A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.
The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.
“Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.
...[The] latest trek got off to a bad start. The day they set off from Ward Hunt Island, a plane landing near the women hit their gear, punching a hole in Bancroft's sled and damaging one of Arnesen's snowshoes.
They repaired the snowshoe with binding from a ski, but Atwood said the patch job created pressure on Arnesen's left foot, which led to blisters that then turned into frostbite.
Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.
"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was
that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.
She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen's foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.
The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft's 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.
Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.
"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."
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Oh, tricky global warming..! Like our pagan gods of old, we approach thee on bended knee, contrite and frosbite. We fearful supplicants don our body suits and sweat pants, hoping against hope that this time, you shall accept our sacrifice, and bless us with your mercurial bounty.
2 comments:
Climate change: can't live with it, can't live without it.
Temperatures exceeding -100? Presumably that's Fahrenheit; that would be -73 Celsius. That beats the record for the lowest temperature ever recorded in Canada by more than ten degrees C. Something tells me these gals are bullshit artists in more than one respect. But of course intellectual honesty doesn't matter when you are fighting to save the planet from evil man. But it's still a queer figure to make up. I guess you're right that they would only make up such a cold temperature if they wanted both an excuse for personal failure and to prostrate like pagans before the wild and wooly imbalanced world of the gods. God forgive us for the kind of people we let educate children.
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