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Get ready to swim to the North Pole and scale Mont Verde
11:18 a.m. EST Jan 30, 2004
In later years, North Pole expeditions have started a new trend in Arctic travel; swimming to the North Pole. The increasingly larger areas of open water between ice floes now force unsupported Arctic skiers to take to the waters in dry suits, in order to make it to the pole before their supplies run out. Whilst early Arctic explorers sledded to the North Pole and back worrying mainly about ice ridges and rubble, modern explorers have had to adapt to a new obstacle - huge, open water leads.
Swimming in ice cold floes of rapidly moving waters and semi frozen ice poses terror of its own. But we've had no choice - not only global warming researchers, but also local Arctic weathermen and wilderness pilots alert Arctic expeditions about larger amounts of water these days. Each year explorers up north have been greeted with the same welcoming words: "It's impossible this year".
Now the warming is also affecting our mountains. And fast. In fact, only a few decades from now we'll be paddling to the North Pole and scaling green Seven Summits. Janet Larsen from The Earth Policy Institute in Washington reports that by 2020, the snows of Kilimanjaro may exist only in old photographs:
"By mid-century, the Arctic Sea may be completely ice-free during summertime. On Mount Everest, the glacier that ended at the base camp of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, has retreated 5 kilometers (3 miles) since their 1953 ascent. In northern Andes the entire Quelccaya Ice Cap that stretches across Peru could vanish over the next two decades.
Major sections of glaciers covering the Alps and the French and Spanish Pyrenees could be gone in the next few decades. The United Nations Environment Programme is warning that for this region long associated with ice and snow, warming temperatures signify the demise of a popular ski industry, not to mention it's identity!
The glaciers in Montana's Glacier National Park could disappear by 2030. Antarctica shrinks too - the Larsen Ice Shelf has shrunk to 40 percent of its previously stable size. Greenland too - the Jakobshavn Glacier on the island's southwest coast is now thinning four times faster than during most of the twentieth century.
As the earth's temperature has risen in recent decades, the earth's ice cover has begun to melt. And that melting is accelerating. In both 2002 and 2003, the Northern Hemisphere registered record-low sea ice cover. New satellite data show the Arctic region warming more during the 1990s than during the 1980s, with Arctic Sea ice now melting by up to 15 percent per decade. The long-sought Northwest Passage, a dream of early explorers, could become our nightmare, altering ocean circulation patterns and trigger changes in global climate patterns."
Janet offers no firm solution to the problem, although she ends her report: "During this century, global temperature may rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius, and melting will accelerate further. Just how much will depend in part on the energy policy choices made today."
Image of a North Pole swim, ExplorersWeb files.
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