Oy! It's so HOT!
Posted on 03/12/2007 7:45:47 PM PDT by milwguy
MINNEAPOLIS - A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.
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"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.
On Monday, the pair was at Canada's Ward Hunt Island, awaiting a plane to take them to Resolute, Canada, where they were to return to Minneapolis later this week.
Bancroft, 51, became the first woman to cross the North Pole on a 1986 expedition. She and Arnesen, 53, of Oslo, Norway, were the first women to ski across Antarctica in 2001.
But the latest trek got off to a bad start. The day they set off from Ward Hunt Island, a plane landing near the women hit their gear, punching a hole in Bancroft's sled and damaging one of Arnesen's snowshoes.
They repaired the snowshoe with binding from a ski, but Atwood said the patch job created pressure on Arnesen's left foot, which led to blisters that then turned into frostbite.
Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.
"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.
She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen's foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.
The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft's 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.
Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.
"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."
Haha ha ha ha ha....when it is hot it is global warming, when it is cold it is global warming too...How "CONVEMIENT' a TRUTH is that?
For more fun on global warming
http://www.globalwarming101.com/
They have been on their quest for the 'holy grail' of global warming for about two weeks and I read their dispatches every day. Im the beginning when temperatures were slightly above normal they were trumpeting global warming. Now that is it -26 they are not posting at all. I think they and their computers have frozen.
Be that as it may, I think it's quite sporty of two fifty-year old women to go to the north pole.
This IS funny.
What a bold sense of purpose and mission.
(What's that I smell.....? Don't say it.)
Like this one.
Oy! It's so HOT!
ping
Hilarious. In the meantime, I'm waiting for that global warming to finish off melting all the other global warming that's still burying my lawn and making it impossible to see down the street to pull safely out of the driveway.
How consistent with the global warming philosophy, the warmer it gets, the colder it gets, until it gets so hot it freezes.
"Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson?"
Heads I win, tails you lose.
How can that happen? Since we have global warming?
Sunburn I could understand, but not frostbite.
58 below inside the tent? I don't care who you are...that's cold.
"58 below inside the tent? I don't care who you are...that's cold."
Yes, but they were probably "keeping each other warm", if you know what I mean.
Yes and before global warming, we could accurately predict the weather!
no ping
see also:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1799853/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1799773/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1799695/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1799610/posts
That what the eco-politicians say, the scientific models say warm and mild and less unpredictable weather.
I'm sorry but you really have to have bought the global warming swindle hook, line and sinker to believe you can travel on foot to the north pole starting in March.
Just look at the weather records for crap sakes.
They must have thought they could really distort the issue with all kinds of fake photographs and drowned polar bears etc. documenting their journey.
Yes, but we CAN predict the future temperatures!
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