During February 1983, we carried out a field study in the Bering Sea on the nature of ice floe collisions and their relation to ice deformation. In the study we deployed on selected ice floes four radar-tracked buoys, three of which contained triaxial accelerometers. These buoys were initially located in compact ice at a distance of about 100 km from the ice edge, with the separations between pairs of floes ranging from 300 m to 5 km. The buoys then drifted out toward the ice edge at a rate of about 0.5 km h-1, with the acceleration data being telemetered to an adjacent ship. The ice motion divided into two parts: an initial solid body translation with no relative buoy displacement, followed by a rapid transition to a period in which the buoy separations underwent large excursions. Examination of the accelerometer records shows two major collisions which were correlated with the large-scale ice deformation and hundreds of small collisions which recurred at the ocean swell period. The first major collision occurred at the onset of ice deformation; the second occurred when two floes which had been diverging started to converge. The periodic collisions began following the major collisions; their magnitude depended on the local ice compactness and the size of the ocean swell amplitude. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1988