One Day After Another

Published on 05.06.2007 - The Arctic Arc

Zero visibility

Today, more than yesterday but less than tomorrow, the difficulties are increasing during the end of this expedition. Alain and Dixie are having fun...

In order to know what happened on the expedition's trajectory yesterday, you need to refer back to the previous report and spice it up a little... Take the compressions and multiply them in number and in height, remove a couple of flat ice zones, reduce the surface of those that they encountered yesterday, cover the sky with clouds and hide the sun, reduce a little more the visibility and tell the whiteout to settle in over the sea ice.

We have understood: yesterday Monday June 4th was, once again, one of the most difficult days of the entire adventure. But instead of getting into a bad mood, which would have been understood considering the circumstances, Alain and Dixie are merrier than ever and they even manage to laugh about their own destiny in order to relax a little. "We are being dogged by ill fortune", explained Alain by satellite telephone yesterday evening around 10 30 pm. "But what can we do guys? Most of the day, during the first nine hours of progression, we fortunately had very few leads to cross. We thought to ourselves: what luck, we won't see any water today. Well no, we were wrong. Around 5 pm, we suddenly fell onto an ice sheet which was completely covered with cracks. There were leads everywhere, we had to cross three leads by turning our sledges into a catamaran. What can we do when we are faced with so many obstacles? Nothing except walk a little longer. Yesterday we worked 11 hours but we only progressed 10 km! Thank goodness our sledges only weigh a little more than seventy kilos now..."

The Website of the Day

On the front page of our daily website is published an article entitled "Melting Arctic Sea Ice Threatens Polar Bears", written by Crystal Davis on January 8th, 2007, and published by EarthTrends Environmental Information, the World Resources Institute gateway to information concerning the environment. Just like most of the other articles, it accentuates the speed at which the ice is melting (9% of the sea ice by decade) and the danger that this melt will cause to the survival of polar bears.

On December 28th, 2006, Felicity Barringer and Andrew C. Revkin had written in the columns if the International Herald Tribune an article on the same subject: "Melting Arctic Ice Pushes Polar Bear Population to the Edge". We learn that in 2005, a group of three American environmentalist associations (comprising of Greenpeace) had taken the American Interior Department to court to force it to add polar bears to the list of endangered species. This attempt turned out to be unsuccessful.