The last (melting) frontier

7:00am Saturday 19th July 2008

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PEN Hadow, the first man to trek solo to the North Pole, tells us about his upcoming expedition to measure just how thick the Arctic ice is and how much time we have left until it melts and the world as we know it changes forever.

By Kate Hodal

HE’S the sort of man that myths are made of - a Zeus-like intellectual giant who, as a boy, played jacketless and barefoot in the wintry Highlands snow and who now divides his time between scientific research in Devon and solitary explorations of the North Pole.

But for intrepid explorer Pen Hadow, a trip up to the Arctic isn't just to test his own limits - it's to discover just how much, and how quickly, the ice caps are melting.

Recent figures show that the iconic icy “landscape” of the Arctic Ocean is melting at a rate of eight per cent per decade, a figure that seems quite small on its own. But with 300,000 square kilometres of ice having already disappeared completely since 2001, an ice mass the size of the UK has melted into the Arctic Ocean.

And just how much longer the North Pole has until it melts entirely away has scientists stumped, with estimates ranging from as little as five years to a century.

But they are agreed on one point: that the consequences of losing the North Pole's ice are serious enough to warrant an Arctic Survey, under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, headed by Pen and bulked out by operations manager Ann Daniels and photographer Martin Hartley.

As the three explorers travel the 2,000km from Alaska to the North Pole in February, 2009, in temperatures as low as -90C, they will be dragging behind them a sledge full of drills and radars.

Until now, estimates on the ice caps' thickness have been based on satellite and submarine images but these radars will finally measure the actual density of the ice itself every 20 centimetres, producing 10 million readings that, along with measured drillings into the ice cores, should give a much clearer indication of the North Pole's future.

And whether it happens now or in generations to come, says Pen from his office in Dartmoor, losing all that ice will spell disaster.

"Arctic ice normally reflects back about 80 per cent of the sun's energy into the atmosphere - it's so white it sends it straight back out," he explains. "But when you take away that white surface and melt it into a dark ocean obviously that no longer happens. The Arctic - which accounts for three per cent of the Earth's surface - absorbs 70 per cent more energy as water than as ice.

"Nearly all sea-level rise over the last 250 years has had nothing to do with ice sheets melting into the sea - it's got to do with the expansion of fluid as it gets warmer," Pen continues. "Our oceans are expanding as they absorb more and more energy - and the warmer sea is what is accelerating the melting of the ice caps from below, which in turn is accelerating global sea level rise."

Having risen already between 10 and 20 centimetres in the last century alone, sea levels are expected to augment another 20-80 centimetres as the North Pole melts - a scenario that could lead to 300 million people being flooded out each year across the globe and cities like New York, Bangkok and London ending up below water. Just a rise of 8-30 centimetres would permanently drown out 2,000 of Indonesia's 17,508 islands.

And as populations are dispersed and whole areas left under the sea, struggles over resources like food and freshwater, land and migration will all become commonplace.

"Nearly a quarter of the Earth's known oil and gas reserves lie under the Arctic Ocean's seabed," explains Pen, "and one of the things coming out of the melting of the caps is the accessibility of first exploration and extraction of minerals.

"I worry there's not adequate management processes and systems in place to responsibly and sustainably control any exploitation that may be coming the Arctic's way. There's a very real need for an Arctic Ocean treaty seeking to address all the big geo-political issues that will come from this melting and ensure sustainability."

The raw data from the Arctic Survey's four-month journey will go straight to scientists at NASA, the European Space Agency and Cambridge University, all of whom will pull together to turn it into tangible projections for the future. Those projections, in turn, will go to policy makers at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in November next year, meeting to make a post-Kyoto Protocol agreement on global warming, as the “commitment period” is due to run out in 2012.

"The main intention of our survey is to inform the most important people at the most important meeting about the most iconic environmental change we've ever seen," says Pen.

"The date spread of five to 100 years before the ice sheets melt is a click of a finger in geological terms but in political and economic terms, it's huge. We need to have better projections to make more informed decisions and act on those decisions."

Pen, who has journeyed to the Arctic 14 times in the past 20 years, fallen through its ice into the sea, been the only person to travel solo to the Arctic and once ran a Polar Expedition travel company, fears the place he loves has little future.

He says: "I get quite emotional about it sometimes because I've been there so much over the past 20 years.

"I just feel I really know her," he explains, lovingly referring to the Arctic as a woman. "She's only been there about 40,000 years but I'm inclined to think she'll go in my lifetime and I know I'll miss her when she does.

"The Arctic is like a blank artist's canvas, with huge ridges from where the ice has crunched together," he says. "The sun circles around you for 24 hours, creating these long sunsets of orange, yellow, blue, grey, red and purple, all across this enormous canvas for as far as the eye can see.

"The combination of that sustained beauty and its being totally devoid of any man-made influence invites you to engage with the world on a different level than the normal prosaic feelings you get walking down the high street. It's a secular pilgrimage the like of which you can never imagine."

Having witnessed stranded polar bears in search of food and ice floes swept out to the warm Atlantic Sea, Pen knows that the change is inevitable - but the father-of-two wishes the public would get more concerned about the future of their planet.

"People should start thinking about getting engaged with politicians to build up influence en masse," he says emphatically. "The UN Climate Change Conference of Parties in Copenhagen next year is the key meeting to replace the Kyoto Protocol by 2012 - and if that's missed as a deadline, then the whole process of establishing a sustainable future could very seriously unravel."

While he might not be able to galvanise the world's population into consuming fewer natural resources and producing less CO2 as quickly as he'd like, Pen is, at least, very aware of his own part to play in this expedition.

"I know that my role is to represent the Arctic as best I can," he says. "She has few friends."

"No-one lives there but increasingly everyone wants a part of her. Having been up there pretty much more than anybody else, I feel I know her best and it's my responsibility to do as much as I can to defend her interests."

To find out more about the Arctic Survey or to watch the team's movements as they travel the 2,000km from Alaska to the North Pole, see www.thearcticsurvey.com.