To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,39024673,39168855,00.htm

Photos: Cool tech behind an Arctic expedition
Comms left out in the cold...

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Wednesday 17 October 2007

A team of polar explorers will travel to and traverse the North Pole next year to survey the Arctic ice.

Polar explorer, Pen Hadow (pictured) will travel to the North Pole as part of a three-strong team to measure the thickness of the polar ice cap in a bid to estimate its lifespan.

The Vanco Arctic Survey expedition will take 120 days, cover 2,000km and take roughly 10 million measurements of the ice's thickness via a radar system used at 20cm intervals.

The ice cap is covered by a layer of snow and although indirect data is available on the snow and ice thickness, there has been no recent measurements of the ice breadth alone.

Hadow said: "If we can take away the snow and look at the ice we can find out how long the ice cap will be with us... The only way we can get this data is by directly observed measurements from walking across the ice cap."

Current estimates put the ice cap lifespan at between 16 and 100 years. Hadow added: "The North Pole is in crisis because it is going to disappear within the lifetimes of most people around today but the real question is - when will it disappear?"

Photo credit: Gemma Simpson