Hartford lost the Whalers (the Whale!), but at least the Connecticut city has a cool Los Angeles Class fast attack nuclear submarine named after it.

And if you think the USS Hartford is a vessel that can only navigate the unfrozen waters of the globe, well, you’d be seriously mistaken, because in the following aerial and otherwise footage (which is seriously tremendous and striking stuff — and we’re not just saying that) you can see the dark underwater beast of a machine pierce through the ice of the Arctic Circle like, as the military blog Foxtrot Alpha so aptly put it, “like the earth is hatching a nuclear submarine”.

It’s amazing:

It’s also cool to see the Navy submariners clear off the broken ice from the top of the sail in much the same way you would clean off the top of your station wagon in your driveway after a big snowstorm in the burbs.

More from FA:

The Hartford surfaced near the Navy’s newly-constructed ice camp dubbed “Camp Sargo.” The camp is named after the first U.S. Navy submarine to conduct a Bering Strait transit during the winter years some 56 years ago. The camp consists of a command center, cold-weather shelters and other basic infrastructure to support more than 70 personnel at a time.

All this is part of Ice Exercise (ICEX) 2016, a set of international drills that the Navy intends to use for scientific research, test and evaluation of operational capabilities tailored to the arctic region. A similar submarine, the USS Hampton, also surfaced nearby as part of the exercise. It will last five weeks.