The Canadian Coast Guard’s largest icebreaker is in St. John’s this week, gearing up for a two-month trip around the North Pole to map the ocean floor.

The Louis S. St-Laurent is preparing to depart early next month to better understand the seafloor and the depths of the waters off Canada’s coast.

Dave Sinnott, who is with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, says there’s still a long way to go before they can fully understand what lies below the surface.

“(We use) a multi-beam echo sounder, and it produces a burst of sound that we resolve into a fan of data on the bottom,” he told reporters.

“When we’re up in the Arctic in, let’s say, 4,000 or 5,000 meters water depth, we can see out 15 to 20 kilometers on either side of the ship. We like to call it mowing the lawn. We record our track of our soundings, and we process that data to make a 3D image at the bottom.”