The Arctic and Its Future
April 2009
Banner photo: © Tim Hibo/Getty Images
Living on Thin Ice
British explorer Pen Hadow is the first man in history to trek solo and unaided to the North Pole. Now, though, he is embarking on a very different expedition. In February he left northern Canada to trek more than 1,000 kilometers to the North Pole, but this time he is traveling with fellow polar explorers Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley, and they will be dragging with them 100-kg sleds laden with equipment to take up to 12 million readings of the depth and density of snow and ice beneath their feet.
Very little is understood about the depth and density of the Arctic sea ice. Hadow's Catlin Arctic Survey hopes to provide the much-needed data about how much ice is left, and so help work out how much time we have to prepare for what is probably the most immediate, truly global threat of climate change.
Measurements of sea ice began in the 1960s, but for three decades there was too little data to be sure what was happening. Since the 1990s, satellite maps have been used to calculate the height of snow and ice above the waterline, but experts have to make assumptions about the roughly five-sixths of mass underneath. Few scientists have the inclination, physical endurance, time and money to do the training necessary to spend months in the Arctic.
Early polar explorations left a trail of graves, men killed by hypothermia, scurvy, gangrene--and for all the advances in modern technology, many risks still remain.
"Some people talk about the Arctic as a monotonous wilderness of white, but if you open your eyes and look at the landscape, especially in spring, you realize that there are no whites whatsoever," says Hadow in his autobiography Solo. "Everything is in shades and tones of pastel colors--cream, grey, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink."
Nor is the Arctic a great flat glass to glide over. Hadow will have to clamber over steep walls of frozen slippery ice rubble which test both his strength and patience.
Then there are the wind and currents, which constantly work on the great floating, constantly changing landscape, grinding ice together, pulling pans apart. Not infrequently travelers have to make huge detours or backtrack over a ridge or rubble field because of an impassable lead, a channel of open water in the ice; occasionally they wake to find they have drifted south of the point they began walking the previous day.
At night, they lie with their heads on the ice and listen to it. "You wouldn't conceive such random movements could produce such metronomic sounds," says Hadow. "It's disconcerting because it tends to be the ice breaking up around your tent. You have to take a view: will this open up and will we be falling in in the morning, or will it be little hairline cracks rather than major fractures?"
And all the time there is the ever-present, grinding cold. In temperatures as low as -50ºC, with windchill that can sink to -90ºC, travelers cannot stop for more than 10 minutes to mend equipment or they start to freeze--mucus dries like gravel in the nose, contact lenses would freeze to eyeballs, and as the temperature drops the human brain begins to slow, making people less responsive to problems.
As they travel across the ice pans, a specially designed radar will take a measurement every 10 cm. The team will also regularly drill cores of snow and ice and take measurements of the ocean temperatures below. The data will be fed back via satellites to scientists every night, and they hope that early results will be available before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December, when the world's governments will be asked to agree on an ambitious treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions and so, it is hoped, reduce global warming and the resulting climate change.
Follow Hadow's progress at www.catlinarcticsurvey.com
This article copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2009
Arctic sunset [© John Rasmussen] 