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Polar Explorers Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen send daily dispatches during their unprecedented four-month journey to the North Pole and back. The expedition team will pull and paddle specially modified canoes across nearly 1,000 miles of shifting sea ice and open ocean. Their objective is to complete the first ever summer expedition to the North Pole and to highlight the growing issues surrounding global warming.
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Life on the Ice


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Perspective

May 23, 2006
cloudy, 24 F, 8 nautical miles
Often when travel becomes really difficult and a clear route through the pressured ice is difficult to find, we unhook from our sled-canoes and climb a nearby chunk of ice. Five or six feet of elevation later, a fairly navigable route usually appears. Perspective.

Yesterday, we were on some of the largest flattest pans we have seen, today some of the smallest. They were pushed into, rafted on top of, or bent against one another creating yet another jumbled mess. We liken our pace in these conditions to a race between a snail and a tortoise.

Still, we made 8 nautical miles - a distance neither of us guessed. Taken day by day our mileages seem insignificant compared to the nearly 1,000 total we have to travel. So we rein in our minds to today, this step, this hour.

Perspective is a funny thing out here: An ice chunk looks huge from afar, distance can be hard to judge, our route, it's all relative to one thing or other. The key for us is to know when to live in the moment and when to take a step back.

We saw a lone trail of fox tracks trotting off to our east... wonder where his big buddy is? Though we have not seen a bear yet, we know they're not far away. There are 23,000 polar bears in the Arctic, a relatively small number considering the vastness of their domain. But as early as 2050 most of them will be gone from lack of sea ice if we do not stop global warming now.

Please click on the 'What You Can Do' section to help protect the polar bear and get them listed as an officially threatened species. Learn what you can do to stop global warming.

Word of the day: pellucid - the sky has not been this for a very, very long time.

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