The lessons to be learned on each expedition is that there is suspense and then a rush. It is like being a surgeon in the operating room — you may have a quiet night but can’t wonder off too far just in case something happens and then when it does happen you are scrambling to […]
If there needs to be something on your bucket list that you haven’t thought of it has to be a visit to KSAT satellite station in Svalbard. First, you will be blown away by the views of Spitsbergen on the drive to the top and once up there you think you landed on another planet. […]
Luggage finally arrived at 5 p.m. and immediately we started frantically cutting our bars, cheese, chocolate and putting it into our 75 bags for our lunches on the ice. What a job, the three of us in a tiny kitchen of Mary-Ann Pollariggen but now it is done and stored in our sleds. We still […]
22 hours ago: Coordinates: 89º44’N, 065º47’E. Weather: clear sky with slight haze, northern wind 8m/sec, and temperature -36ºС. It is cold at the North Pole - the arctic has returned. The drift of the ice camp where we are flying to on Saturday is fast so we would like to get dropped off at the […]
De afgelopen dagen was ik op een conferentie in Banff met wetenschappers van de ESA en NASA. De conferentie ging over de CryoSat satelliet en de arctische campagnes die wetenschappers komende maanden uitvoeren. Verschillende Universiteiten bundelen hun kennis en financiële middelen om de satellieten te kunnen afstellen met metingen op het ijs. Deze ingewikkelde logistiek […]
Shouldn’t I be pulling a sled instead of paddling it? Just because the conditions in the Arctic are unusual this year and preparing for the worst case scenario, I dragged my sled to the Elk River today and took it for a paddle. The swirly and fast moving water made me nervous and since it […]
There are a couple different ways to come at the problem of climate change—you can focus on eliminating the cause, or on mitigating the symptoms. The latter approach includes obvious things like preventing flooding from rising sea levels. But it also ranges into “geoengineering” schemes as radical as injecting sunlight-reflecting aerosol droplets into the […]
Ranking Major Fossil Fuel Companies on Climate Deception, Disclosure, and Action (2016) An in-depth analysis of eight leading fossil fuel companies finds that none of them has made a clean break from disinformation on climate science and policy. Major fossil fuel producers bear a particular responsibility for climate change. Their products cause a buildup of […]
We’ve reached peak bottled water. From today, for a sweet £80, Harrods will sell ‘luxury water’ harvested from icebergs off the coast of Svalbard. Svalbarði is the brainchild of Jamal Qureshi, a Norwegian-American Wall Street businessman who visited the archipelago in 2013, and returned with melted iceberg water as a gift for his wife. He […]
Things are heating up in the Arctic, yet again, this week, as one storm has already caused temperatures near the North Pole to spike by nearly 30C on Wednesday, and even more heat is on the way in the days to come as they will be approaching the freezing mark. That may not seem like […]
