Greenland ahoy!
Published on 02.06.2009 - General Info
Hedrich and Tortel are finally nearing the coast of Greenland. According to Arnaud, they have really experienced the global warming everyone is talking about.
Of course, the expedition is far from over because Hedrich still has to travel to the South Pole and once he sets foot on Antarctica, he then needs to make it all the way to the mythical bottom of the world. But for the time being, the two men have managed to overcome the torments of the Arctic sea-ice and carve a way across the compression zones on their way to sighting the Greenland coast. Which is an amazing performance in itself. All the more so because they have not been backed up by any logistics team (apart from the route planner) and have managed to complete the trek from the North Pole to Greenland entirely unsupported. Which is a first in itself.
It has to be said that at no point has progress been easy. Arnaud wrote on 31st May: "Everything is constantly moving, the sea-ice is forever cracking under our feet and all around us... Yesterday, we travelled through the roar of 1-to-2-ton compression ridges crunching against and on top of one another. It created quite an atmosphere, I can tell you!!!"
The same day, Tortel added an interesting comment about the overall appreciation the two men have gained over the past six or seven weeks: "If we were to summarise this expedition, I would point out two important things: 1/ The Earth really is warming up... 2/ The climate is becoming incredibly unstable. With depressions on top of depressions, violent winds, powdery snow, temperatures that are too varied, and so on. What's going on is really amazing. In a word, we are seeing a real change!"
By 31st May, they were just 72 km from Cape Morris Jesup.
