Now to the Arctic, the North Pole and The Expedition

So now 'we all' have a common understanding of the Poles and their differences, I'll focus this Post on the specifics of the North Pole and Arctic Ocean, as they relate to our expedition.....

So the Arctic Ocean is this huge ocean covering the northern 'cap' of the earth from virtually the 70 degree North parallel right up to the North Pole (Greenland, and to a lesser extent the Canadian Arctic Islands)make an intrusion spoiling this otherwise perfect Northern earth cap, 'made of ocean'. Because it is largely frozen over, many people tend not to think of it as a mass of water, with all the tides, winds, currents and unpredictability of any other of the major oceans, but it is!

At its deepest the Arctic Ocean is ...The Arctic Ocean over 1000 m deep and is continuously covered with drifting polar pack ice whose thickness varies between 1-10 m, although pressure ridges maybe three times that size. About one third of the Arctic Ocean is shallow, i.e. continental shelf. Over these shelf areas, ice is absent at least part of the year, but ice is found year-round over the deep ocean. This icepack is surrounded by open seas during the summer, but more than doubles in size during the winter and extends to the encircling continents.

Because of its donut shape and the plethora of channels and connections to other major oceans the Arctic Ocean has a relatively complex and dynamic system of currents. This is shown below:

From the map hopefully you can see that we will be taking the 'Beaufort Gyre' virtually head on...hmmm, I think that means less sleep and more walking!

In conjunction with the currents, the floor of the Arctic Ocean is divided by three submarine ridges—Alpha Ridge, Lomonosov Ridge, and the Arctic Mid-Oceanic Ridge, and these ridges have a huge impacts on the flow of currents. Basically, the ice shelf if the thinnest and most prone to early breaking up above these ridges. On the expedition we will cross or get very close to the Lomonosov ridge and will feel its impact on the ice conditions.

All this paints a picture of very dynamic, frozen environment, almost a contradiction in that how can it be frozen and changing so much? Well, the answer lies in leads and pressure ridges. Leads are open water 'channels' where the ice layer has cracked and broken into two or more smaller ice plates, probably due to currents underneath. These then get pushed apart by the wind and currents, leaving a 'Lead' or water canal between them. Depending on the width of the canal, and the strength of the current running in it these leads can pose huge challenges to us the expeditioner. Pressure ridges on the other hand, are formed by two or more relatively fast moving packs of ice colliding pretty violently into each other with great momentum causing fracturing, buckling and sometimes one sheet to be forced under the other. This leaves a pile of collision debris that can tower above the insignificant expeditioner, and provide a huge barrier to straight line progress! I can't wait to see my first and my largest pressure ridge, and then probably hope those are the only two I ever see again!

Because it has all this sea ice which is very susceptible to temperature change, climate change is another variable affecting this unique ocean, more than any other. There is some evidence that the Arctic sea-ice cover has decreased about 6% during the last two decades, and that the mean ice thickness has decreased as well. It is thus an environment undergoing huge change and this alone makes our expedition full of new unlike any other before! Richard Weber, who has been to the Pole some 5 times, and more than anyone else, told me that each year he has noticed a deterioration in the weather and ice conditions. Meaning that the ice is more broken up earlier in the year. I have heard a view that says by 2015 it will be impossible to attempt what we are trying to do because there will just be too much open water.


One of the other challenges this Arctic Ocean will throw at us is a phenomena called drift. Most of the time we will be travelling on what feels like terra firma, thick hard ice, however given what I have described above this ice is just one of the many fractured ice plates that is drifting with the wind and currents. Mostly this won't be obvious, but setting up camp for the night, and then waking after a possibly noisy night's sleep will confirm that it is indeed drifting! An early morning, nervous check on the GPS will tell us the good or bad news: We have either had a free ride to the Pole, or some of the progress of the previous day, and in the worst case all of it, has been wiped out by southerly drift!

Lastly, I have painted this picture of the Arctic Ocean being this 'cauldron' of drifting, cracking, bashing, drifting and melting ice, subject to the control of the winds and currents, but what happens at the cauldron edges? This is what the first few days of the expedition will be about....:

We will be leaving from a point considered the last and most northerly land point in Canada an island called Ward Hunt Island. Being an island 'off Canada' that definition is not exactly true, however because the Arctic Ocean is totally frozen in this area, the island is firmly connected to the mainland by a solid ice shelf giving it this sort of mainland status. If you think we are cheating, well in the purest sense maybe, but history and the Polar expedition record books have accepted this point as the official last landpoint!

This mainland connected ice called the ice shelf extends out into the Arctic Ocean and has a totally different feel to the cauldron ice. With climate change these extended land shelves are under threat, sometimes allowing the ocean to 'claim the ocean back'.

This extract from Canadian Ice Service brings the point close to home: "In July 2008 two ice islands calved from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf. A chunk of ice approximately 4x2KM broke off to the northwest of the unstable section of the ice shelf. A second larger calving came from within the unstable section between two large fractures and produced an ice island that is 7x2km in size. It is very possible that more of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf will calve before this summer is over."

When one adds the extreme cold, every threatening storms and high winds to the above picture of the Arctic, it's not difficult to see why 'they say' going from Canada to the North Pole is probably "The hardest natural challenge on the earth".

With that I better head off to the loo....