Main engines:	4 × Sulzer Sulzer (manufacturer) Sulzer Ltd. is a Swiss industrial engineering and manufacturing firm, founded by Salomon Sulzer-Bernet in 1775 and established as Sulzer Brothers Ltd. in 1834 in Winterthur, Switzerland. Today it is a publicly owned company with international subsidiaries...  8ZAL4OS (4 × 4,500 kW)
Auxiliary generators:	4 × Sulzer 6AT25H (4 × 1,270 kW)

The Oden is a large Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 icebreaker

Icebreaker

An icebreaker is a special-purpose ship or boat designed to move and navigate through ice-covered waters. Although the term usually refers to ice-breaking ships, it may also refer to smaller vessels .For a ship to be considered an icebreaker, it requires three traits most...

, built in 1988 for the Swedish Maritime Administration

Swedish Maritime Administration

The Swedish Maritime Administration is the Swedish government agency which provides services to the transport sector by keeping the sea lanes open and safe...

. It is named after the asa god Odin

Odin

Odin is a major god in Norse mythology and the ruler of Asgard. Homologous with the Anglo-Saxon "Wōden" and the Old High German "Wotan", the name is descended from Proto-Germanic "*Wodanaz" or "*Wōđanaz"....

. First built to clear a passage through the ice of the Baltic sea

Baltic Sea

The Baltic Sea is a brackish mediterranean sea located in Northern Europe, from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from 20°E to 26°E longitude. It is bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat by way of the Øresund, the Great Belt and...

 for cargo ships, it was later modified to serve as a research vessel. Equipped with its own helicopter and manned by 15 crew members it has ample capacity to carry laboratory equipment and 80 passengers, functioning independently in harsh Polar ice packs

Polar ice packs

Polar ice packs are large areas of pack ice formed from seawater in the Earth's polar regions, known as polar ice caps: the Arctic ice pack of the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic ice pack of the Southern Ocean, fringing the Antarctic ice sheet. Polar packs significantly change their size during...

 of the Arctic

Arctic

The Arctic is a region located at the northern-most part of the Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, Russia, Greenland, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean, surrounded by treeless permafrost...

 and Antarctic

Antarctic

The Antarctic is the region around the Earth's South Pole, opposite the Arctic region around the North Pole. The Antarctic comprises the continent of Antarctica and the ice shelves, waters and island territories in the Southern Ocean situated south of the Antarctic Convergence...

 seas. It was the first non-nuclear surface vessel to reach the North Pole

North Pole

The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is, subject to the caveats explained below, defined as the point in the northern hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface...

 (in 1991), together with the German research icebreaker RV Polarstern.

The Oden has participated in numerous scientific expeditions in the Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 arctic archipelago. The ship is currently involved in an Antarctic research project.

Expeditions

Oden Antarctic Expedition 2008

From November 25, 2008 to January 12, 2009 researcher Tish Yager and teacher Jeff Peneston as members of an international research team participated in an expedition on board of Oden Icebreaker collecting a range of data in rarely traveled areas of the Antarctic seas and coastline, including the Amundsen and eastern Ross Seas. They studied production and destruction of greenhouse gases and their effects on sea ice microorganisms. The study was designed to allow future researchers to better understand and monitor the Antarctic

Antarctic

The Antarctic is the region around the Earth's South Pole, opposite the Arctic region around the North Pole. The Antarctic comprises the continent of Antarctica and the ice shelves, waters and island territories in the Southern Ocean situated south of the Antarctic Convergence...

 region.

Oden Antarctic Expedition 2007

Lollie Garay a prominent teacher of Earth and Space Science at Redd School in Houston, Texas together with Drs. Robert Sherell and Walker Smith joined a team of international scientists on the Oden icebreaker. Dr. Sherell leading the US science group of the expedition is a professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences and Department of Geological Sciences at Rutgers University. He is well known for conducting research on primary producers and their distribution of trace elements in the water column of the ocean, while Dr. Walker Smith is a professor of Marine Science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who studies the year-to-year changes in the biology, physics, and chemistry of Antarctica's Ross Sea

Ross Sea

The Ross Sea is a deep bay of the Southern Ocean in Antarctica between Victoria Land and Marie Byrd Land.-Description:The Ross Sea was discovered by James Ross in 1841. In the west of the Ross Sea is Ross Island with the Mt. Erebus volcano, in the east Roosevelt Island. The southern part is covered...

. The joint project was a co-operative endeavor between the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to collect a range of data in rarely traveled areas of the Antarctic seas and coastline. On this voyage the international research team studied the oceanography and bio geochemistry of the region, with emphasis on the processes that control the growth and fate of phytoplankton in the ocean.

External links

• Sjöfartsverkets site describing Oden
• Article on Antarctic Research featuring Oden. Science, 19 August 2011.