Exploring the North Pole by Airship
Credit: Jean-Louis Etienne
A French polar explorer plans to survey the Arctic Ocean’s ice cap in a helium-filled airship that will sail back and forth over the North Pole — cruising 6,000 miles between Spitsbergen, Siberia and the Canadian Arctic before finally landing in Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s north coast.
Led by physician Jean-Louis Etienne — the first person to reach the North Pole alone on foot — the Total Pole Airship expedition will launch in March, 2008, with four crew members tucked inside the 177-foot-long zeppelin and an extensive support crew on the ground.
“My next expedition will be to cross the glacial Arctic Ocean in an airship … to draw the public’s attention to the phenomena that threaten this fascinating polar world that still inspires so many childhood dreams,” Etienne said in a statement on his website.
“Taking up the flame passed on by the early polar explorers, we will be bringing back from our modern scientific adventure details of the thickness of the sea ice that covers the ocean at the North Pole, a key piece in our Earth’s climate balance that is now under threat.”
Using a special electromagnetic sensor suspended in the air beneath the airship, the expedition will create the very first “continual profile of ice thickness in the Arctic, extending from the Canadian coast across the North Pole to Siberia,” according to a release by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany’s polar studies institute and a major sponsor of the expedition. French oil company Total is also a sponsor.
The sensor, called an EM-Bird, was developed Dr. Christian Haas of the Wegener institute. Suspended about 60 feet above the ice from the airship, the device will measure the ice surface with a laser altimeter, and then detect the ice bottom with a low-frequency beam. The difference between the two readings gives the ice thickness.
Helicopter testing EM-Bird
Testing the tester
Between April 13 and 27 this year, a team of scientists will calibrate and test the EM-Bird at the Russian ice station Borneo, near the North Pole. They will use a remote-operated sub to go under the ice, heated tents on top to house electronics and other instruments, and a helicopter to haul the sensor around above the pack.
By flying the sensor over a pressure ridge and other places with uneven ice, then comparing the actual depths to the recorded depth, the scientists hope to tune the device and get a fix on its margin or error.
Etienne’s team has created an extensive educational website, with links for kids, charts, photos and messages from the scientists and technicians traveling to the North Pole this week.
Polar explorer
Etienne knows the frozen world well, though rarely from such an elevated vantage. In 1986, he became the first person to ski solo to the pole in a grueling feat of endurance, and three years later, he joined Will Steger’s Trans-Antarctic expedition to become the first group to cross the southern-most continent on foot.
Only four winters ago, Etienne and his dog Lynet were dropped off at the North Pole by helicopter and then spent months living inside a 9-cubic meter capsule that drifted for months on ice floes while taking measurements of the drift.
This new project will help answer fundamental questions about the fast-shrinking ice cap. Figuring out whether the total mass of Arctic sea ice has been increasing or decreasing may be one of the key research questions of International Polar Year, what one snow-and-ice researcher once called “the holy grail” of climate science.
“There is almost no information about regional distribution of ice thickness in the Arctic and Antarctic”, explains Dr Christian Haas, geophysicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, in a release. “This lack of knowledge is a consequence of major methodological problems associated with measuring ice floes of only several metres thickness, and of the logistical difficulties of venturing into the central Arctic.”
But for all its scientific significance, the expedition echoes themes and techniques from the heroic age of polar exploration.
In 1926, Roald Amundsen and his crew flew the dirigible Norge from Spitsbergen across the pole to Alaska, ultimately landing near Teller on the Seward Peninsula. Two years later, explorer George Hubert Wilkins and Alaska pioneer aviator Carl Ben Eielsen flew from Barrow to Spitsbergen in a Lockheed Vega over uncharted terrain in what many say was the greatest feat of aviation navigation accomplished to that date.
Weeks later, the Italian Umberto Nobile (who served as Amundsen’s pilot) crashed the dirigible Italia two days out of Spitsbergen. Six men were lost when the airframe was swept away, and Amundsen disappeared during an attempt to rescue the survivors.
Move ahead 80 years. Etienne’s airship will launch from Paris in March, 2008, then fly across Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden to reach Tromsoe, Norway, at the northern-most tip of Europe.
It will then set sail over the treacherous Barents Sea, flying more than 600 miles over frigid ocean littered with floes, to reach the final launch site at Spitsbergen. Etienne calls it “one of the most delicate stages of the expedition” that requires a southern wind and non-stop travel.
Airship travel routes
After final preparations, the zeppelin will leave with the EM-Bird slung below and begin taking measurements of the ice as soon as it leaves shore. The airship will visit a depot near the pole, Russia’s remote Station Borneo, travel to Siberia, and also fly over the Magnetic North Pole in the Canadian islands northeast of Alaska.
After taking two circuits over the Beaufort Sea, it will sail ashore and land at Prudhoe Bay, home of Alaska’s North Slope oil field.
“The resulting data set will permit comparisons with previous measurements and can serve as a reference for future campaigns,” the Wegener Institute stated in a release. “A continual ice thickness profile, extending from the Canadian coast across the North Pole to the Siberian Arctic, will be the unparalleled first-time product of the expedition.”
When it’s all over, the airship will need to return to Europe (Sorry Alaskans.)
“The method of return of the airship will depend on the experience gained during the expedition and the technical capabilities of the craft,” Etienne said on his website. “The airship will either be dismantled in Alaska and shipped home in containers or flown home to France under its own power.”