How to Surface a Submarine in the Arctic Ocean - Smarter Every Day 260

• [Man] Seven zero, six up, point four up. Standby for impact! - Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I've made a really long journey to an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean to board the USS Toledo, a U.S. Navy fast attack nuclear submarine, which has punched its way up through the ice. Today we're gonna learn how to actually control a sub underwater, and it's very different from what I thought. After we go back into the ice, we'll go really deep in the ocean, which I found to be a little bit unsettling, and then we'll go into the control room and learn the complicated and dangerous process of surfacing a submarine in the Arctic, which involves using physics to break back up through the thick Arctic ice. All right, here we are. We're at the final episode of the Smarter Every Day deep dive series, on board a nuclear submarine.

And there's a lot of other stuff you can learn in previous episodes: the command structure, how to make oxygen, how to fight fires, but for now, we're gonna go back to the beginning when I first boarded the USS Toledo, and we're gonna learn what it was like to drop down through the ice and begin our journey. Let's go get smarter every day. [Music] - Okay, Arnell is about to tell us what's going down. We are literally about to dive and you're gonna walk me through how that works, right? - Right. - [Dustin] So what's going on? - Basically, what we're about to do is, we're gonna take our boat from sticking in ice, and we're gonna pull it back down toward normalcy state, what we're used to operating in. So right now we're operating with our bow planes in. So basically... - [Dustin] Our what? - The bow planes, which basically are the wings on the front of the boats that help us go up and down. They move just kind of like an airplane. Just think about the airplane wings, that's what we think about, they're inside the boat right now. So we're like an airplane with no wings right now. - [Dustin] So you wait a second. You said you pull them inside the boat. - So hydraulically, we pull both sets of little T-Rex arms inside the boat. (Dustin laughs) We pull them in, and they're stowed inside the boat right now because we don't want to come up and damage them in the ice, when we surface through the boat. - [Dustin] No way, there's no bow plane, can I see it though? This is made out of wood. - They're retracted. - [Dustin] They're retracted. - So right around here is where the bow planes come out on this side. This is where I was talking about the stern planes. So you have the stern planes in the back that operate. - [Dustin] Yeah. - And on the side, both sides here, it'd be a short set of planes that stand out, and those are your bow planes. And they control, for us going up and down. Now the ballast tanks we're talking about, they're located up here and they're also located back here. This is where we're gonna take the water on, take water on here, or put more air in to change buoyancy of the boat. It's the sail of the boat right here. - [Dustin] The sail? - The sail. - [Man] Even though it's not a sail. - Even though it's not a sail, this is how you got on the boat today. So you come up through here. - [Dustin] And why did we get on the boat here? - Because when we surface the weapons shipping hatch, which is normally located here, we would've popped it open, but when we came through the ice, the superstructure of the boat was not high enough, there was still water over the weapons shipping hatch, so if we'd opened the weapon shipping hatch, there would have been flooding on the boat.

• We're not high enough because of the ice right now, so there's a little water over our weapons shipping hatch. We can't open the normal hatch. We decided to go with this option. - [Dustin] That's a good reason not to do that. (laughs) That's a good reason not to do that. Okay, so my understanding is you are about to take me to the control room. - That's correct. - And we're gonna do a dive. - We're about to dive the ship. - And you're gonna let me put the camera somewhere. - You will see something. (laughs) So who am I gonna watch? - So when we go up to control, I'll have you up in the front where I normally stand, the captain will be on the conn, and you'll see the chief of the watch, you will see the diving officer, and you will see the officer deck and the conning officer who will be in control of the entire evolution. - Okay, got it. Got it, sounds good. And what do I need to not say to not look stupid in that room? Just keep my mouth shut, right? - Just let it ride. - Yes, sir, I'm looking forward to it. I can already tell, man, you're my favorite person on the boat. It took me like 10 minutes. Is that why you got me? Is that why you shook my hand first? - That was it, I felt it.

• [Dustin] Filming inside the control room of a U.S. nuclear submarine while it's diving in the Arctic is an incredible privilege. And this is not the kind of access that the Navy takes lightly. Because of this, there's gonna be some trade-offs, at some point, you're gonna see some stuff blurred out in the background, and at some points the audio is gonna drop out completely. We're doing this so that the Navy can take us right up to the line, as far as classified information goes without revealing any of the capabilities or limitations of the submarine. Okay, we're gonna dive and I can film here in that direction just because of stuff that's on the screens. - [Man] Just tell me when you're ready. - Ready, sir. - [Man] Ready? - Yeah, ready to dive? - Captain, sir, all personnel onboard the ship. The ship is rigged for dive with the exception of Arctic full blow and a sounding of 1490 fathoms beneath the ship. Checks with charter water depth, I intend to stationary dive the ship to 180 feet.

• Submersion ship ice, sir. Dive, stationary, dive the ship to 180 feet. - [Man] Stationary dive the ship to 180 feet. Dive by chief of the watch and the one MC stationary dive stationary dive. Sub two blasts of the diving alarm, stationary dive, stationary dive. - [Man] One MC Stationary dive, stationary dive, sub two blast diving alarm stationary dive, stationary dive. Chief of the watch aye. - Stationary dive, stationary dive. - We can bring the water in, having shut it in half so we can control the angle that we're using to come down from. The diving officer of the watch right now is controlling our angles and our pitch and roll, which we can see up here. - Where's the depth gauge? - So we have the depth gauge here, you can also reach depth here and digital depth here. And you can read it in digital, up there. - Got it. - Speed, course, depth, pitch, roll. - I can feel it. - Right now we have a 63 down angle. - Understood. - We're trying to come out of the ice.

• Put 10 - [Man] Put 10 - Upward depth rate, four six five down. Upward depth rate, four four, four down, four two, four down. Upward depth rate, negative acceleration, chief of watch, flooding. - [Man] We're flooding. - [Man] Test turn planes and rudders - Test turn planes and rudder. Test turn planes and rudder. Six four, six six. Extend the bow planes. Extend the bow planes. CSES control extending the bow planes. Seven eight eight zero downward depth rate, three down, positive acceleration. - [Man] I make it up 240 feet, zero degree bubble. - 240, zero degree bubble aye sir. - You just heard the diving officer say zero degree bubble. And you may not have heard that before, but you already know what that means. To maintain a level submarine before the ballast tanks are equalized, the submariners have to use what's called the bow planes and the stern planes. I'm tempted to use an airplane metaphor, but piloting a submarine is much more like piloting a blimp.

There are two main forces at play here. You've got the buoyancy force, which acts on the sub, whether it's moving or not, and then you've got what's called the dive planes. You've got the bow planes and the stern planes. And these are kind of like wings, except they provide both upward and downward force. And they only have an effect on the submarine when it's actually moving through the water. Using the speed and the angle of attack, the submariners can calculate the amount of force the planes are contributing to maintaining a zero degree bubble. You can then push or pull water into and out of the ballast tanks to equalize the buoyancy force at that particular depth. You can then slowly dial this in by allowing the bow and the stern planes to take less and less of a bite of water until ultimately they end up at a zero degree angle of attack. By trimming out the submarine like this, they can dial it in so that they can hold the submarine at a certain depth using only buoyancy forces. This is a really, really big deal.

And when we go to punch back through the ice, this concept is going to come back into play in a really big way. - So when you do a static dive, you don't have the forward momentum of the boat and the bow planes to help you. So you have to adjust pitch and roll with ballast? - If you want to go zero, just use sea water to just weigh you down perfectly to match the buoyancy. Under the Arctic is very challenging 'cause the salinity changes so much, normally salinity is pretty constant in the ocean, but here, 'cause of the freshwater on top, the salinity can change all throughout the water column. So that changes your buoyancy all the way up and down. - So, if you noticed, when he first started, he was calling off depth rates pretty rapidly 'cause it's very heavy in that fresh water. And then once you hit that salinity acceleration started coming off, the velocity started coming off and it was really more of a controlled approach.

• It's not like a thermocline, it's a different thing 'cause it's salinity. - It's both - It's both. - It's a pretty strong effect that it has. - Only thing we have to deal with is the temperature change, which is normal, but other under the Arctic it's both. - Really, it's amazing. So I noticed you were hyper stressed for a short period of time and now you seem chill. What's up with that? - A lot of things happen all at once and if they don't happen exactly at the right moment, you don't get the angle you need, you don't get the ascent rate you need, you don't get the pitch rate, the planes are moving as fast as you need them to, everything kind of happens all at once and then compounds. Once you get ordered up, calms down pretty significantly. - So sir, you're controlling the rudder of the ship. - Yes sir, rudder and bow planes.

• [Dustin] So you're just looking at gauges. It's not like driving, you can't see what you're doing other than these needles, right? - Just the needles. - [Dustin] So what are you trying to hit? Don't tell me a number, but... - I'm going to a course. I'm going east, going in a different cardinal direction, so I'm going east. - [Dustin] So you're literally driving the boat right now? - Yes, sir. - [Dustin] Is it pretty intense? - When you first starting, I would say so. But I've been doing it for a little while, so I got used to it. - [Dustin] So you're pushing in and out like a yoke, but you're also turning, so is that the bow plane? - It is plane. So I'm trying to keep depth of the planes and then going in my direction. - [Dustin] So left and right is rudder, pushing in and out, it's your planes? - Yes. - So, we did the dive and now we're turning 10 times, is that correct? - So we're gonna do 10 turns of the screw. - [Dustin] Of the screw. - That just means the screw's turning 10 revolutions a minute. - Oh okay, so it's a rotation rate of the propeller. So you're calling that. Okay, got it. - And the goal of that is to get us to slow down so we can actually do a very microscopic adjustment of the trim. We're taking the planes, which provide some lift out of the equation by slowing the ship down. So we're finding that neutrally buoyant. So in the event that casualty or something happened where we lost propulsion, the ship wouldn't float uncontrollably up or down, it would find this happy depth we would go right there and we'd just stay until we figured out what the next step was or where we're starting to fall. - [Dustin] Got it. Where'd you learn all this? - A lot of experience here, on board the ship and previous ships and training commands.

• [Dustin] Got it. A little later, once we were underway, Chief Charlton had a classic demonstration set up for us in the torpedo room. - All right, so we got here is we've got a string tied across from all the way across the ship, towards the starboard side, at our shallow depth, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna proceed deep to show you how the hull compresses as we dive the ship. - [Dustin] Really? - Yeah. Here in a minute, they're gonna start diving the ship. And then as you see that, you'll see the string starts to lower from the hull compression. - [Dustin] Are you allowed to tell me the difference in depth that we're going like from... - No. - [Dustin] Okay. I felt it diving now. - I'm gonna lean a little bit forward, you're going to lean in a little bit aft. - I can feel it. - And then as we go deeper, you'll see the string start to dip. - Stuff's starting to move. - [Chief Charlton] There's something falling. - Wow, that's like a 10-degree tilt. - 10 degree, yep. We're starting to get a little bit of slack on the line already, you can see here. - [Dustin] I'm doing the math in my head, at that speed at that angle, we're going deep. - Oh yeah. (laughs)

I'm a mechanical engineer, and one of the things they teach you in mechanical engineering school is the ultimate load capabilities of pressure vessels. So while I was in this submarine down in the ocean, I was thinking about things like hoop stress and axial stress and mechanical buckling and the fatigue strength of wells. There was a lot going through my mind. In this spaceship, the difference in pressure between you and outer space is only one atmosphere, but it's very different in the ocean. For every 10 meters or so that you go deeper in the water, it's like adding another atmosphere of pressure to the outside of the pressure vessel, and in the Beaufort Sea, where we're at in the Arctic Ocean, there is a lot of available atmospheres worth of depth that we could go just by diving deeper. Okay, you're a smart person, and you know that if Dustin is in a submarine that's pointed down at 10 degrees, and you can approximate a velocity, you can just do the trig, and you can figure out that over a certain amount of time, Dustin is going to be this deep in the ocean, in the submarine, right? For that reason, I'm having to put a cut in the video right here, so you don't know how long we did this, but I will tell you this, I could do the math in my head in the moment, and I was terrified. We were deep. This is the only time on the submarine that I was genuinely uncomfortable, and this is because I understood the magnitude of the stresses that were on the outside of the pressure vessel that I was standing in.

• So, 10 degrees down, at least eight knots we've been doing it. We're freaking deep. (laughs) Cleaning out now? - Yep, so we can study out our final depth and you can see the line starting to droop here, a lot more play than there used to be. - [Dustin] Oh yeah. - [Chief Charlton] That was tight and now... - [Dustin] It was very tight. So what I'm seeing is the deflection, the hull is crushing in. And so it's built to deflate like that. - It is, yep. - [Dustin] And so everything around us has the ability to move. So there's not one thing that's bolted from that side all the way to that side. - Correct, everything kind of floats, and it's all mounted in a way that it allows the hull to compress without affecting the operation or the normal state of machinery on board. - That's amazing. Okay, the more I think about this, the more interesting it gets. The first thing I learned is that a submarine can control its depth with dive planes and ballast tanks. The second thing I learned is that a submarine can go stupid deep and undergo incredible amounts of pressure. So these two things are actually related, and I want to show you with a classic experiment called a Cartesian diver. This is just an eyedropper, and I've got a certain amount of water in the eyedropper so that it just barely stays afloat, and check this out. If I simulate going deep in the ocean, by squeezing the bottle and increasing the pressure, look at what happens to the air in my ballast tank here. As I squeeze it, you can see my ballast tank gets smaller and smaller, the air is getting crushed, and then at some point it reaches a point where it is no longer wanting to float. That means the depth of the ocean affects your ballast tank. So it's like this big feedback system and you have to constantly change both things to make it work. So at a really deep depth, because you have a lot of pressure, it either takes a whole lot of air being pumped into your ballast tanks, or what I would do is, I would maintain a certain velocity so I had control authority with my dive planes.

This is fascinating. It is far more complicated than I originally thought. And it also means that you can reach a certain depth where a submarine will want to fall. You're not just controlling total buoyancy of the boat, you're controlling relative buoyancy from the front and the back. - We will control relative buoyancy from front and the back. We work a lot on that while we're doing the Arctic dive. So when we were doing the stationary dive, we were operating the front main ballast tanks vents and the aft main ballast tank vents, and we were operating them separately. And that's what basically we're trying to do. We're trying to control our pitching angle because if we open them both up at one time, we end up sticking our rudder into the ice, or we'll end up sticking the sonar dome into the ice, and we don't want that 'cause that's our safety ship where all our sound sensors are at. - So, this sounds easy, but I thought hovering a helicopter was easy until I did it. - Hovering a submarine sucks. It just takes a lot. - When you say hover a submarine, you're saying that the submarine just stays right there. - Parking the submarine on one depth with a zero angle, it's very hard. So basically the diving officer and watches that are sitting up there, they're calculating the different waters, different angles and what it's gonna take to make our ballast basically zero to sit in one place.

• I had no idea, man. I thought I knew like even a little bit about subs. I knew nothing. I'm gonna summarize it this way. You're solving multiple kite equations as a crew at the same time, it's like a continuously iterating loop that is constantly being solved. And if you do it right, you can hover, and in this case you want to pitch up just a little bit and come up and punch through the ice. But that pitch up is important. - That's exactly what we're doing. - Oh, by the way, you have to do it in the right spot because the ice has a certain thickness. - It gets really thick if you miss. (laughs) - [Dustin] Thank you very much. - No problem. - It's hard to describe, but when we started getting close to surfacing the ship, I could feel the energy level of the ship start to slowly elevate. Like people were doing things they weren't doing before and they were making preparations. And interestingly, the captain went to his quarters and he started putting on all his Arctic gear. - [Dustin] Sir, what are you doing here? - So when we serve the ship, I'm one of the first ones to go up to the bridge. So I'm kind of getting halfway dressed out, not too hot. Might be about negative 30, negative 20 degrees, when we get up there. So when we first surface me and one of my department heads, we're the first ones to go to the bridge. And our main goal is to clear all the ice off the top of the sail, so we can raise our mast. We have to raise our induction mast, which we use to bring air in and that's needed to fine tune and finish the servicing procedure. So after we're up on the surface with our high-pressure air, we run a low-pressure air system, to push more water out of the main ballast tank to adjust the angle and get exactly where we want to be. So I sit here, all my winter stuff.

• [Dustin] So, you're literally gonna go up and like move the ice from the top? - Oh it's pretty neat. It's probably about two to three feet what we expect. - Is it okay if I throw like a GoPro on one of you guys? - Of course, a GoPro on the weps, it'll be a pretty cool shot. - That's awesome. Okay, sweet, I'll get out and let you do your thing. So you need my dosimeter back? - [Man] We need that back. - Okay, cool. Can you hold that? - [Man] Yup. - So this is my radiation exposure, so you're gonna measure that and tell me what it is? - It's a thermal luminescence dosimeter. So what we do is, we open it up and there's a chip inside. It has lithium fluoride crystals inside and it's exposed to heat and that releases any electrons that are captured while you're on board. - [Dustin] So you can quantify. - We can quantify how much you get. - That's awesome. Sweet, thanks man. Okay, we're about to surface from under the ice. When we descended under the ice, there was a lot going on. I can only imagine it's gonna be more in the other direction, I might be wrong, we'll see. I might get to hear the crunch. Because this servicing was part of ICEX, the team that was back at Camp Seadragon warned us to surface the ship in a very specific location for research purposes.

• We've already went and identified a place in the ice, it's probably about 300 yards wide, probably runs about a mile straight north and south, and thin enough for us to surface through. My dive just got us hover trimmed, so we slowed down to about a knot and made sure that our water's good, so when we slow and actually hover under where we want to go, we'll be able to just ascend vertically right there. So I am right now waiting for permission to vertical surface because of the helicopter up there. So we got to wait for them to go. So once I get to go ahead for that, and then I'm gonna go ahead and position the ship under the spot that we've identified and hover right under there, and then we'll blow a bunch of water off and then vertically surface right there. So you gotta make sure you come up with the proper angles. Your goal is to have your sail hit first, it's hardened, it's designed to impact the snow first. And you want to make sure that the rudder and the screw don't actually get into the ice 'cause you have the possibility of damaging them. Now we're making our approach right now, we're just waiting for permission. - Roger that.

Okay, I have an absolutely ridiculous illustration to show what my concern was. At this point, just roll with this. This is a popcorn ceiling, we're gonna pretend like it's the bottom of the ice. Okay, so here's the deal. As the submarine is coming up, we have to hit the right angle to bust through the ice, right? But it has to be thin enough for us to bust through. But there's another problem. Let's say that you're a balloon, right? And you're floating just like a submarine wants to be positively buoyant in the water, as it comes up, you've got the center of mass and you've got the center of buoyancy, and the moment where they touch that's when the center of mass moves, it moves up, right? So check this out. If we have a submarine, as soon as it touches right there, if there's any disturbance, like water inside like the ocean flowing, you're gonna tip that thing over if you don't punch through enough, right? So likewise, as we're coming up with the submarine, when we touch the surface, we have to go through with enough force to break the ice. But if we don't, in this case I'm not going to, if I push really hard, it's gonna try to tilt over. That's a really big deal, in this case, it's, you know, kind of scary.

• This is a camera that's mounted directly on top of the sail, straight up. - [Man] We'll run a steady course two one zero. - Turn around and see different shading of the ice. It helps with the ice thickness. Also, if you look, this is what's gonna help us out, it's part of that vertical surface, we have to be perfectly hovering. That's a zero speed. You heard earlier, we made an announcement for people not to walk around the ship. So it's that sensitive that if a guy walked from the board compartment back to the engine room, just the weight to the 150, 200-pound person walking can affect the trim of the ship. It has to be perfectly trimmed. We use this to see if we're moving through the water. - [Dustin] So we're pretty close to the ice right now? - Yeah, 150 feet under the water. - [Man] That's about one three zero feet above us right now. - [Man] I still have to make an X like that to mark a spot. That's where the previous day that we surfaced. So mark out the exit, you can see it. - [Dustin] You can see it through the ice. - [Man] Shovel it out. - [Dustin] Gotcha. - [Man] There's another one. That's where they're panicking. - [Dustin] So that's where they're gonna surface. That's cool. So there's a very complex scene behind me. I'm not allowed to film it, but they're mapping out exactly where they want to go. They understand their vector very, very well. And it's very interesting, and I'm sorry I can't show you. You're the captain, you're letting him control the ship. What's happening there? - That's the best part too, everyone's we're trained so well, so I should just be able to sit back and check big picture of things and we practice it so much that I'm thinking about, "What's he gonna say next?" And he says it and it checks with what I'm thinking, so I get to sit back and say very well, that's where you want to be. If you're involved with stuff I'm trying already. So we train, this way I can just sit back, see me constantly I'm checking everything.

• I'm all back two thirds. I'm all stopped. - Basically what we're trying to do here is parallel park a submarine when you can only look up at the sky and our parking space is a mile long, but a 300-yard stretch of thinner or younger ice. The crew of the Toledo had already done something like this before, when they punched back through the ice when I met up with them and you can see from the aerial footage, when I was coming in the delineation or the thicker in the older ice, in contrast with a thinner and younger ice. The problem is the aerial footage doesn't tell the whole story because, yeah, you might have a strip of young ice, like right here, and you're trying to pop up right there. But what you don't realize is the water is flowing under the ice in a completely different direction. So you're trying to hit this, but you're having to deal with forces that are moving you this way. So you might have to turn into it and then... It's a very complicated dynamic thing.

Another question I had, which was not answered for me, I asked, but I didn't get an answer, is how do submarines know where to punch through the ice? Like, do they have some kind of instrument on board where they can guess that thickness above or do they get that information from someone else? I have no idea, but what I do know is if I was moving through the ice and I can't surface, I would want to know the closest location where I could surface. So to me, I would constantly be thinking of escape routes, kind of like when your engine goes out on an airplane, you're always looking for a field. I would want to know what is the equivalent of that for a submarine. They would not tell me how that works, but I got to believe that there's some kind of system in place. - I'm all back two thirds.

• [Dustin] The main way he's propelling this thing is with the propeller, and he's pushing backwards and forwards with that in tandem use with the rudders. But also from what I infer here is there some type of retractable outdoor propeller, which extends from the hull and can rotate the bow in different directions to swing the bow around. Throughout this whole event, his only relative cue is being able to see the ice up above from an upward-facing camera that gives the relative sense of motion. - I'm all stopped. - Okay, here we go, We're about to punch through the ice. - [Man] Vertically surface the ship by dive. Vertically surface the ship. - [Man] I want to see vertical surface vertical surface. - Vertical surface, vertical surface, vertical surface. - [Over The Radio] Vertical surface control, what have you got? - [Man] Eight zero three up, point three up. - [Man] Seven zero, six up, point four up. - [Man] Stand by for impact. - [Man] Six zero, seven up, point four up. - [Man] Impact! - Angle's staying up. - [Man] It's coming down. - Chief launch three forward. - [Dustin] So that's what it was like down in the control room, but I want you to see what it was like from the sail itself. Weps, or the chief weapons officer, he was up in the sail, which has multiple compartments, and I was able to get a GoPro on his head, and he's up there during the moment of surfacing. This is what it would've looked like from above the ice. This is the Toledo doing an earlier surfacing, and I think it's fascinating to contrast the experience above to what's actually going on below.

• The primary concern now is to get enough freeboard so that we can actually get guys to like a hatch so that water's not coming down and we'll go and dig it out with chainsaws, ice picks and stuff. - So while I waited, weps, or the chief weapons officer, he's the lead officer over the sonar fire control and torpedo divisions, he went up with Captain Castalano to clear the ice off the sail, which was no easy task. - [Man] Upper bridge access hatch coming open. - [Man] There's a good bit of ice still on the sail. - Yeah, I could feel the Arctic air blast me when they opened it. So they're going up there to clear the ice right now. - [Man] Big chunks come down? - [Dustin] How big are they when they come down? - About that big sometimes, they range. - [Dustin] So I need to stay over here. - Yes, I would recommend staying behind that drain. - [Dustin] Yes, sir. - [Man] That thing's solid I hit it with a breaker bar, like six times. - [Dustin] What's up buddy, are you about to go dig us out? - We might get out. - It's gonna be a hit or miss, you may be able to get out, we'll see. I didn't have any Wheaties this morning.

• I am starting to learn how to play cribbage. I'm good with just going straight to the Pacific, if you want. - [Dustin] How was that man? - Intense, sir. - [Dustin] This first time you've done that? - No sir, third time. - [Dustin] Was it good? - It's getting better and better each time. - [Dustin] Is it? - [Dustin] How about you man, how was it? Was it good? Yeah, a rush? How did they do man? - Just another Sunday. (laughs) - [Dustin] How'd they do, sir? - They did great. - [Dustin] Did they? What could've been better? Obviously something could have been better. - It can always get better, but guys are awesome. - [Dustin] That's awesome. So were you nervous? - I wouldn't say nervous. Definitely, it's always anxious doing that because it's such a dynamic evolution between like positioning the ship in a spot. Like I positioned a spot that's only like 150 yards wide, but you know, the ocean current pushing me, trying to push me out of it. So you're trying to sit yourself up and account for that. So I got to worry about that, but dive, sitting there trying to hover and everything's got to happen like right like that, ‘cause the longer I sit there and wait, trying to, you know, mess with positioning the ship, the more I'm getting pushed out of this area.

• [Dustin] 'Cause there's no sideways propulsion, right? - No, I can only like twist the ship at that point. So usually try to set up like going into the ocean current because then you can just kind of sit there, but this one, the way that the surface of feature that we were shooting for, wasn't too oriented in that way. It was only 150 yards wide, so you're not gonna necessarily be able to come in that way 'cause the ship is so long. With the geometry set up, it was one of those ones where you had to kind of come in, stop and go up 'cause you only have so much time before you drift out. You can kind of reach a point like when you get close enough where you're not stopping the ship, so you gotta make sure you meet the parameters. It's definitely dynamic, It happens pretty quick, but it's probably one of the coolest things I've done. - [Dustin] When are they putting the periscope up? - Once they clear. - [Dustin] The debris? - Yeah, once they clear the ice up there. So it sounds like it's kind of thick so they should have fun. But once that happens, we'll get the scope up, we can go look at it, take a look around. You'll be able to see Ice Camp. - [Dustin] That's cool. - It's pretty awesome.

• [Dustin] And just like that, it was time for me to go. - Looks like you're trying to leave. - [Dustin] Thank you, man, I appreciate that. Pretty awesome. So I took a few more pictures. I took a selfie with one of the famous locals and said my goodbyes and headed towards the chopper, which did one orbit around the Toledo, so we could see what it looked like when it punched through the ice. After a short hop in the helicopter, we landed at Camp Seadragon and I took a couple of last minute photos with the flags, which I thought were really cool. And then the Canadians who are experts at Arctic flight, took us all the way back to Prudhoe Bay. It was there that an Arctic fox reminded me of how truly isolated we were. This is like the edge of civilization, and I was struck by both the beauty and the harshness of this part of the world. It took several days and several flights to get home, which was wild because the crew of the Toledo got to Camp Seadragon via submarine under the water. This was the last video in the Smarter Every Day deep dive series in a nuclear submarines.

I'd now like to introduce you to some of the people that made this happen behind the scenes, we'll start with Lieutenant Michelle Pelissero. You may have seen her in the background of some of the shots throughout the series. Michelle is the one that escorted me onto the submarine and introduced me to the sailors and made sure I had access to the things I wanted to explore. Here's a quick high five with Michelle at the end of the embark when we were both exhausted. Thank you, Michelle, for making this possible. - Thanks for coming out. - [Dustin] Yeah, it was pretty cool. Yeah, so all the time, huh? This is what these guys do all the time. That's amazing. - Pretty great job. - [Dustin] Thank you for letting us see what that was like, it was really fun. I want to say thank you to everyone on board, the USS Toledo, you treated me with respect the entire time I was there. I hope you feel that I reciprocated.

Everyone from the A-gangers, the cook, the captain, the chief of the boat, executive officer, everyone on board, thank you so much for your time. I know you went out of your way to make this happen, and I'm grateful. When someone contacts me from a public affairs office about a video, oftentimes they have in their mind the exact type of video they want or the message that they want to convey. I want to introduce you to someone very, very special. Because when I first met Commander Jodie Cornell, it was clear to me that we had mutual trust. She trusted me with the Navy's message and I trusted her to just let me do my thing. This was unlike anything I've ever done before I promised the Navy one video, and that was about ICEX. But because of the access that Jodie gave me and the trust she put in me, we created this entire series. So I definitely want to introduce you to Commander Jodie Cornell. This is Commander Jodie Cornell. - Hi. - Yeah. So why did you bring me out, Jodie? She's the PAO officer that did everything here. Why did you do this? - I brought you out because I wanted you to learn about the submarine force. And I want you to take this message back and show everybody about all of the officers and the enlisted folks that work on the submarines, how dangerous it is, how important it is and how interesting it is to be a submariner.

• And can you please explain the rules and stipulations that you put on me? Like you told me what to make, right? - No, I did not. I let you do whatever you wanted to do. I gave you some ideas though, before you came out. So before you came out, I sat down with some submariners and I said, "Hey guys, what are the cool things that happen on a submarine that Dustin can cover while he was out here?" - Jodie's awesome. She's cool, we've been going back and forth for several days now. She's really fun. But she basically made all this happen, so big thanks to Jodie. - Yeah, thank you. - [Dustin] Thank you, I appreciate it. - Now, hand sanitizer. (laughs) - I have found that the most interesting content, for me personally, is when I can simply experience the environment and ask questions in the moment. So that's what Jodie did for us in this series, and I'm grateful. Again, thank you to the Navy for letting us experience the Smarter Every Day deep dive series in nuclear submarines.

This episode of Smarter Every Day is sponsored by audible. I want to tell you about this submarine that's behind me. This is the USS Requin. This was a submarine that was in World War II. It didn't see a lot of action in the Pacific, but I'm gonna tell you about a sub that did. That would be the USS Barb. And you can listen to the book "Thunder Below" when you go to audible.com/smarter or text the word smarter to 500-500, the link will pop up on your phone, you just click it. Thank you so much if you watched a lot of videos in this deep dive, it's amazing, but if you still don't know who Fluckey is, you have not passed the course here. You have to know who Eugene B. Fluckey is in order to complete the deep dive. It's incredible.

So if you would consider supporting the sponsor, that'd be rad. You can do that by going to audible.com/smarter. You get your first audiobook for free, but you also get access to a huge plus catalog, which has all kinds of stuff, that'll just ease your mind and just make you genuinely a smarter person. The amazing thing about diesel-electric submarines like this is, this is how the Toledo came to be. They slowly developed the diesel-electric submarine. They built system after system. Eventually, the U.S. made the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine. All these systems didn't come from nowhere, they had to be developed. Learning about what these guys did way back in the day, it's incredible, and I really want you to go on that journey. So required listening, "Thunder Below," Eugene B. Fluckey, you're gonna love it. audible.com/smarter. Download that book for free, you will dig it.

Sometimes at the end of a video on the internet, people say things like, please subscribe or support me on Patreon or whatever. I'm feeling so much more than that. I'm feeling just grateful, gratitude for everyone. If you've watched these videos, if you've participated in any way, if you support on Patreon, whatever. This was a thing. The Smarter Every Day deep dive series into nuclear submarines, I'm just grateful. And one person in particular, I want to say thank you to. There was a person in the submarine force that spent a lot of time making sure I could get this stuff cleared through operational security. They asked that they were not to be publicly recognized. I just want to say, you know who you are. And I want to say thank you to that individual. That's just a testament to the silent service and what they do. I'm grateful, all over. I'm gonna leave links down in the video description to the Navy. Haven't been asked to do that, it just seems appropriate given the subject matter of this content. Also, I'm gonna make a playlist, so that this can live on for future generations to learn along with me, I'm going to re-watch this stuff too.

So I'm grateful. Thank you so much. I am Dustin, you're getting smarter every day. Have a good, bye.