the engine room is standing by main engines are warm puffing ahead we were surrounded by sea ice it was -5° outside we were packed in the control room about to do a dive that submariners rarely do straight down in the Navy's nuclear power submarine I found myself on started tilting if that tilt angle got too steep you'd risk a situation that is much harder to recover from ships have sunk to the bottom of the ocean stand by for impact stand by [Music] imp but wait what was I doing in a Los Angeles class nuclear powerered
submarine underneath 10 ft of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean ah phys girl hello good to meet you well in case you're new here I'm Diana you're watching physics girl and earlier this past winter I spent two nights on an ice Camp 160 m from civilization my last video describes why peeing in the middle of the night at an arctic ice Camp is so terrifying but the whole reason we were there was to go on a nuclear powerered submarine for these exercises that the Navy only does every 2 years this is so this is real
we are in a submarine in the Arctic Ocean and we're going under and they invited us along to ask questions let's dive into it but the things that I really want want to show you are one what was it like to dive surrounded by Arctic sea ice the officers on board told me that the stationary dive we were going to do was much harder than a normal dive and I got the sense that it was more dangerous two how do submarines even work standing there in the submarine about to fully submerge underwater and sleep there
overnight excuse me sorry I realized I didn't know is there compressed air that they put into the tanks or something where does it go how fast did they sink how well can they control this 6,000 ton vessel three we learned the submarine weighed 50,000 pounds more than anyone expected on their first resurfacing so they had to go through some of those complications when we resurfaced and finally the story of why the military yelled at me as we disembarked from our Frozen BNB and why the military probably doesn't invite YouTubers to their nuclear submarines too often
about probably about 20 more minutes and you guys will be ready to go down and have a cup of coffee and enjoy your day let's rewind a bit though to get to this submarine we had to cross you know that line on your Google Maps that separates land from Ocean and fly with the Royal Canadian Air Force and land on a floating ice camp that is floating and I mean floating because when you walk around in a circle your GPS tracks spirals because the ice beneath your feet is slowly moving Levi we've moved .1 miles
in the last 35 minutes so trippy from that ice you get on a helicopter for over an hour that plops you down on some more ice where you see nothing but endless ice with a little gray cylinder poking up through it and you realize there are men walking around on that cylinder because that is the USS Pasadena and it has just come up from a trip into the bower sea with zero contact to the outside world and popped up through the Arctic sea ice to pick us up and dive 500 ft and sleep overnight and
hopefully not die across now so that's what you're going to walk across take get in there carefully carefully because if you fall into this water you have a couple minutes and we have a tent to rearm you and a doctor here just in case you fall in that's you yeah yeah if you fall in who help you Hector I think I'm not going to have you film while you're walking across they're going to put a handrail up so you'll be able to hold on to a handrail they didn't put a handrail don't look straight straight
down just keep on walking okay not tripping I cannot express to you how much I had to focus on Left Foot Right Foot and these visions of 28° water soaking into my down coat and the five layers of clothing that I had underneath my laptop my phone my headphones my dignity I'm good I'm good thank you guys so much I got really quiet right oh my gosh that is the the scariest like wide plank I've ever walked I hadn't seen land for 3 days and we were about to disappear even further from civilization once the
submarine dived underneath the surface got it I was about to learn a lot about how submarines dive and how what we were about to do was seriously different from how submarines normally dive I intend to stationary dive the ship to 1 180 ft stationary dive stationary dive they kept repeating stationary dive this was the first thing I realized I didn't know about submarines they almost never drop straight down and for good reason give give you a heads up a warning that's what we're doing there will be some jostling of the ship and a little bit
of uh angles that you see nothing too severe the captain warned us what to expect because instead of driving forward and letting moving water flow across the boat and across what are called diving planes the same way that air flowing over airplane Wings controls the altitude we had to drop straight down for a pretty clear reason so normally we'll go about you know eight or so knots as we're diving and we kind of kind of Glide down but you know with ice in front of us and behind us and all around us we run into
an ice ke and that's why diving in Arctic water required a lot more control using the ballast to syn the sub and I think our captain mentioned mentioned he'd only had to do a dive like this once or twice before because usually there's no reason to do it and it's a lot harder to keep the summering level this way so it's more risky but danger is my middle name Diana is just my first name stationary dive patol maneuver half shut open V stay dive stay dive open for vents open for V open for vents P
vet open I think we were at like 14° or something and it's stayed like that for a long time and we were just like standing at that angle not knowing what was going on open that fence open the fence F B's open shutting F BS half B shut something was happening and we weren't given a lot of information at the time maybe they didn't know exactly but the captain later explained to us a couple reasons why the process took extra long and what you saw yesterday was new for us it was actually new for the
the Arctic operation specialist and every time we do this we learn something new we had a significant amount of ice that was built up on our four main ballast tank bents and so when we did the venting of the four tanks um not as much air escaped that normally escapes and it's not that the ice would ever freeze the vent shut which was a concern of mine but they assured me that the hydraulic vents are relatively fail safe but that ice can block some of where the air is supposed to come out and that slows
the process quite a bit again an issue you don't have to deal with when you're not in the ark one more thing I learned that kind of messed with my mind when the submarine is at an angle one thing that they have to take into consideration is that the forward and rear ballasts are now at different pressures in the water which made sense to me I have scuba dived and you know that the further down you go in the water the pressure increases but could the pressure be that different between the front and the end
well the submarine is about 360 ft long so at a 20° angle the difference is 120 ft of depth from from one end to the other that's 3 and 1/2 atmospheres of difference so we're talking tens of thousands of pounds the end lower in the water now has less buoyancy so you have to take that into account so that end doesn't keep accelerating down faster than the other end and that's why I was worried about getting to too steep of an angle but I was told that it would have to be an extreme angle for
you to worry about this and they wouldn't give me a number because it's probably classified but our 14° was not a big deal and it was at this point that I real ized I had no idea how ballast tanks worked because I didn't know if they were closed off to the ocean this kind of effect would only matter if the submarine shrinks when it goes down or if water is free to flow in and out of the ballasts but that can't be how submarines work right wrong but first a quick sponsor message thank you to
3M for supporting physics girl and sponsoring this video have you ever wondered how they make cars quieter and give the doors that solid Funk sound when they close we talk about how life-changing technology is all around us but there's some tech that you might not even know is there and you couldn't know because you can't see it it's literally in the walls well I recently visited the 3M Innovation Center at their headquarters in St Paul to check out some of this cool technology I have two identical gongs here and I'm going to hit them but
one of them has duct tape on it and the other one has a mystery tape here's the duct tape gong first and here's the gong with the mystery tape what is This I Swear these are identical gongs but what is this mystery tape well it's called vibration damping tape it's thinner than duct tape but it's made of this mix of aluminum and a viso elastic material and it absorbs the vibrations of the metal so that they can't become sound as much it's so weird noise damping tape is just one of thousands of Innovations 3M has
pioneered that's relevant to me it's in our cars it's in airplanes 3M science is all around us and their goal is to improve all aspects of our lives through science from creating tape that makes our trips and our commutes quieter and more enjoyable to helping solve bigger problems like climate change 3M is constantly innovating to better all of our lives every day you probably have 3M Products within arms length of you right now thank you to 3M for helping make this video possible and now back to the Arctic this is how submarines work they obviously
have to change the buoyancy of the submarine because submarines are built a lot like boats so they will float so then how do you make them sink you have to change the density or the weight by filling parts of the submarine with water now I know we're thinking the same thing so how do they bring water safely into the submarine well they have these compartments called ballast tanks and they literally flood the compartments to dive which makes sense Add Water you get heavier and then blow out the water using compressed air in order to surface
but where are the tanks when you're standing in the living quarters you start wondering where are they letting water into well almost the entire Hull is a tank it's the main ballast tank that travels across the entire length of the submarine outlining the hull and that entire thing gets flooded when the submarine Dives and there are additional tanks at various other points to more finely control the buoyancy and the Tilt angle and so forth those are called trim tanks now those tanks are completely closed off from the ocean and are adjusted using compressed air the
other main ballast giant tank across the whole hole is open to the ocean on the bottom there's a grid or something that keeps out I don't know dolphins or jellyfish probably but it turns out that those main ballast tanks are not affected by your depth because they're completely flooded with water when you dive anyway ways what is affected is that the submarine hole significantly shrinks when you go to deep depths even though it's made of high yield strength steel so the submariners have to adjust tens of thousands of pounds of water in and out of
those trim tanks to deal with the shrinkage and that's how submarines work I also learned about other parts of the submarine the part up there where they're standing next to the Periscope that thing sing out the Periscope I see um that's actually where you stand when the boat's underway in the middle of the ocean got the Periscope itself has a speed limit because when the water's coming over it but if the fairings up you can go a little bit faster got it so it's just kind of more rigidity more support but the sail that that
part of the sail is always up I was also learning to talk like a sailor well this is a incredible place to learn about a submarine so after a somewhat nerve-wracking process of submerging beneath the Arctic Ocean we were ready for the coolest sleepover ever before we knew it it was time to return to land or I guess more solid water the crew found a place to come up through the ice how they did that I have no clue it was classified well okay I have some clue up here in the Arctic it's a little
bit different we have to actually find relatively thinner parts of the ice to uh map out so we'll we'll drive around essentially using all of our data that we can collect to look up uh with our sonar and Visually with the camera to see what is above us so once that meets we we have preset ice thicknesses and dimensions of the uh feature itself we have to meet if I hover over here I hear more like crackling on the ice and down here is more running water turns out it's not just diving in the Arctic
that's tricky surfacing is also a lot more complicated because it's one of the only places in the world that a submarine is punching up through a crystallin inorganic solid vertically surfacing we're getting an angle on a submarine about 4° so that the all the force is concentrated on on the tip top the sale so all the uh hundreds and thousands of pounds of upward buoyance we have is concentrated on one very specific point in the ice and just and just cracks it so they have to essentially use the sail like a battering ram against the
ice to break through using just the speed that they get from increasing their buoyant force without any Forward Motion at all but the captain explained to me that in the Arctic they might have to deal with the submarine unexpectedly weighing 50,000 lb more than it should what we saw yesterday was it didn't match what we expected basically like I said about a 50,000 lb uh change in in buoyancy as we were surfacing the other day wait hold on 50,000 lb 50,000 lb and and obviously you're not adding 50,000 lb worth of people no changes in
the buoyancy of the sub made it 50,000 lb heavier than they expected what would cause that when we surfaced the day before our buoyancy as we were going up we got heavier and heavier and heavier just due to the fact the celin changed and the temperature changed so as we're going up we're actually blowing water out of our tanks just to keep an upward velocity so because they're ascending in the Arctic where the temperature of the surface can be drastically different than it is underwater and the solinity of the water changes due to the presence
of you know the freshwater ice at the top you get just unpredictable buoyancy and over the length of a 362 ft submarine turns out that can mean a difference of tens of thousands of pounds if we start getting lighter heavier that's going to change we can accelerate or we can decelerate and stall out stalling out's bad because then we don't bust through the ice accelerating is bad because we go too fast and we can do some damage so even in an unpredictable environment it's essential for them to get their Ascent rate just right and that's
part of why we were there at all and then bam we broke through the ice actually was pretty uneventful stand by for impact stand by 60 ft 10° up 56 Up impact impact I I think you slept through it I think I slept through the whole thing so when you board a nuclear submarine the way you have to behave is uptight you just do what everyone tells you to do you ask questions respectfully and not just out of respect because these men are literally in charge of your survival in an extremely hostile environment uh where
where are you from sir I'm from Texas all right so when you've just broken through the ice and they tell you Diana climb up the top top of the sale to get that drone shot you wanted you obey yeah I was pretty excited but then something happened and I got my first real orders so Levi who's a licensed drone pilot breaks out the Drone and something about drones is that they often have a set distance from the takeoff location that they'll allow you to fly that way you can't fly the Drone out of range and
it calculates this distance mostly based on GPS but as we saw back at the ice Camp when you're standing on Ice the GPS shows that you're moving because the ice is moving now our Dream shot was to get a drone up to see me standing on top of the sail but we were told drone batteries only have a few minutes out in the extreme cold some Personnel even tried to use their own drone at the ice camp and it just fell out of the sky but we were determined we just had to move quickly now
seconds after I got to the top of the submarine and seconds before Levi got the Drone up to see me I started getting yelled at by the military Personnel from the ice Camp down on the ice they're like get off the boat get off the boat now and I turned to one of the men on the sale with me and told him that a minute before the captain himself had told me to go up the sail I had no idea what was going on but it turned out the submarine was starting to move and the
ice was scraping against the hall and there was danger that the exit plank was going to fall into the ocean and they still had one of the world's most prolific pun users on board so we quickly had to grab all of our stuff and I mean frantically shoving camera gear into anyone's backpacks and they rushed me off the sub and I had to walk the plank of death again but this time I had a smile on my face I had a DSLR safely in my hand not in the ocean except missing out on our Dream
shot by mere seconds was not even the worst part you may recall from earlier the importance of GPS for drones in the Arctic the ice had moved far enough that the Drone would not return from the other side of the submarine you can even see in the earlier part of the shot how the Drone won't cross the water but if we speed it up just a few moments later in the clip the Drone now won't even get to the water it's moving further away and it has all of our footage from the trip on it
and it's about to crash land onto much thinner Frozen sea ice and the military told Levi there's no way the Navy was going to rescue us rescuing the Drone so as I said goodbye to the most rare and unique footage we've ever captured and the scientist had the idea to land the drone on the other side of the of the submarine on the ice reset it and then put it full speed back toward us Levi was hesitant that it wouldn't take off again but we were running out of time the Drone batteries were going to
die within [Music] minutes after it landed it was able to take off again Levi hit the throttle full speed and it came flying over the sub tried to stop over the water again but our hero an grabbed it out of the air and saved the day we got our drone back we got to keep our awesome footage minus me at the top of the sale but we were really close to losing it and it makes you think about how quickly things can go wrong in the Arctic I mean we just had a few pieces of
equipment to keep track of and such a minor Kink almost caused a huge issue and that's just for a drone I can't imagine having to do checks on the submarine and be responsible for keeping people alive in such a harsh environment it was so cool to see these guys and how they live and get to experience just a piece of that for a moment but it was also intense to know that they experience you know isolation from their families and from the world and they don't hear anything for weeks sometimes months at a time so
if you want to hear more about my experience sleeping on the submarine and learn more about the Cool Tech that I didn't get a chance to cover in this video like you know the nuclear reactor and more about what life is like on a submarine make sure to stay tuned and check out my upcoming videos all about what it's like to sleep on a submarine and how a submarines get around hint it's not GPS thank you so much for watching and happy physics thing [Music]
