Dixie pulling the sled
Open water. Towering ice blocks. Ragged crevasses. Shifting floes.
Two Belgium explorers struggling toward Greenland on an expedition to measure snow depths across the Arctic Ocean have stumbled into hellish conditions within the Ultima Thule of the Far North. But they keep trudging forward.
Since leaving the North Pole on April 26 on a 500-mile traverse toward land, Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer have been crossing what may be most inaccessible and least visited territory on Earth.
“The blocks we are encountering can measure anything up to three or four metres (10-13ft) high!” Hubert said in a May 24 dispatch by satellite phone. “And Dixie, who was pushing from the back would begin to shout and coax with each effort, as though he were driving a beast of burden with me being the beast up in front who had to obey each injunction.”
The explorers have fallen behind schedule. Their technical team has consulted satellite images and advised them to alter their route more to the east as a way to cut almost 200 miles from their route. Unless they can move faster, they will not reach shorefast ice rimming Greenland.
The two men reached the North Pole on April 24, after traveling on foot from the remote north coast of Siberia almost 578 miles in 54 days. Two days later, they began the second leg — a 500-mile travese toward Greenland.
The latest dispatch:
Since then, they have been advancing in far tougher conditions than before: storms, days of complete white out, water and depression zones hidden by the fresh fallen snow, channels of open water, labyrinths of ice blocs several metres high to climb, etc.
The fact that they had to haul their sledges on foot during 18 days without being able to put on their skis even once allows us to imagine the bad quality of the terrain. Alain described one of these dreadful days over the satphone:
“… If I hadn’t already repeated this over and over again, I would say that today was one of the worst and most tiring days of the entire expedition, and we have had quite a few! But is there any point in repeating this…?”
After leaving Severnaya Zemlya off Siberia at the end of February, the two men averaged almost 11 miles per day on the first leg of The Arctic Arc. The original goal was to reach southern tip of Greenland before the end of June, an unprecedented Arctic journey of 2,700 miles.
The Belgium traverse over the pole is among several Far North expeditions underway this spring connected to the International Polar Foundation, many focused on gathering insight into how global warming and shifting climate has begun to change life for people, animals and ice in the Arctic.
People will be skiing, walking, traveling by dog team, visiting villages, gauging how the cryosphere has changed. Most of these trips provide extensive on-line portals into their daily challenges, with features aimed at school children, satellite phone dispatches and photographs, and occasional live feeds.
Eight different endeavors link to the IPF’s Polar Expeditions website, including a French schooner drifting (on purpose) in the pack ice and a 2008 mission to measure ice thickness by flying over the pole in a zeppelin.