The Arctic-Arc: They reached the North Pole !
The North Pole - Copyright: Arctic Arc / International Polar Foundation
© International Polar Foundation
After many days of progress in very hard conditions, Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer finally reached the North Pole ! And even though they faced recurrent storms, howling winds and opaque mists, what impressed them was the unusually "wet" environment in which they found themselves: the pack ice is melting.
One day of bad weather followed another. Storms, thick fog and winds, nothing was spared them. Our two explorers are still asking themselves how they could have progressed so quickly in such difficult conditions.
The only perfect day was the one preceding the day they reached the Pole : "there was sunshine and a blue sky ! It was terrific," explained Alain Hubert, "to see the sea ice lit up as such by the sun rays. Furthermore, being that the temperatures have really risen over the past few days, we spent a truly memorable day. The ice, for its part, was also a whole lot better: all the leads (Ndlr: channels of open water) were frozen, which allowed us to progress, without tiring ourselves out, 22 km in nine and a half hours..."
Both explorers were happy, and confident they would easily cover the next day's last 20 kilometers separating them from the Pole.... Things happened quite differently : it was hell ! "I really don't understand anything anymore," explained Hubert on the satellite phone, "yesterday's landscape was turned completely upside down, there was water everywhere again. Endless leads, icy areas we were unable to bypass, extremely dangerous passages, zones of no horizon. We had to turn around and go back several times, it was one of our most difficult days."
After 13 hours of fight, they finally reached the mythical North Pole ! Since the beginning of the "Arctic Arc" expedition, Alain and Dixie have already progressed 930 km in 54 days, with a daily average of 17.2 kilometres per day (without taking the drifts into account). But they still have more than 3200 kilometres to go before reaching Greenland's southernmost point.
Despite all the difficulties they encountered to get there, one of the things that most impressed Alain and Dixie is that sea ice is melting everywhere, even near the North Pole ! "There is water everywhere", said Alain, "we must constantly cross leads, either by finding pathways or by turning our sledges into catamarans. This is probably due to the fact that temperatures have become quite milder these past few days, -18°C yesterday morning and -11°C yesterday evening."
Such "wet" conditions are surprising at this latitude. "What I do not understand", explained Alain a few days before, "is all the young ice which has made us suffer today. [...] We are confronted with a kind of terrain - a sort of swamp - which we are not used to seeing over on this part of the sea ice. Normally, here, the ice is older and more stable. But this time, it's dislocated and cracked open by water leads, as though everything had been disrupted. It really was hell, the real Arctic ... the one we fear, but also the one we came here to find ."
