What’s it like in the Arctic?

May 6, 2008 by Lei.

It might not come to many people’s mind that Arctic is an ocean, not a land. So when we talk about traveling “on land” in the Arctic, we mean traveling on a piece of ice. The piece of ice can be big, can be small. Ice can break and can melt. Since the ice is on the ocean, it does not stay still. It drifts with current and wind. You can never (easily) stand on the “same” point on ice.

To start the trip, we first flew from Longyearbyen to Ice Camp Barneo on a Russian jet Antonov AN-74. It is not as big as the Ilyushin 76 that we used in Antarctica, and does not require solid blue ice runway, which is not possible to build in the Arctic.

Ice Camp Barneo is just a campsite with a few tents on a big piece of ice. There we caught a flight on a helicopter to fly to the start of our ski trip. It was built in late March on 89 degrees, but has drifted to 88 degrees when we flew in mid April. Because of global warming, there were not a reliable multi-year ice to build the camp on, so it was built on a piece of young one year old ice. When we finished the trip in late April, a big crack showed up near the runway, as you could see in the following picture. It takes a lot of guts for a pilot to land a plane on a piece of broken ice!

Though we say this is a ski trip, it is not the kind of skiing most people have in mind. First of all, when you pull a sled of 100 pounds behind you, the maximum speed you could ski is just about a normal walking pace even if the surface is perfectly smooth. Besides that, you often have to travel on a far-less-than-perfect surface. Because the apparent “peaceful” ice we were traveling on was actually floating on the giant ocean. The powerful force of the ocean current often pushes ice in all directions. When two pieces of ice were pushed against each other, the ice crashed into small mountains of ice rubbles, thus forming what we call “pressure ridges”. To get over pressure ridges, it takes a lot of team work where we help each other by passing on or pushing over the sleds.

Besides pressure ridges, we also crossed leads of various sizes from time to time. A lead is a piece of open water that breaks the ice. If the lead is small, we could just leap over. When it is big, we would have to take hours to detour or search for routes to hop over the ice “islands”. This year, we ran into a series of giant lakes that clearly is a product of global warming:

These lakes cost us a couple days of no progress, and it was where our teammate Brian Jones fell in to above waist line. In his honor, we named this lake “Lake Jones”.

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