Success was not a sure thing. Commander Anderson's first attempt to enter the Arctic Ocean from the Bering Strait in June 1958 was turned back by heavy ice and shallow water. In early August Anderson and the Nautilus left Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to try again. The sub traveled submerged for the entire journey, maneuvering through the Bering Straits in undersea valleys and then skimming along the edge of the ice pack off Alaska's North Slope. There Anderson briefly surfaced to take a radar bearing off a nearby DEW Line station before slipping under the jagged underwater daggers of the ice cap to make a final run for the Pole.
Once under the ice Nautilus relied upon a unique sonar system that was aimed upward toward the ice overhead as well as down toward the sea floor. "Overhead was incredibly rough, almost solid ice with upside down pinnacles that projected downward as much as eighty feet or more from the surface," Anderson would later write.
Caption: Commander William R. Anderson, captain of the Nautilus, and Dr. Waldo Lyon, the expedition's senior scientist, kept close track of the ice overhead with a special sonar system. U.S. Navy photo.
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