The Last Days of the Expedition
Published on 11.06.2007 - The Arctic Arc
A final rush for the two men. With a superb view of snowy mountains before them and only 47 km left to cover, they are now definitely approaching the coast.
"The ice is still moving a little but it is mostly stable since we are now progressing on old ice. The terrain has been good since yesterday, we even came across some flat land. There was still lots of water, of course, and there were abundant leads along our way but, overall, it went well. We are following our instinct, bypassing the obstacles. Today we found quite rapidly some good paths. That's why we progressed quickly and that we managed to progress 22 km! It is true that visibility was excellent, just as yesterday, and that it helped a lot. There was also a little wind coming in from the Northeast which pleasantly cooled the temperatures down. When it is 1°C as it was today, it's already too hot for the efforts we have to make. Our feet feel like they are in a sauna, and since we can't do any laundry..."
Happy and relieved from the stress that the bad ice conditions have prompted over the past few days, Alain Hubert is now finally optimistic. He knows that, within a couple of days (two, three or four days), they will reach the Greenland coast. There they will calmly await the Canadian Twin Otter which will fly in from Resolute Bay to pick them up.
The Website if the Day
Today, we will zoom in on a map of the renown Nasa Earth Observatory, entitled: "Record Low for June Arctic Sea Ice". It shows the unusually low Arctic sea ice concentration (the amount of ice in a given area) during the month of June 2005. It comments that, since September 2002 (September being the month during which the sea ice concentration is of course the lowest), sea ice extent is dramatically decreasing. For example, in 2002, a new record-low was set at 15% below average.
