Frostbite ends Bancroft-Arnesen trek

[skytrooper]

By PATRICK CONDON, Associated Press Writer
Mon Mar 12, 5:28 PM ET



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.


"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.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/...c/polar_trek_1

Gotta love Mother Nature and her wicked sense of humor.........

[92Notch]

Last week the Global warming talks in congress had to be postponned for the second time due to snow. lol.

[grimrebuke]

Originally Posted by 92Notch

Last week the Global warming talks in congress had to be postponned for the second time due to snow. lol.

For the record, our snowfall this year has been pathetic. Congress can usually get a week or so of downtime due to a few feet falling in the winter. We have yet to have broken 4 inches in a single snowfall this winter, and it will be mid-70's tomorrow. They've closed Federal offices and schools about 4 times for "icy conditions" or a dusting of snow.

[Ice Pick]

Felt like Global Warming with all of the snow melting here today.

[SwiftSloth]

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.

Wow... This has nothing to do with the debate in any way... At most, this should be in the 'lighter side'.

[Corporate Avenger]

For the lame:

Global warming can mean temperature differences of as little as a degree or two, yet it has a huge effect on our planet, which means in places like the North Pole, it might be 58 below instead of 59 below, you still have to go prepared.

THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.

http://environment.newscientist.com/...25124.500.html


Of course, when ExxonMobil is your Messiah, facts do not matter..

This building was destroyed by melting permafrost, according to the Flat-Earthers, this doesn't exist..

[GROFF200]

This is why most scientists these days speak in terms of "Climate Change" instead of the pop culture term of "Global Warming". Overall, the world may get warmer, but locally temperatures may be more variable.