of heavy-duty thermal layers, specialized boots, and windproof jackets we have to pile on before taking our first steps in one of the most unforgiving places on Earth. All right, I'm actually extremely hot right now, so Yeah, okay. take that off.
How's that? Perfect. So this is pretty much the end of the line for commercial flights, meaning this aircraft right here is our ride out to Ice Camp. It's a single-engine Turbo Otter, and we have an hour flight of about 150 miles till we get to camp. As you can imagine, there's no paved runways, so this thing is going to be landing straight on the ice. The ride out is like flying through a never-ending snow globe. Blankets of thick white ice stretching across the horizon into what seems like infinity. For a while, it's just that, endless and unbroken, until all of a sudden a speck appeared on the horizon. So small you can miss it if you didn't know what you were looking for. And then slowly that speck starts to take shape into the only thing
out here for hundreds of miles. We made it, baby. This is crazy. Literally, everywhere you look, just ice. All right, we just landed. One more ride till we get to camp. This one might be my favorite. After 24 hours of travel, four flights, and one snowmobile, we have officially made it to Ice Camp. This is our home for the next day or so as we wait to join up with the submarine tomorrow. Now, as you can see, there's not a whole lot out here. A dozen tents or so filled mostly with scientists and researchers who are conducting experiments in one of the harshest environments on Earth. Now, I'll be taking you around camp to show
you some of the cool stuff they're up to, but before we do that, I want you to understand what Operation Ice Camp actually is, and why what happens out here on the Arctic is so important. To understand what this place is, you have to go back more than 60 years. In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, the US Navy's nuclear submarine USS Nautilus became the first vessel in history to travel beneath the Arctic ice pack and pass directly underneath the North Pole. That mission proved something revolutionary, that submarines could operate in one of the harshest environments on Earth. Ever since the US Navy has continued returning to the Arctic to test, train, and expand its capability of operating in the region.
Today, that mission is known as Operation Ice Camp. Every 2 years, the Navy establishes a temporary base right here on the floating sea ice. While the submarine crews operate hundreds of feet below the surface, researchers up top battle sub-zero temperatures to measure ice thickness, assess ocean conditions, and monitor the changing landscape. Because the Arctic is the shortest route between the United States and Russia, it's become one of the most strategically vital regions on Earth. And for the US Navy, controlling the waters beneath this ice has become more crucial than ever before. Sam, I'm at home.
Uh Theo Goetz, welcome to Ice Camp, boys. Thank you so much. We're very excited to be here. Well, we're happy to have you. Well, it's nice and warm in here, but I think before I get a little too cozy, I'd love to get a little walk around with you of the operations, what's going on. We can call it the Ice Camp tour if that works. Absolutely, we're ready. So, the runway we just landed on, I see is right here. That was you guys who set that up when you first arrived. Just a blank sheet of ice, huh?
Yeah, so we scouted this location out, wanted to make sure we can build at least 2,500 ft runway. So, you want it thinner and smoother. And then the multi-year ice behind us, we got to make sure it's thick enough that it'll actually support uh an ice camp for hopefully 3 or 4 weeks. So, how thick is the ice underneath us right now? This ice flow ranges from about 9 to 12 ft thick. And you landed on a runway that was a little over 4 ft thick. So, is there any danger of this cracking? Are we pretty safe? Eventually, it will crack. So, if nice uh fractures right in the middle of the camp, it's always a safety risk, so we developed that system to quickly just pull any tent. So, every single shelter you see here, Yeah. everyone, even the large ones, they're
actually hooked up to the same system. So, what's the bathroom situation like for the birthing? So, it's a what we call a wag bag, and essentially that human waste is going back to land. So, basically this is kind of the central hub we're about to enter, right? Yep. Where all the operations are? This is uh, Matt Pesci. Nice to meet you, Sam. This is a camera that we have mounted about 30 ft up. So, you're on bear watch, huh? I was just asking about that. There we go.
We're always looking for cracks, bears, and anything else. Essentially, we have quite a few, uh, communications capabilities here. We have, uh, Starlink. And people need a little downtime and watching some YouTube videos. Hopefully ours, right? I think so. I think I've heard great things. In this hole, we have our acoustic communication system where we can talk to the submarines that are underneath us. We give them a plan of what we want them to do for the rest of the day, uh, what testing, what exercises, whether we want them to surface, where we want them to surface. This is the galley. It should be primarily for eating. We are also using it kind of a staging ground right now.
You said you're making your own water? What's that look like? We're using a reverse osmosis unit. It just draws in salt water and makes us fresh water. What is the food situation like? Is it kind of like MRE style, or you guys actually have heaters and stuff? Yeah, it is MRE light. We are just rehydrating food. This is a air beam shelter. We use this for quite a few different things. Uh, this camp we're going to use it for divers. We have a team, uh, coming out to, uh, recover exercise torpedoes, and they're going to be using this as, uh, preparation type dive.
And then, do you guys have any idea how deep the actual ocean is from right here? I know it's deeper than I want to be. It's kind of terrifying. So, you just want me to like Dunk your face in there, take a drink? Dunk my face in there? Yeah, get a drink. But, I mean, this is hundreds of feet deep into the ocean. Thousands. Thousands of feet. Very salty. Very, huh? Now that you guys have seen the hole here, we'd like to just turn off the lights and show you how much it glows.
What you're seeing is pure sunlight filtering through the ice sheet. The ocean water absorbs the warmer red wavelengths and scatters the intense blue light back up through the hole, making it look like it's glowing from the inside. So, if you guys are outside and see a polar bear, run, scream, yell, and come tell us. If you see any mammal, anything at all, ring seals, uh arctic fox, anything, come tell us. If you see any fractures in the ice, scream, yell, and come tell us. We'll let you know if we need to evacuate the camp. Well, everyone, welcome inside my birthing. And I'll tell you what, there's tired and then there's 24 hours of travel, four flights, a snowmobile, -20° weather, and an entire day out here
on the arctic tired. But if you thought today was eventful, just wait for what we have going on tomorrow because bright and early we're going to be flying out to meet up with a nuclear submarine. I'm going to try to get as much sleep as I can, and I'll see all of you in the morning. Against all odds, I actually slept pretty well my first night here at Ice Camp. Minus one scary run to the outhouse. And yes, out here you literally have to poop in a bag. Despite the extreme temperatures, it's strangely beautiful up here on the top of the world. As I fell asleep, the northern lights danced above us, rippling green across the dark sky as the wind howled against the tent all night long. But when I woke
up the next morning, all was still. Well, good morning from another beautiful day here at Ice Camp. And today is one of those days where you pinch yourself and think, is this real life? Because we are about to board this helicopter right here to fly out and meet up with a nuclear submarine. But here's the thing, we've also been granted access to go underway with the crew and spend a night on board. I know, it's absolutely wild, but even crazier to think that in just a few hours we're going to be cruising hundreds of feet below the surface of this frozen ice in a nuclear submarine. As we took off and watched Ice Camp disappear below us into the void of endless white, the scale of the Arctic really started to sink in. Nothing but
frozen ocean stretching to the horizon. Somewhere down there, completely blind to us, is a US Navy nuclear submarine maneuvering beneath the ice pack. Our job now was to find it. Breaking through the Arctic ice isn't as simple as just coming up and surfacing. The crew has to locate a section of ice thin enough to punch through and position the submarine directly beneath it while using thousands of tons of steel to force their way to the surface. If everything aligns, we're about to witness something very few people on Earth have ever had the chance to see.
All right, guys, this is it. Somewhere in this area a nuclear submarine is lurking. Now, we've been told there's actually two submarines in the area. One that we're going to be boarding a little bit later on, and the other which we're hoping to see break through the ice. Now, as you can see behind me, there's a big X painted in the snow. The idea is that the sub should hopefully target that area because if you look around, it's completely whiteout conditions. So, we'd have nowhere to look. I'm not going to lie, guys, it is pretty intimidating just standing here knowing that there is a nuclear submarine somewhere right underneath us. So, we just watched the USS Delaware surface. But, allow me to introduce you
to this. This is the USS Santa Fe, a Los Angeles-class fast attack sub, and our home for the next 24 hours. So, if you guys are ready, let's head inside and see what life is like on board one of the most powerful submarines in the world. Give us a minute. Heavy ice on the hatch. Even on a high-tech nuclear submarine, getting inside comes down to good old-fashioned manpower. Clearing massive chunks of Arctic ice off the hatch. Hello. All aboard. Thank you. Woo! Hello. We made it. Yes, sir. Climbing down into a 7,000-ton warship was definitely intimidating, but the crew running this machine instantly made me feel right at home.
So, it's funny, outside it's about -20° and here, a crisp 70. So, I'm going to find a place to shed some of these layers before I start sweating. So, just passing by the hallway and looks like they have a Super Smash Bros. tournament going on. I have to check that out. So, this right here is our room, also known as a bird egg. And right here is my rack. Now, last night I thought that was one of the craziest places we've ever slept. This might take the top spot. Measuring 360 ft long across three steel decks, the USS Santa Fe is a Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine built for three things: hunting enemy ships, gathering intelligence, and striking targets anywhere on Earth.
Powered by an onboard nuclear reactor, she can stay submerged for months at a time, moving silently underneath the ice with a crew of roughly 140. Equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles and heavy torpedoes, these fast attack subs are the backbone of the Navy's undersea dominance. And for the next 24 hours, this 7,000-ton warship is our home. The USS Santa Fe is one of the most complex machines on Earth, and it exists because of the people who built it, people like you. But, here's the problem: to keep boats like this coming, the submarine building industry has to
add over 14,000 workers every year for the next 10 years. The truth is, this is a once-in-a-generation national effort to transform American shipbuilding, and that's where buildsubmarines.com plays a part. It's the platform that connects people to training programs and careers building the US Navy's submarines, and a launchpad for taking part in this historic effort. Whether you've worked in shipbuilding before or never at all, there's a spot for you. This is modern hands-on work for welders, machinists, engineers, and a lot more. And these jobs aren't just on the coasts, they're in all 50 states. At the end of the day, if you have the determination, you could be a part of
something big and be able to point to a submarine and say you helped build it." You can get started at buildsubmarines.com to find the right opportunity for you and become part of the next generation of American builders. So, I'm here with Brian Reed, and I just found out about your position. You're an ice pilot. So, to my understanding, anytime a submarine is operating in Arctic environments, they need you, the expert, to help them navigate and guide them. Did Do I have that right? Our main role is we do training prior to doing the Arctic operations in the Arctic because ice is surrounding us. We drop in a stationary condition, so we're using ballast only to do that. That is not a normal
operation a submarine would train or do. The reason why we exist is we have the opportunity to do this frequently, and our qualification path to do it is so long that if we try to do it with active duty, they would transfer before they qualified or soon after qualifying. So, you would never have somebody that was not brand new, and a lot of this is experiential. So, what are the biggest challenges operating a submarine in this environment? There's a lot of them. I think the largest is the fact that the ice is ever present in the frozen regions of the Arctic, which makes a lot of things that we take for granted not an easy option, such as going shallow to use a
periscope, changing out the atmosphere through the ventilation system. Those are much easier to do in open ocean. In the Arctic, you don't always have that opportunity to take into account that I have a hazard overhead that I don't normally have. So, we point to point support the submarine. With everyone fully settled, the captain invited me to the control room as the crew prepared to submerge the submarine back into the depths of the Arctic sea. Conning officer, ship's ready to stationary dive. Attention to control. Captain, sir, the dive guide was entered, the ship is recirculating, we are in submersible water verified by myself and the ANAV. The ship is ready to stationary dive. I intend to
stationary dive the ship. Very well, conning officer. Stationary dive, stationary dive. Ah! Stationary dive, stationary dive. You got to shut the effing shut. Bro, help start the outboard. Start the outboard, helm aye. 6-0, extend the bow planes, dive aye. Extend bow planes. 8-6. Bow planes travel. 100 ft. Bow planes open. Bow planes locked extended, testing bow planes normal.
Vertical velocity slowing. 180 ft. Officer of the watch to counter measures, report what the depth gauge reads per the counter. All right, successful dive. We are at a depth of 300 ft. Thanks so much for letting us watch. Appreciate it, guys. Good job. Thank you. So, we are now officially underway on the USS Santa Fe. And there's a few people I want to introduce you to. They're responsible for helping run operations on the boat. And they're going to give us a little behind-the-scenes look at how this submarine operates. To get a sense of everyday life down here, I first met up with Lieutenant Junior Grade Ben Powers, who
offered to show me the day-to-day of living in this windowless steel tube. This is a stateroom. So, you get three bunks in here. Can you fit in this rack? I am foot to head. Yeah. Perfect. If you're ever having trouble sleeping on a submarine, it probably means you're not working hard enough. Your normal day is probably looking at 16 to 18 hours. You'll stand your 8 hours of watch, and then you'll go into your off-watch period. An average 5 to 6 hours of sleep. So, you want to take a look at the shower that we all share.
It's a little tight in here. This is our sink that we all share. We have our urinal and our toilet. We all share this head. Keep it clean. It's a group space. So, I hear this is the laundry room. Just two machines for the whole boat? Yep. These two right here. We have about 150 sailors on board. So, this thing's probably just going constantly. Oh, yeah. All right now, we're in cruise missile watching The Notebook. Is this the biggest room on the boat to kind of gather?
Yes. This is the biggest room. We do training, games, anything that you can think of. We do it here all on Christmas. This is the wardroom. This is where the officers eat all their meals. Every room is multi-purpose. I heard this can be used as like a hospital surgery table if needed. issue or something like that, you put them on the table. Right here. Welcome back to control. Right in the middle is the con where the officer deck directs the submarine. To my left is the ship's control party. So, I see these two guys on the yokes.
Is one of them depth and one of them forward and backward or how does it work? Inboard is a helm, he controls the rudder primarily. Turning left and right. And then outboard controls the stern planes that really control the angle of the ship. Beyond the advanced sonar, the sub still relies on optical periscopes for situational awareness above the surface. Watch standards walk the scope in continuous circles to survey the surrounding waters and ice flows. Mind if I hop on? Uh go ahead. And it's equipped with 12 times magnification to pick up contacts from miles away.
Those people look pretty cold out there, I can tell. This is the torpedo room? Uh right now we have a loadout of Mark 48 Mod 7 ADCAPs. So, how do you guys actually get the torpedoes down here? The middle level deck comes up and meets from the torpedo room through all three levels and forms a tray for us to load down all the way down here into the torpedo room. So, our torpedoes are launched horizontally out of the torpedo tubes. The missiles themselves are launched vertically out of the tubes on the top side of the ship. Now, behind this door is a section of the boat that is completely off limits to cameras. It houses the engine room, which is also where the nuclear reactor
is. It's what allows a ship like this to be able to operate underwater for months at a time. The nuclear reactor heats water to create steam, which spins turbines that generate electricity and propulsion for the entire submarine. That power also allows the crew to do something pretty incredible, make their own oxygen from seawater and produce fresh drinking water on board. In theory, the submarine could stay underwater indefinitely, and the only thing forcing it to surface is running out of food, which speaking of, there's someone I've been meaning to introduce you to. Welcome to the galley, and I'm here with culinary specialist 2 Dang. Now, I think a lot of people have a lot of questions about how you make food on a submarine.
So, what would you say to that? We are making three meals a day, over 150 personnel on board. Each meal we feed over 80 people. It's kind of like Tetris. The more we can stack things neatly, the more we can fit in. Mind if I take a look inside? All right. goes pretty far back. So, this is, I see, salmon, we got pork sausage links, some more pork, burgers. Are there some crew favorites? Pizza night is definitely, uh, one of their favorites. And that's tonight, huh? Kind of a pretty good.
Not bad, right? Now that we've had a chance to see how the submarine works and got a feel for its layout, I wanted to shift focus to something just as important, the people who actually live and work down here. Operating a nuclear submarine is much more than just the technology. It's about the crew who keeps this vessel running. Life aboard a submarine is unlike almost anything else in the military. The crew spends months, not just at sea, but beneath it, living in extremely tight quarters, far from sunlight, family, and the outside world. But their attitude surprised me. The morale was high, and I wanted to find out just how these sailors do it.
It's like being in your house on a rainy day. That's all it is. Fortunately, you're just surrounded by constant water. So, you don't really have a concept of day, the lights are always on. You can tell which day it is by the food you're getting served. After you fall into your routine, you become kind of a robot. Everybody has their own things that they like to do to make themselves comfortable, whether that's reading or music or watching TV. Your things that bring you back to zero, to absolute zero, before you go to bed or when you wake up. If you don't have that, you're going to lose your center of gravity.
How many people in your life can you say that you see every single day for 180 days straight that aren't in your family? And so that's what makes it a family here. Well, that's the end of a pretty jam-packed day that started at ice camp and now ends with us going to sleep aboard a nuclear submarine. Now, if we quiet down for a second and just listen, it's surprisingly tranquil. It's pretty crazy to think that we are hundreds of feet below the surface of the ice, but from here, you'd hardly ever know.
The next morning, I woke up to a message from the captain. It was time to surface. Now, there's a certain energy that runs through the boat on mornings like this, and I could feel it before anyone said a word. Surfacing a submarine is rare, something you might only do once on an entire deployment, and here I was, about to see it firsthand. I rolled out of my rack, got dressed, and made my way through the narrow passageways towards the control room, where the whole evolution was about to unfold. So, we are back here in the control room, and right now the crew is looking for the perfect sheet of ice to surface through. Cuz we have to actually get out. It can't be too thin, and we'll fall through, but at the same time, they
don't want it to be too thick where the submarine gets stuck. The top sounder behind me is able to measure the draft of the ice, so we're able to have confidence that we didn't pick something too thick to break through. And there's also another side to it. If it's super thin, it'll shatter like glass around the submarine, so we have sort of a Goldilocks zone, so we try to set that. Control, to control. Control, this is hovering at 180 ft under a serviceable feature. Ice draft is 2 ft. The ship is ready to vertical surface. I intend to vertical surface the ship.
Very well, conning officer. We bring the ship to a hover, which again is not a routine that submarines normally do. And then we lower tank levels to give us an buoyancy ascent. No indication for the Worley 9. Notify Very well. Dive vertical surface the ship. Vertical surface the ship, dive I. Chief of the watch, on the word of receive vertical surface. Especially the Los Angeles class submarine, the sail is actually hardened to be able to break through, but it's really less the sail and more the amount of speed and buoyancy because as hard as you hit the ice, it hits us back.
100 ft. Timing is everything because momentum is not enough to break the ice. The crew relies on what's called an Arctic blow at the exact moment of impact, blasting high-pressure air into the ballast tanks and generating thousands of tons of additional upward force. 10 ft from impact. Prepare for ice impact. 5 ft, stand by. If they miss that window, 7,000 tons of steel will simply bounce off the under pack, leaving us stuck under the ice. 6.8 up. 400 ft. Just wait. Still coming up. All right, ship is vertical surfaced. I have no questions. I relieve you of the con.
I stand relieved of the con. All right. Back up top. After stepping back out into the freezing Arctic air, we had one last piece of business to take care of. Sharing a message from our good friend back home. All right, everyone. My name is Sam Eckholm. We are from the Access Granted YouTube show, and we travel the world covering different military missions. For the last few days, and this has been incredible, and you guys have really welcomed us with open arms. But, there's someone else who got wind of what was going on up here, and sent a little message, and so I wanted to play that for all of you right now.
Tom Hanks here, talking to you after a day of work. Hey, I just wanted to say thank you for all of you guys that are up there. You're far from home, you're far from your families, and what you're doing is greatly appreciated. Now, I had my friend Sam Eckholm bring along up to you a little something from home. What means home better than a good stiff cup of coffee? Not just any coffee, but Hanks coffee. It's going to warm you up a little bit. So, listen. Stay warm. Stay safe. Laugh a bunch. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for your service, and thank you from everybody here back home that's going to enjoy the benefits of what you guys are
doing. Back up here on the surface, and it's pretty incredible to think about everything this crew is capable of doing in one of the most remote places on Earth. I want to give a big thanks to the US Navy, the Arctic Submarine Lab, the USS Santa Fe, and everyone who made this episode of Access Granted possible. In the meantime, I'm going to get to the helicopter because it is absolutely freezing out here, and I'll catch you guys next time.
