So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain, American Author
Tickets for Zion Park's subway are hard to come by, but well worth it
While Zion National Park has no train, it does have a subway, and the lottery to visit this subway has just opened up for the year. This cylindrical slot canyon is so popular only 80 permits are issued per day, and a lottery reservation system is enacted between March and November to handle peak demand. Getting to this curvy canyon is no small task. The 9.5-mile round trip hike is strenuous and requires technical skill. But if popularity and beautiful images are anything to go by, the journey is well worth it. Take a ride on nature’s subway below.
While the subway itself is only a quarter of a mile long, getting there is a somewhat difficult 9.5-mile hike round trip. Image by Stephanie
Only 80 permits are issued per day and they can be difficult to get during peak times in spring and summer. Image by Terra Trekking
If you want to bring your friends you’ll have to be selective; groups of more than 12 are not allowed. Image by Terra Trekking
Getting to the subway does require some route-finding and rappelling, so it’s not for the inexperienced. Image by Terra Trekking
Algae thrive in the low light deep in the subway tunnel, causing the vibrant greens seen in these pools. Image by Mike Henderson
The subway is located between two peaks named North and South Guardian Angels. Image by CCharmon
As swimming is required in some areas, going in the warmer months is advised. Image by WikiCommons
Heavy snow melts and spring runoff can flood and shut down the subway, so make sure you check the train schedule before heading out. Image by Jeremiah Roth
Daniel Alvarez paddles 20 miles per day from Minnesota to the Florida Keys
The plan was to kayak 4,000 miles from the northernmost tip of the lower 48 states in Minnesota to the southernmost point in Key West, Florida, a plan that Outside Magazine called bold, inspired, and slightly reckless.
Daniel Alvarez, 31, from Tallahassee, Florida, has proven himself worthy as a long-distance hiker, having completed the 2,174-mile Appalachian Trail, the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, and the 3,000-mile Continental Divide Trail.
Now he has proven himself as a long-distance kayaker.
Alvarez completed the nine-month kayak journey on Saturday, paddling into Key West to a cheering crowd.
“When I got to the end [Saturday], there were a ton of people on the beach and they were all cheering me on,” Alvarez wrote in an email to the Duluth News Tribune. He had paddled through Duluth in September. “I felt pretty silly because they thought I’d done it alone, when really I would never have made it close without a hundred different people along the way who helped.”
Not only did he receive help from people along the way, Alvarez got financial help for his trip from Outside Magazine. He won Outside’s inaugural Adventure Grant and $10,000, finding this out a week into the journey.
Traveling in a donated, bright yellow, 17-foot Necky kayak—“I wanted to give the huge barges on the Mississippi the best chance of seeing me,” he told Outside—Alvarez paddled about 20 miles a day from Northwest Angle in Minnesota, through the Boundary Waters and Lake Superior, down the Mississippi, and across the Gulf of Mexico.
Along the way, Alvarez blogged about his trip and posted photos at Predictably Lost. It should be noted that he made the trip in part to support the protection of the waterways along his route. His website details the organizations he supports.
Many people along the way told Alvarez they wished they could do what he was doing, to which he told them, “If you make it a priority, you can. If you don’t make it a priority, there are a thousand excuses not to do it. Eventually, you just have to get in the boat and start paddling.”
Now that the former corporate lawyer has stopped paddling, what is on the horizon?
“I just have no idea what I’m going to do next,” Alvarez told the Duluth News Tribune. “It’s a good thing and terrifying feeling, but I’m sure I will figure it out soon.”
Geobeats offers a nice YouTube video about Alvarez’s journey, but take note, that isn’t him paddling into Key West at the beginning:
Researchers are exploring the deepest known set of hydrothermal vents in the world, at a site in the Caribbean nearly 5 kilometers (3 miles) beneath the ocean surface.
They've discovered a new vent there that is deeper than any previously known, said Andrew Thaler, a researcher on the expedition. The group explores the area using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) named Isis, which just completed its first dive Wednesday, Thaler said.
The site, known as the Beebe Hydrothermal Vent Field, lays in the Cayman Trough, a deep section of the Caribbean south of Cuba. It lies about twice as deep as most known hydrothermal vents. Hydrothermal vents are fissures in the seafloor where geologically heated water spews forth.
The researchers, led by Britain's National Oceanography Center and the University of Southampton, discovered the Beebe field in 2010, but have yet to detail all of its treasure trove of life and geochemical oddities.
Their previous studies have already revealed several species new to science, and this go-around will likely do the same. "From a biological perspective, we won't know if we've made a major discovery until we've had a chance to process samples back at the lab, but there's no doubt that a few new species will be described from this cruise," Thaler said.
NERC/NOC
Anemones and blind shrimp are bountiful near the vents.
The scientists set sail on the RS James Cooke on Feb. 6 and will be at sea until early March. They are blogging about the expedition at a site called Into the Cayman Abyss and tweeting using the hashtag#DeepestVents.
The vents are crawling with blind shrimp, fields of anemones, tube worms and other bizarre life forms, said Thaler, who studies these creatures as a researcher at Duke University. Isis has already returned with samples of seawater and wildlife scooped or vacuumed from the ocean floor, he said.
The vents, some of the hottest ever discovered, are also interesting from a geological perspective. Here, high temperatures and pressure cause venting fluid to become supercritical, meaning it behaves like a gas and a liquid. These fluids are very reactive, dissolving minerals deep in the Earth's crust and transporting them to the seafloor, according to the expedition's website.
The Beebe field also contains a series of older mounds from former vents, which could help researchers understand how these important formations are created.
One researcher placed half of a pig carcass within the Cayman Trough near the hydrothermal vents to see what scavengers it might attract, Thaler said.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
What’s the greatest living Arctic explorer to do when his funding disappears? The world’s greatest living explorer crumpled between the washing machine and the refrigerator, sweat dripping from his nose onto the kitchen floor. At that moment, Pen Hadow didn’t look like a polar hero. And as he recently announced his retirement, one wondered why he was still putting himself through such a punishing training regimen. “Old habits die hard,” he gasped between pants. I think it was more complicated. After all, when the body stops traveling, the spirit takes over the trek.
'Everything I did combined the spirits of adventure and science to get the important message out.' (Courtesy of Martin Hartley)
Fifty-year-old Hadow has more sea-ice time than anyone on the planet. Ten years ago he became the first person to trek solo, and without resupply, from the Canadian coast to the North Pole, an achievement likened to the first ascent of Everest without oxygen. The amiable Hadow has also led a score of expeditions to both polar regions, guiding parties of clients under the aegis of his own adventure travel company, and in addition, he has undertaken three multimillion-dollar scientific surveys of the Arctic Ocean sponsored by insurance giant Catlin.
Having spent seven months in the Antarctic myself, and almost as long in the Arctic, I know the conditions explorers face: pressure ridges 10 feet high, temperatures in the minus 60s Fahrenheit, disintegrating sea ice, and winds that don’t just knock you down, they send you flying. No amount of satellite phones, high-frequency radios, tracking beacons, or emergency transmitters will enable a support plane to reach you in an hour if you get peritonitis or carbon-monoxide poisoning, and a polar bear or thin ice could finish off a hero in a second. Imagine one of Hadow’s open-water swims between floes, when he towed his sledge like a boat—a tasty snack for a thousand-pound bear.
Unusual in the testosterone-fueled exploration community, Hadow is not just a stuntman out to prove he can beat all that. He believes passionately that the explorer’s role is to enable and communicate science. “Everything I did,” he says now, reflecting on a long career, “combined the spirits of adventure and science to get the important message out that the Arctic Ocean environment is changing at a speed and scale likely to have dramatic effects throughout the Northern Hemisphere.”
Hadow was born in the Scottish highlands, where his father was a pig farmer. He was raised, by Robert Falcon Scott’s son’s former nanny, in the British tradition of toughening children up in the open air and dispatching them to boarding school at the age of 7. “The one constant in my life,” Hadow has said, “was the distant echoing in my head of Nanny Wigley’s tales of the great explorers.” The hair is graying around the temples these days, but Hadow has kept his boyish good looks. Perhaps regrettably, he looks an awful lot like Tony Blair. He lives in one half of a former school in the twee market town of Tavistock in Devon in southern England. A globe five feet in circumference occupies a corner of the high-ceilinged sitting room, and a Times Atlas lies open on a special stand in another. In an office off the sitting room, piles of graphs and charts overflow onto a rowing machine, a battered mini boxed set of Winnie the Pooh books, and framed photographs of Hadow’s ex-wife. They have two children: a son, 14, and a daughter, 10. Imagine telling the other kids at school that Daddy’s an explorer.
In a break in the kitchen training session, I cruelly mention that Hadow would be an old man now in the exploration game. “I don’t accept that,” he says between glugs of water. “Endurance-event athletes tend to be older. Even more so in the polar environment, where skills can only be acquired by experience. The only issue with age is recovery time.” So why has he retired? “The economic climate forced it on me.” It turns out that he had been planning, as a swan song, the first unsupported solo crossing of the north polar ice cap: a thousand-mile, three-month ski hike from Russia to Canada via the North Pole. Core costs exceeded $1.3 million. Like every explorer since Columbus, Hadow has spent an awful lot of time wooing sponsors. But last year, for the first time, his sponsorship collapsed three months before the offing.
Hadow became the first solo explorer to reach the North Pole unsupported in 2003. (Courtesy of Martin Hartley)
Is he the last of his species? Is there a future for old-style exploration? Hadow launched into a set of squats. When he finished, he leaned against the sink before contemplating his reply. “At the macro level,” he says thoughtfully, “by which I mean finding out where things are—exploration has no future. But at a micro level there is masses to achieve. Establishing the range of the fritillary butterfly, for example, can yield vital data on a changing climate. I think there is a significant role for future explorers to support science in the more hazardous technical challenges. They can help chart markers of change. A chapter has closed in a spatial sense, but another has opened.
“In pursuit of sponsorship I’ve lately made a comprehensive sweep through corporate boardrooms, and I strongly believe that although the economic climate is not right, the social climate really is, and in five to 10 years we’ll see a burgeoning of environmental sponsorship through which the business community will demonstrate a commitment to the natural world. Companies big and small will take up the baton from the green charities. It needs to be a properly organized societal effort, and only business has the reach to roll this out on a massive scale. Not-for-profits don’t have the reach or the cash to tackle big stuff, and increasingly, I believe, they will act in an advisory capacity.”Other polar explorers have gathered science data in the course of dragging sledges, making records, and losing half their body weight. As you read this, Sir Ranulph Fiennes is leading a winter trek 2,500 miles across Antarctica: the team will be calibrating ice measurements on the ground, taking core samples to establish rates of water flow from the ice sheet, and searching for extreme- environment cryo-bacteria. But all too often these kind of expeditions end up looking like stunts. Hadow exudes authenticity.
He went through three sets of elevated press-ups with his feet on a chair. Why quite so much exercise if the next trip is off? “I’m a great believer in mind-body balance, and I want to carry my skills into the next phase,” he says, referring to the coaching company he has just established, aimed at both corporations and individuals. Much talk ensued on the importance of developing whole-body strength rather than sticking on slabs of muscle; on four-week cycles of progressively higher intensity, followed by a deload week; and on lactic thresholds and stored glycogen. I sat at the kitchen table with my notebook open, feeling fat.
Most explorers regard the polar regions as territory to be beaten into submission. Either that, or a battleground on which to prove how near dead they can get while acquiring a frozen beard. Not Hadow. There is something of the feminine about his take on the natural world—something that’s not about conquering. The Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic must be the most male places in the world—don’t I know it—yet Hadow reckons women thrive on the ice. He has guided many female groups, including the first all-women trek to the South Pole.
His Arctic Survey in 2009 took thousands of measurements assessing climate change. (Martin Hartley/Catlin Arctic Survey via ZUMA)
“In my experience,” he told me between burpees, “in the polar regions women do better. Men live on their own private islands in a sea of uncertainty, doubt, and anxiety and play a very conservative psychological game. As a result, they tend to underperform, whereas women intuitively work collaboratively.” He has a woman’s poetic memory, too. Fourteen years ago, he briefly met one of my children. When we spoke of the boy, he said, “Oh yes, the one with eyes the color of a blackbird’s egg.”
Who owns the Arctic Ocean? Nobody. But given our increasingly ravenous global appetite for hydrocarbons, and the decreasing sea ice that makes it easier to extract the stuff, ownership has risen to the top of the geopolitical agenda. The five Arctic littoral nations (Denmark, the United States, Canada, Russia, and Norway) are racing to “prove” that their continental shelves extend north for hundreds of miles, thereby allowing them to claim swathes of the Arctic as sovereign territory. Russia even sent a politician down in a submarine under the pole to plant a red banner in the seabed. Non-Arctic countries too are jostling for a place at the table. WikiLeaks revealed U.S. concern over Chinese interest in the Arctic. Cui Hongjian of the China Institute of International Studies recently made a startling comparison. “Countries closer to the Arctic,” he said, “may tend to wish the Arctic is private or that they have priority to develop it. But China insists that it is a public area, just like the moon.”
Hadow has seen for himself how a warming climate is changing the polar regions, and so have I. Once I traveled on a Russian icebreaker across the Arctic Ocean from Murmansk to east Greenland. Standing next to the captain on the bridge, day after day I watched him crossing out huge patches of ice from last year’s chart. In addition to the widely reported record melt in 2012, Arctic monitoring stations measured heat-trapping carbon dioxide exceeding 400 parts per million for the first time ever. By general consensus, 350 ppm is the highest safe level we need to maintain in order to avoid profound climate change.
The volume of summer ice on the Arctic Ocean is poorly understood. “We can see the area of the ice from satellites,” Hadow explains, “but we can’t see its thickness. Thirty to 40 percent of the total volume of Arctic Ocean ice is held in pressure ridges. On my aborted expedition I was going to take five different measurements of every ridge I crossed.”
“How many ridges would there have been on your route?” I ask.“About 7,500.” “So you were going to take 37,500 measurements with a cutting-edge kit?” “No, with a clipboard, a pencil, and a pile of forms.”
This is vintage Hadow. Unlike most explorers, he doesn’t talk about gear much. His passion is ice craft: understanding how the polar environment works and how he can work with it. And anyway, not many kits work at minus 60 degrees. At the South Pole, I saw grown men cry at the failure of some multimillion-dollar piece of equipment that had worked in the lab.
How serious, I ask, is the Big Melt? Having finished his training session, Hadow was about to take a shower, but at this question he became tremendously animated, standing at the sink in his socks and waving his arms around like a windmill. “There couldn’t possibly be anything more serious!” This man cares about the Arctic Ocean very much, and his personal relationship with the landscape he knows so well is deeply touching. His major concern is the damage that would be caused by hydrocarbon extraction. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13 percent of its undiscovered oil lie underneath the Arctic Ocean, not to mention a periodic table of minerals. “It means that the role of the explorer has never been more important. The natural world is showing signs of stress in response to human activity, yet urbanization, increasingly, has cut us off from the natural world. The better we understand how it works, the better we can manage it.”
According to John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace U.K., surface ice measurements “will be critical to our understanding of what’s really going on in the high Arctic. What ice information can reveal is that this is not just about the Arctic—these changes will affect us all.” Hadow has a messianic vision of the global importance of the explorer’s work. “The Discovery Channel/National Geographic view of the natural world has taken us down a dead end and wasted time, making us feel a sense of awe and wonder but not moving us forward usefully,” he says. “I don’t think the Arctic is beautiful, though it has its moments. I don’t buy into wilderness worship. It delays the relationship we need to have. When we understand well, we start to care, and then maybe we’ll act.”
Bravery is not just about besting ice floes. It’s also about accepting that something has ended and facing the next challenge with quiet dignity. It was hard not to feel sorry for Hadow when I saw what he was putting himself through on the training front with no expedition at the end of it. But he is so immensely likable, it was impossible to see him as a tragic figure. There was instead something quietly hieratic about this man who knows so much about something so very important. We should listen to his message. His recently founded life-coaching company has already netted several high-profile corporate clients, and he plans to develop his profile in that field, as well as engaging in a range of polar-spokesman activities.
Despite his derision for the fluffy polar bear wondrous nature view of the polar regions, Hadow talks of “a lifelong love of the Arctic” in romantic terms. In the shower he’s obviously tried to find the words to sum up his attitude. Shiny and polished, he emerges to recite what he’s come up with. It’s corny as hell, but totally convincing. “The Arctic Ocean is like a defenseless princess who needs chaperones—a new generation of explorers—to represent her interests abroad as she arrives on the global scene. Everyone is looking to see what they can get out of her—nobody else there is coming from her perspective. That’s the job of those coming up behind me. Before it’s too late.”
There's no pipeline—or anything even resembling a trail or infrastructure—yet. And that's precisely why Ken Ilgunas decided to head out in September on a 1,700-mile hike tracing the planned route for the Keystone XL Pipeline—from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada, to Houston, Texas. He wanted to chronicle the opinions of the people who live along the proposed route.
Before he left, Ilgunas shared all of the logistics. He detailed his food supplies (6.5 pounds of mashed potato powder and 228 candy bars), his plan for staggering his supply pickups (sending individual boxes via Priority Mail to small town post offices), and shared his design of a homemade lightweight camp stove (tin foil and an empty Purina cat food can). He wrote a post about how he broke his pinky toe after tripping down the stairs in his friend's basement to add some pre-trip drama. He wrote another post about all of the gear he would take with him, 27 pounds of stuff that includes a can of bear spray he's had at the ready for plenty of non-bear-related incidents. He's been in defense mode a fair amount of the trip, something that becomes obvious after a quick survey of of his blog post titles: "It finally happens, I'm attacked by cows," "Finally get going, have an interesting bar experience outside the Alberta/Saskatchewan border," and "A posse of paranoid Montanans surround my tent."
Here's a bit more on his trek, in case you want to follow along.
WHAT: A 1,700-mile walk from Hardisty, Alberta, to Houston, Texas, along the planned route of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Ilgunas plans to interview and hang out with the locals as he goes. He has hiked from farm to town to farm, battled through shin splits, fended off attacks from moose and dogs, and weathered a three-day winter storm in a tent.
WHO: Ilgunas is a 29-year-old adventurer and writer who lived out of a van during his time at Duke, worked as a backcountry ranger in Alaska, and hitchhiked from Alaska to New York. (Just read thisshort series of posts called Vandwelling to get a taste for his sense of humor and degree of honesty.)
WHEN: In mid-September, Ilgunas hitchiked north to Canada from Denver, Colorado. On September 24, he began to hike south from Hardisty, Alberta. He expects to arrive at the end of the pipeline in Houston, Texas, sometime in February. He is currently in Kansas, where cold streams and dogs off leash have inspired interesting conversations with his camera. (Warning: vulgar language in the video below, filmed in Kansas.)
WHY: "I wanted to walk just because I was in the mood for a long walk," he told the CBC. "And I wanted this to have some sort of purpose. To go on a journey is to be changed by the experiences you have and the people you meet and the places you see. And to go into a journey with some sort of rigid stance? You’re kind of closing yourself off from those opportunities."
A campsite used by members of Captain Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition has been found - a century after Scott and his team perished on the journey to the South Pole. Yahoo! News - Scott's entire team perished on the return trip from the South Pole in 1912 (Image: SWNS)
A campsite used by members of Captain Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition has been found - a century after Scott and his team perished on the journey to the South Pole.
Scott and four companions reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to discover they had been beaten there by another team led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.
On the 1500km journey way back to base on the coast of Antarctica the entire team died, including Captain Scott himself, Captain Laurence Oates, Edgar Evans, Henry Bowers and Edward Wilson in March 1912.
The survivors back at base camp set out to recover the bodies but could not return home as their ship would not arrive until January the following year.
While they waited, the base camp team continued work by scaling the continent’s second highest volcano, Mount Erebus, to complete a geological study.
The site, pictured in 1912, and as it is today (Image: SWNS)
Geologist Professor Frank Debenham had the idea of creating a polar research institute while on the trek.
Now a camp which the team made on the peak's upper slopes has been discovered by explorers, 100 years after it was last used.
The new expedition was led by Professor Clive Oppenheimer, who re-enacted the Scott expedition's ascent, using written accounts and pictures from the time.
Prof Oppenheimer, a volnacologist at the University of Cambridge, found rings of stones that Scott's team built around their tents to keep the pegs firmly in the ground.
But the rest of the camp had disappeared completely.
He said: "I was tremendously excited to discover the campsite. In my mind’s eye, I saw the four men fussing around their tent.
"Transposing again the historic photographs on the snowy stretch in front of me, I couldn’t help smiling and saying ‘hello boys’."
UK and New Zealand authorities are now working to get official protection for the site.
Philippa Foster Back, granddaughter of Prof Debenham and chair of The United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust said the discovery was "wonderful".
She said: "It is a reminder of both the dangers and thrills of Antarctic science and a fitting tribute to the great legacies of exploration and discovery left to us by all the brave men of that party."
Sir Ranulph expedition ship arrives in Canary Wharf By Rob Virtue on November 30, 2012 11:50 AM |
A ship aiming to be part of the first ever trans-Antarctic winter crossing has docked in Wood Wharf.
Led by explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the Coldest Journey expedition will see the specially adapted SA Agulhas travel nearly 2000 miles in almost complete darkness and in tempretures of minus 90 degrees celcius in a never before attempted challenge.
During its time in Canary wharf, the ship will be loaded with vital equipment and supplies for the journey.
The project team which includes Brian Newham, Ian Prickett, Spencer Smirl, Richmond Dykes and Dr Robert Lambert will carry out scientific experiments whilst on the ice and also raise money for Seeing Is Believing, an internationl charity focused on tackling avoidable blindness.
Sir Ranulph said: "Seeing is Believing is a cause very dear to me. Having experienced temporary snow blindness myself in the past, I've had a glimpse into what it would be like to lose my sight. It's absolutely frightening. I was moved by the challenge of eliminating avoidable blindness and I wanted to be a part of it.
"The Coldest Journey has the potential to make a real impact towards the goal of eliminating avoidable blindness around the world."
The journey will begin on 21 March 2013 at the winter equinox and could be 68-year-old Sir Ranulph's final expedition.
In 100 years or so, when Google’s autonomous robo-historians write the book on their fleshy predecessors, they will no doubt try to explain why we blew it on climate change. Why, despite decades of ever-more-definitive evidence, did the human species not take even the most basic of measures to avoid a catastrophe?
They will find plenty of blame to pass around. Our political systems, they will observe, just weren’t up to the diplomatic challenges of mustering a multinational effort — we couldn’t agree on whose fault it was, who should pay to fix it, even whether we should bother trying. Our brains proved ill-equipped to process the gravity of a long-range threat until it was too late. And our news media, the storytellers to whom this message was entrusted, were too easily distracted by more lurid dramas.
We didn’t see it coming, even though, on every other level, we knew it was.
This, as nature photographer James Balog tells us in the documentaryChasing Ice, is essentially a failure of imagination. Unless you have a glacier in your backyard, the earliest effects of a warming planet have so far appeared to most of us only intermittently, a signal lost in the noise of the daily weather.
Balog’s response to this perceptual disconnect is called the Extreme Ice Survey: He sets up dozens of stationary cameras aimed at glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and elsewhere. The cameras shoot photos every 30 minutes during daylight hours, some 8,000 pictures a year. It’s the same photo-a-day technique that so many amateur documentarians have used to create those viral videos of receding hairlines, but on a geological scale.
The resulting time-lapse movie can condense months and years into a few mesmerizing moments. Now we can watch the canary in the coal mine as it expires.
“Melt” doesn’t really capture the awesome violence of what we’re seeing. Balog’s cameras look on as the flank of an Icelandic glacier “deflates,” crumpling into black-puddled nothingness like a giant decomposing animal. A crawling river of ice in Alaska turns into a raging torrent, speeding up before our eyes. Greenland’s Ilulissat ice sheet rolls over the landscape, an endless white blanket sloughing off into the ocean. It is, as the photographer says in the film, a “magical, miraculous, horrible, and scary thing.”
Chasing Ice, which was directed by Jeff Orlowski, saves most of these sequences for the film’s climactic third-act reveal, when we finally see the results of three years of labor by Balog and his team of young assistants. The first two acts are dedicated to the team’s admirable and occasionally moderately nail-biting efforts, as they scramble over various harsh landscapes installing their cameras, battling bad weather and technical foul-ups.
Balog, a veteran environmental photographer well-known for his work in National Geographic, is now pushing 60 and has a bum knee that’s starting to get in the way of the physical demands of his work. But, perhaps because his photos reveal something enormous and terrifying that’s happening at a planetary scale, it’s hard to get too worked up about the small-scale drama of his knee surgery. He isn’t the sort of obsessive weirdo whose outsize personality can carry a two-hour documentary. Essentially, he’s just a guy doing his job, a photojournalist drawn to the ice by the charge of his profession: to bear witness.
It’s possible that the whole EIS project doesn’t really have much to add to the science on Arctic melting (doesn’t satellite imagery reveal essentially the same phenomenon?). The wider arena of climate change policy is glimpsed only in passing; there’s a montage of assorted Fox News mockery of global warming, footage of hurricanes and floods, grave promises of extreme weather to come. And Chasing Ice has little to say on solutions, so stow your geoengineering schemeselsewhere.
The film’s achievement is fundamentally aesthetic. A sequence at the end showing an enormous “calving event” might be the most astonishing thing you’ll see all year. A lower-Manhattan-sized glacier spontaneously self-destructs into a boiling sea, rumbling and roaring like an angry god as it dies. It’s a triumph of disaster-movie spectacle, all the more haunting for being real.
It’s hard not to marvel at such visuals and wonder if some of that melted ice isn’t soaking someone’s basement in Staten Island now, or whether it’s coming into your basement next year. Balog’s work makes such powerful agit-prop because, unlike the ill portents delivered by other climate Cassandras, it delivers ground truth, not doomy speculation pegged to a deadline that still at least sounds far off.
As chilling as it is to read, say, the newest report from the World Bankon how unlivable we will likely render the planet by the end of the century, there’s still that slender thread of reassurance to cling to. Yeah, we’re cutting it close, but we’ve still got 88 years to get our shit together. As Chasing Ice shows, however, the clock might be ticking faster than it appears.
For a glimpse of what Chasing Ice has to offer, check out the trailer below. The film opened at film festivals earlier this month, and rolls out in theaters in major U.S. cities on Thanksgiving Day. (Find a full schedule here.)
David Dudley is a writer and editor who lives in Baltimore. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Daily Beast, and AARP The Magazine.
If you’ve spent much time in interior Alaska, you’re aware that the seasons go from full on summer to full on winter in a matter of only a few weeks. On one of the last weekends before the snow hit, my buddy JR and I took my boat out on the river for one last hurrah.
I had just fixed my jet unit after battering it while I was hauling my moose out of the bush, so I just couldn’t stand putting it away without one last good trip. This time we were in pursuit of the late-running coho salmon, or silvers as we call them.
After their long swim up the Yukon river, the silvers finally make it to their spawning grounds beginning in late September. By the time they get here, they aren’t the vigorous fighters they are in the ocean, and aren’t very good to eat, but they’re still a blast to catch. We took to a crystal-clear river dressed more for snowmobiling than boating, but it was chock full of fish, so we knew it would be a good day.
Before we got going, we had to spend half an hour letting my throttle thaw out and getting my steering cable broke loose. It was about 18 degrees and the moisture in my steering cable had frozen it solid! Soon enough, though, we were on our way, and shouting and pointing like kids as we zipped over schools of salmon. After a few minutes, we found a good spot to tie off, and we were catching fish in no time. We were fishing out of the boat using lures we call wiggle warts, which are basically just a shiny rattling crank bait.
Although the fish aren’t really feeding at this point in their journey, they are still very aggressive. The wiggle wart is a pretty obnoxious lure, and our basic technique was to pull it upstream past the salmon or hold it in the current right in front of them. There weren’t very many that could keep from biting it!
After pulling in 10 or 15 fish from this spot we pushed farther up river, and after only a few bends upstream we passed over a hole that had to have at least 200 salmon in it. We anchored up and started reeling them in almost every cast. After awhile we had to take a break for a cup of coffee and to break the ice off the guides on our fishing rods. We spent quite a bit of time just sitting there watching the salmon all around and under the boat. It’s easy for me to take this stuff for granted, living in a place like this, but just being out there is an amazing experience every time.
It turned out to be a great last run on the boat for the year. We caught and released about 50 salmon, and we were thankful to spend another day out enjoying Alaska.
The Russian bark Sedov is sailing towards the coasts of French Polynesia as part of its round-the-world voyage. The Sedov is retracing the route of the first Russian round the world expedition led by Ivan Krusenstern 200 years ago. Photo: Karina Ivashko The seafarer’s descendant Alexei Krusenstern is writing a book about Russian round the world voyages which should come out after the current expedition comes to an end. The Voice of Russia’s Karina Ivashko and Alexei Lyakhov report.
The bark Sedov set sail from Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment in St.Petersburg, which is known for a monument to Russian navigator Ivan Krusenstern. In 1802, Lieutenant Commander Ivan Krusenstern wrote a letter to Russian Emperor Alexander I with a proposal to mount a round the world expedition. The emperor found his arguments convincing. One year later, the two ships, Nadezhda and Neva, set out on a round the world diplomatic and research mission paving the way to a series of successful round the world trips by Russian navigators.
Ivan Krusenstern’s descendant, Alexei Krusenstern, a former doctor and now a businessman, is writing a book about Russian round the world expeditions covering a period from his famous ancestor’s expedition of 200 years ago to the current voyage.
"The book will tell readers about 19th century round the world trips. More than fifty such expeditions took place in the middle of the 19th century. Many expeditions were made in the early 20th century. In Soviet times, ships did not go on round the world trips, except for merchant ships. In 1991, the tradition of sending ships on round the world trips was revived and a whole number of vessels, including the Russian tall ship Kruzenshtern named after the famous seafarer, and the ships Pallada, Nadezhda, and now Sedov, are partaking in circumnavigation projects."
A separate chapter of the book will be devoted to the first circumnavigation of the globe. Thanks to a large number of illustrations, readers will be able to compare the way things looked two centuries ago with what they look now. The author will also speak about Russia’s influence on global navigation.
According to Alexei Krusenstern, round the world trips have a particular meaning for Russian people for a good reason.
"No other nation but Russia can boast that its seafarers come back to the Russian land being only halfway through a round the world voyage. After covering two oceans, they arrive at the Russian Far East. This could be why Russians are so keen on round the world expeditions."
The vast size of Russia, washed by three oceans, becomes tangible only on a round the world trip. A passion for seafaring runs in the Krusenstern family, Alexei Krusenstern says.
"At least five members of the Krusenstern family have made round the world voyages. As a seaman cadet, young Ivan Krusenstern distinguished himself in the war against Sweden in 1788 and was ordered to capture a Swedish flagship. When he boarded the enemy ship, he discovered that among those on board there were three Swedish lieutenants who were his cousins. One of them, Maurice Adolf von Krusenstern, became the leader of the first Swedish circumnavigation several years later."
Alexei Krusenstern was going to celebrate his 50th birthday at Cape Horn, on the Russian bark Sedov. However, he had to change his plans as his part of the Circumnavigation 2012-2013 Project, he says, is to present a complete layout of the book by the bark’s return from the months-long journey.
The site, pictured in 1912, and as it is today (Image: SWNS)
