After four years of work and numerous test runs in the Monterey Bay, a team of MBARI engineers took the institute's first autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, for a trial cruise in the Arctic Ocean last fall. The group spent a month aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker USCGC Healy, testing the AUV and its components under and along the Arctic ice sheet.

The Gulf of California sits at the northernmost end of an immense underwater mountain range called the East Pacific Rise, which extends across the Southeastern Pacific Ocean almost to Antarctica.