Arctic Explorer

Something old something new

Ghost Ship - or barque Europa in dense fog, Photo: Brendan Byrne

The final 20 miles of the Dalton driven in the fog, North Slope, Alaska

Taken August 2020

OOPS!

Aurora Borealis by Frederic Edwin Church, 1865

In Search of Those Lost

I’m currently super interested in Arctic exploration. This is mostly inspired by the searches for the lost Franklin expedition. 

May they rest in peace.

In temperatures that drop below -20 degrees Fahrenheit, along a route occasionally blocked by wind-driven ice dunes, a hundred miles from any other people, a team led by two of our scientists are surveying an unexplored stretch of Antarctic ice. 

They’ve packed extreme cold-weather gear and scientific instruments onto sleds pulled by two tank-like snow machines called PistenBullys, and after a stop at the South Pole Station (seen in this image), they began a two- to three-week traverse.

The 470-mile expedition in one of the most barren landscapes on Earth will ultimately provide the best assessment of the accuracy of data collected from space by the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), set to launch in 2018.

This traverse provides an extremely challenging way to assess the accuracy of the data. ICESat-2’s datasets are going to tell us incredible things about how Earth’s ice is changing, and what that means for things like sea level rise.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

what if the solution to all your problems is to get really into the history of polar exploration. Have you tried that

You can't even go on an expedition to find a passage through dangerous ice fields and die alongside 100+ men for your hubris anymore. Because climate change 🙄

Photo Series | ~ Help! ~

Images by ©

• Sunil Singh

On an arctic expedition from Svalbard, we spotted this polar bear at about 81 degrees north. Fast melting glaciers and pack ice melting sooner than normal due to climate change have made extinction of this beautiful creatures a real threat. Their future is in our hands.