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

SmarterEveryDay · 6.4M views · 2021-07-30 · 42:02

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Overview

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains how a US Navy nuclear submarine surfaces through Arctic ice, filmed during the ICEx exercise. It shows ballast and control systems and the physics involved.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as the best accessible explanation of submarine ice breaking and sub controls.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2021–2023

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What people said

ortusdux · 2021-11 · Recommendation

The Navy is understandably cagey about how they surface through ice-sheets, but this Smarter Every Day video is the best summary I have seen. [VIDEO] Basically, some part of the sub needs to be strong enough to reliably break ice at sub-zero temps. The rest needs to maintain its strength at those temps.

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dataviz1000 · 2023-06 · Reference

The YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay was invited to film on an Ohio class nuclear submarine training in the Arctic. [0] You can see how many of the system are mechanical and not electronic in the demonstration especially the ballast controls. Most if not all boats and ships can control the throttle mechanically so if the boat loses its electronics such as a wave smashing the windshield in, it is still possible to control the rudder and throttles. I was very surprised at the lack if mechanical controls on the recreational submarine. [0] [VIDEO]

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paranoidrobot · 2021-10 · Reference

They have upward-looking cameras, at least on some of them. You can see it in the last Smarter Every Day video[1] where they're talking about surfacing a submarine in the arctic ocean. At several points you can see a video monitor showing an upward view of the ice. [1] [VIDEO] e: to be clear, that upward looking camera isn't going to be enough to detect much beyond your own footprint. If someone is about to cross that area you'd need some other way of detecting them.

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Sources

Video by SmarterEveryDay, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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