North Pole trips 'endangered'
2007-10-31 12:54
Oslo - Trips over ice to the North
Pole may be impossible in summer in just a decade or two because
of global warming, one of the world's leading polar adventurers
said on Wednesday.
Norwegian Boerge Ousland, who has skied alone across the
Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic, said he would recommend one
piece of equipment for anyone planning a trek to the North Pole
in a few years' time: a kayak.
"It's a bit strange to think that the trips I have been
doing may not be possible in 10-20 years," he told reporters
after attending a climate seminar in the Norwegian parliament.
"But it may well happen."
That would end just over a century of trips across the ice
- American Robert Peary was the first to claim to reach the
North Pole in 1909.
"Over time I have seen the changes myself," said Ousland,
aged 45, who has been to the North Pole several times.
On a first trip in 1990 the ice was about three metres thick
around the North Pole. "Now it is 30% thinner," he said.
There were also far more and wider gaps in the ice with open
water, requiring risky swims in a special survival suit while
tugging provisions and other gear along in a floating sledge.
The Arctic ice shrank in September 2007 to the smallest on
record, eclipsing a 2005 low, according to U.S. satellite data.
It is now expanding again as winter approaches but many
climate scientists say that the ice could vanish in summer well
before the end of the century because of a build-up of
greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels.
Helicopter to ice
And the summer ice now starts several hundred kilometres
further north than a century ago. Few expeditions can
now begin from Russia's Cape Arkticheskiy, as Ousland did in
1990, because a helicopter ride is needed to reach firm ice.
The receding ice is also revealing new islands.
Ousland and a colleague this year, retracing a 1896 trip by
Norwegian polar hero Fridtjof Nansen, found that an island
called Northbrook Island in the Russian Arctic was in fact two
- melting ice had exposed a channel between them.
They took a photograph of walruses swimming between the two
islands. Polar bears in the region looked thin, forced to eat
nesting seabirds rather than seals, which live on the ice.
Ousland said that even a trip he made with South African
Mike Horn staring in January 2006 - the first winter trek to
the North Pole - revealed gaps in the ice.
"It was a shock to find open ice," he said. "We swam 5-6
times on that expedition because the ice was so thin."