Ten Years of High North
A vial with a sediment sample. Source: Osservatorio Artico
On July 18, 2026, the Alliance left the port of Tromsø, Norway, to launch the tenth consecutive campaign of the High North Arctic research program, coordinated by the Italian Navy Hydrographic Institute. The mission, conducted together with the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) and this year integrated with the activities of the Arctic Climate Observatory 2026, concluded on August 16 with the ship’s return to the same Norwegian port. For four weeks the crew operated in the waters west and north of the Svalbard archipelago, an area of the Arctic Ocean that the program has now been observing for a decade. On board, for the fourth consecutive year, a correspondent from the Italian Arctic news outlet Osservatorio Artico followed the expedition day by day.
From Seabed to Satellite
The High North program, launched in 2017 by the Italian Navy, is today a well-established model of scientific cooperation in one of the least explored regions on the planet. The objective of the 2026 campaign was described by the Hydrographic Institute as a “seabed to satellite” approach: integrating satellite observations, direct measurements at sea and ice surveys to build a more complete picture of seabed morphology, the water column, ocean circulation, and ice cover. The data collected by the Alliance does not remain confined to the Navy’s archives: it is shared with the Norwegian Hydrographic Service and feeds into the major international seabed-mapping programs, contributing to a knowledge base that Italy makes available to the global scientific community.
The Alliance is no ordinary ship. Launched in July 1986 at Muggiano, in the province of La Spezia, she is a “NATO Research Vessel”: owned by the Atlantic Alliance but scientifically managed by CMRE, and has flown the Italian flag since March 2016, when an agreement between the Ministry of Defense and NATO entrusted her crewing to Italian Navy personnel. From a technical standpoint, she is one of the quietest vessels of her kind, specifically designed to minimize the propagation of sound in water. A feature that makes her particularly suited to those scientific experiments for which the absence of noise is a necessary condition. On board she has around 400 square meters of laboratories, and her crew numbers 44, joined by up to 20 researchers and students embarked for each mission.
The Italian naval ensign aboard the Alliance, which has flown the Italian flag since 2016. Source: Osservatorio Artico
Life and Research Aboard
Life on board the Alliance has its own rituals. One of the most intensely felt is the so-called “Arctic baptism,” a lighthearted tradition reserved for anyone crossing a certain latitude aboard ship for the first time, be it the Arctic Circle, the Antarctic Circle or the Equator: a collective rite, taken in good humor by the crew and embarked researchers alike, that symbolically marks entry into an extreme environment. Beyond this moment of lightheartedness, the day-to-day account of the mission, entrusted to “ship’s logs” published by Osservatorio Artico, conveys the rhythm of a routine made up of watches, shifting weather conditions and days marked out by the constant light of the Arctic summer. It is an aspect of the mission that rarely emerges from official communiqués, yet one that reveals how research in one of the planet’s most remote regions remains, above all, a human endeavor: made up of waiting, adaptation, and cohabitation in cramped spaces for weeks on end.
Drift ice in the waters west of Svalbard, seen from the deck of the Alliance. Source: Osservatorio Artico
Scientific cooperation was at the heart of the 2026 campaign. Together with NATO’s Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, the crew carried out maintenance and repositioning of deep-water observation systems (moorings), used to monitor the physical characteristics of Arctic waters over time. With the National Research Council (CNR), Italy’s leading public research body, an autonomous ARGO float was deployed, designed to dive and periodically resurface, transmitting data via satellite. With ENEA, the national agency for new technologies and energy, water samples were collected for the study of radionuclides, repeating observations begun ten years ago. For the fourth consecutive year, the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (National Institute of Health), Italy’s leading public health research body, continued the SeA Care project, dedicated to monitoring contaminants of anthropogenic origin in one of the planet’s most remote marine environments.
Over the program’s ten editions, these collaborations have produced a substantial dataset: 305 CTD profiles (water temperature and salinity), 151 water samples, 33 sediment samples, 32 drifting buoys (drifters), 105 further temperature and salinity probes (XBT/XCTD), 119 sea ice observations and 19 drone surveys, spread across 194 days of activity at sea and more than 12,900 kilometers of sounding track. Added to all this was satellite observation: images from the COSMO-SkyMed constellation, jointly developed by the Italian Space Agency and the Ministry of Defense, were used both to support navigation and to characterize sea ice, closing the loop between remote observation and direct measurement that the Hydrographic Institute identifies as the campaign’s distinguishing feature.
An iceberg at the ice edge, in the area of the Arctic Ocean surveyed by the campaign. Source: Osservatorio Artico
Numbers Worth Sharing
In the 2026 campaign alone, the crew mapped around 5,900 square kilometers of seabed, bringing the total area surveyed across the program’s ten editions since 2017 to more than 31,800 square kilometers, an area larger than Sicily. These are figures that, taken alone, say little, but their value lies elsewhere. In a region where much of the seabed remains, even today, either imprecisely mapped or not mapped at all, every bathymetric survey that is shared publicly, as Italy does through the Norwegian Hydrographic Service, helps close a knowledge gap that matters as much for navigational safety as for understanding the changes under way in the Arctic Ocean. It is a form of cooperation that makes no noise, in the most literal sense of the term, but which, over time, builds a shared database available to anyone who needs it, be they researchers, maritime authorities or other Arctic nations.
With the return to Tromsø, the Italian Navy confirmed its Arctic presence for the next three-year research cycle, 2026–2028, continuing a commitment that has now run uninterrupted for a decade. It is precisely this continuity that distinguishes a scientific program from a one-off initiative, and it is also what has made it possible, over time, to build a relationship of trust with Norway. Tromsø is not merely the starting and finishing point of the campaigns, but the logistical base of an entire cooperation infrastructure, beginning with the link between the Italian Navy’s Hydrographic Institute and the Norwegian Hydrographic Service, which work together on a regular basis within the Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission. It is a form of presence measured in shared data rather than in claims, and one that, in a region increasingly watched by the rest of the world, chooses to make itself noticed through its discretion.
