COLD WAR FOES POOL KNOWLEDGE OF ARCTIC.

Byline: Heather Dewar Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

It was literally a Cold War: for more than 50 years, Russian and American scientists secretly probed the Arctic Ocean, collecting information they'd need if the two countries ever waged submarine warfare under the ice.

Now the information they gathered will be put to peaceful use - unraveling weather mysteries in this country and around the world, shedding light on changes in the Earth's climate and tracking marine pollution.

The freshly declassified maps and measurements, most of them taken by Soviet scientists working under grueling conditions in the Arctic winter, represent ``a virtual time machine record'' of weather patterns that affect the entire planet, Vice President Al Gore said last week.

Gore spearheaded the project that involved the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Naval Intelligence and their Russian counterparts. After seven years' work, the two countries' oceanographic research has been purged of military secrets, pooled and made public.

``Quite possibly, we might find new answers to profound questions about the nature of our planet and its future,'' Gore said, as the first of four sets of scientific data was unveiled at the National Geographic Society.

Among the questions that scientists will be asking:

Do the temperature changes that periodically sweep across Arctic waters affect the world's weather as powerfully as ``El Nino,'' the Pacific version of the same phenomenon? If so, can forecasters use the Arctic changes to do a better job of protecting people and crops?

How does cold Arctic water help keep the Earth from overheating, and what would happen to our planet's climate if the polar oceans warmed up?

And what has become of Soviet-era nuclear wastes that were dumped willy-nilly into the Arctic? Do they pose any threat to people or the fish we eat?

The information released won't immediately answer any of those questions, said James Baker, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). However, he said it would help flesh out and verify scientists' research, especially on global warming.

Global warming was the last thing on the minds of researchers who began probing the Arctic in 1937, when Soviet scientists spent nine months living in an eiderdown tent on a drifting ice floe. The researchers collected information on water temperatures, ice thickness, currents and bottom sediments, until their floating home began to melt and they had to be rescued by a Soviet ship.

Early researchers were mostly interested in information that would benefit commercial shipping. But during the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union viewed the Arctic as ``one of the key potential battlegrounds for a coming world war'' - a war waged by nuclear submarines hunting one another beneath the polar ice while they aimed their missiles at the enemy's cities, Gore said.

To fight such a war, their navies needed detailed maps of the sea floor, as well as information on currents, weather, water temperatures, salt levels and anything else that could affect the subs' sophisticated gear.

The information is important, Baker said, because the ocean plays a major role in balancing Earth's temperatures. Cold Arctic water is a crucial part of the process.

More than three-fourths of the world's sea water passes through chilling zones in the Arctic and Antarctic, he said, and elusive Arctic phenomena known as ``chimneys'' periodically bring gushers of cold water to the surface.

Even slight increases in the world's water temperature could disrupt these poorly understood processes. ``The effects on Earth's climate could be huge,'' Baker said.

Scientists at the Arctic Longterm Ecological Research Station in Toolik, Alaska say they have detected signs of warming on the Arctic land mass. However, no signs of warming have been found in the polar ocean, Baker said, ``and we don't know why not.''

The 50-year-long record of Arctic water temperatures could show whether such changes have already begun and help assess their impact.

The records will also help scientists check the effects of Soviet nuclear waste-dumping in the Arctic, said Adm. Paul G. Gaffney II, the chief of naval research. Western scientists estimate the dumped material contains 2.5 million curies of radiation - almost as large as the radiation released by the August 1945 atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, though far more diluted and dispersed.

``Our initial thought is that there's not any substantial leakage, and if there is any leakage the insult is confined to a local area,'' Gaffney said.

Details on Russian nuclear dumping were not included in the data-sharing, the Americans said.

The information is being released on a CD-ROM disk as the Arctic Ocean Atlas, with new installments due out through 1998. An overview of the joint Russian-American project and samples of the data are available on the World Wide Web, Gore said, at http://ns.noaa.gov/atlas.