The Team
The expedition team is made up of five young explorers, including myself, and Will Steger. Will is a pioneer in arctic and Antarctic exploration. He has travelled these regions for over forty years and has seen massive changes over that time.
I did a much shorter trip to the Arctic with Will 18 months ago and it was pretty life changing. One of the hardest parts to these trips is dealing with the extreme cold. But we also had run ins with polar bears, crashed through ice which was thinner than we had bargained for, and some poignant moments like when we identified some strange black sludge as diesel soot fumes from boats working nearby, which was melting the ice even faster.
You can also check out the reports on my blog - let me know what you think.
Picture Courtesy of Nasa
Ellesmere Island
The ice shelves on Ellesmere haven’t been observed since the last expedition passed through in the 1920’s. We are going to be looking through the diaries of those past explorers, taking archive photos with us and charting the changes we see. Stuff like the size of glaciers - how much have they changed?, the positioning of ice shelves - how fast are they moving and what does it mean for us back home?, explorer routes which perhaps are impassable now but which last time had enough ice to travel over - how fast is it all melting?
One major stopping point will be the Isle’s ice shelf, which has already broke n off from the very north of Ellesmere and split into two pieces. It then floated south and settled either side of an island called Amund Ringnes island, hundreds of miles from where it started.
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