Saturday, 1st March, 2008

The beginning

As I am writing this I am flying high up above the white plains below, travelling from Ottawa in Canada, to Iqaluit on Baffin Island, where the adventure begins. When I arrive we have two weeks of training there and then we set off to Ellesmere Island, just off the coast of Greenland on our 60-day dogsled expedition.

There are two reasons I’m doing this. The main one is to be part of the small expedition team which will chart the landscape of the coastal areas of Ellesmere to see how fast the environment is changing. The second is to pass on the message to my generation (I’m 23) that we should be more aware of what’s going on, and proactive on the issues of global warming.

I approached Kiss to cover the trip because it reaches millions of people my kind of age. Kiss and I agreed it is the biggest issue of today but also that it can all get a bit technical like some boring science lesson. So we thought it would be cool to do it together, kind of live and as it happens, so we can share the stories as we go along.

Just as we’re all hooked on our favourite music, it would be great to get a few of you hooked on the trip, and what I’m doing. We have some amazing technology (although it has to work in minus 30 and worse!) so I’ll be keeping a blog and will send pictures back to base camp along the way, as well as calling in to Rickie and Melvin some mornings. You can also email me questions and comments which I will hopefully get when weather conditions allow.

globalwarming101.com

- Sam