First built to clear a passage through the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia for cargo ships, it was later modified to serve as a research vessel.

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.

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.

[6] There was a controversy that Oden was not assisting the shipping in Swedish waters, which had problems in the unusually cold winter.

[10] In 2016 Oden accompanied CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent on an undersea mapping expedition to the Canadian Arctic.