Arctic team’s fresh data indicates alarming rate of Arctic meltdown
Explorer Hadow returns after months on thin ice and provides fresh data indicating the alarming rate of Arctic meltdown
By Geoffrey Lean, Sunday, 17 May 2009
Pen Hadow is used, figuratively, to living on thin ice. The explorer - the
first person ever to trek alone and unaided to the North Pole - habitually pushes himself far beyond the limits of normal human endurance. But for the past two and a half months he has been on it literally as well.
He and two colleagues - Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley - have been out on the Arctic ice cap in temperatures down to minus 90C, measuring its thickness and finding far less of it beneath their feet than they had been led to believe.
Pen told The Independent on Sunday yesterday: “We have been hunter gatherers for information and it has been fascinating… I have spent nearly 500 days on sea ice over the years. But for the first time I was looking at it and really trying to understand what was going on.”
This is important because, although we know that the ice cap is melting alarmingly quickly, we do not know by how much. Satellite pictures show its extent is shrinking, on average, by an area the size of Scotland each year. But there is also its thickness to consider.
Scientists estimate the ice has thinned by some 40 per cent over the past 30 years, but the only way to be sure is to get out and measure it, which takes people like Hadow.
Safely back in Ottawa yesterday (”I can’t get over the green trees and grass”), he said that after trekking 270 miles (440km) and drilling 1,500 holes in the ice, he and his colleagues, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley, had found only two spots where it was more than 5.2 metres thick, normal for the permanent polar ice cap. The average, he reported, was just 1.774m.
It would be easy to cry havoc and conclude that the ice is melting even more quickly than believed, but Hadow resists the temptation. For there is, as he says, “no simple story”. Though the explorers had been told by scientists that their route would mainly take them over permanent ice, it became clear that they were trekking over water that had frozen only that winter and had probably drifted there from somewhere else. Indeed, it was somewhat thicker than usual for such “first-year ice”, suggesting that this may be a better year.
Stranger still, lack of snow caused the team to abandon the usual practice of anchoring their tent and screw fixings directly into the ice. “During 20 years in the Arctic I have never had to use ice screws before,” he said, “but we had to resort to them almost every night.”
There were some bad moments. One night he was woken at 3.15am as the floe on which they were camped began to break up. (”It makes a shrill, metallic noise and vibrates.”) They barely got off in time. And for nine days they had to subsist on a starvation diet of nuts and chocolate drops when a resupply failed.
Now the information gathered will go for scientific analysis to see what it tells us about the future of the polar ice cap.
Article courtesy of The Independent
Tags: Ann Daniels, cas, Catlin Arctic Survey, Martin Hartley, Pen Hadow
