Global warming has changed what it’s like to travel to the North Pole
The North Pole is a destination without a marker. Unlike its southern equivalent, which is located deep within the frozen continent of Antarctica and delineated with an actual pole and a nearby scientific base, the North Pole is in the middle of a constantly shifting mosaic of ice atop the Arctic Ocean. There are no mountains, no permanent topographical features of any kind, just a jumbled, jagged icescape. Historically, to be at the North Pole has been to feel as removed from the rest of humanity as it is possible to feel, isolated in a harsh environment, thousands of miles from civilization and warmth.
It is a place that as recently as 1846 was described by Sir John Barrow, an English statesman who midwifed the Victorian age of Arctic exploration, as “the only thing in the world about which we know nothing.” Long after its true nature has been unveiled, it has continued to bedevil and torment many who have dared to impinge on it.
For decades, men and women have striven to reach the top of the world; they have struggled on skis, hauled sleds and endured a litany of miseries – including death – in pursuit of that goal. But when I went to the North Pole, all I had to do was board a flight to Helsinki and catch a charter to Murmansk, Russia, where I boarded a ship. From there, all that was required of me was to kick back and enjoy the scenery, the wildlife and the three multicourse meals per day.
After we reached the Pole, that ship, a 500foot, 28,000-ton, red-and-black nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker called 50 Let Pobedy – or, in English, 50 Years of Victory – towered over us, about 130 fee-paying passengers from around the world, accompanied by a small handful of scientists and journalists, as we stood in a large circle, each of us wearing expedition-issued bright yellow parkas. The ship’s captain, Dmitriy Lobusov – tall, gray-bearded and looking every inch a Russian sea captain – spoke into a microphone, his words translated by an aide by his side.
“Congratulations to you all on achieving your dream,” he said. And if none of us could lay claim to any achievement even remotely on the scale of those who had danced with death as they battled to be where we now stood, just the very fact that we were now here, that we were standing at the top of the world, placed us in rarefied company.
Less rarefied, however, than it used to be. In 1977, another nuclear-powered icebreaker, the Arktika, became the first surface vessel to reach the Pole. The journey has been completed multiple times by several vessels in the four decades since; our voyage was the 123rd.
The top of the world has become a tourist destination: an extraordinarily expensive one, certainly, and one reached only infrequently. It
is nonetheless achievable with far greater ease than anyone might reasonably have imagined even 50 years ago, when the number of expeditions that had traversed the sea ice and stood at the Pole could be counted on the fingers of one hand with a digit or two to spare.
Its accessibility is not the only way in which the Pole and its environs differ from half a century ago - a difference that was evident during our journey.
“I have been working in the area for 30 years and been doing North Pole voyages for 24 years, and I’ve seen many changes in the ice conditions,” Captain Lobusov said during the voyage north. “As we approach the North Pole, you can see we have many stretches of open water.”
To travel to the North Pole is to be acutely aware of not only the isolation of the present, but also the weight of the past, of those who sought to be where we now stood, to meet, in the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the “challenge of human daring.” It is also, increasingly, to consider the future - to wonder whether, just as the window of accessibility is cracking open, the opportunity to see the North Pole as we know and imagine it is already starting to close.
If, as Robert Peary claimed, he, Matthew Henson and a team of Inuit were the first men to stand at the North Pole on April 6, 1909, they did so after more than a month of hard slogging from Canada’s Ellesmere Island. Sixty years later, when Wally Herbert became the first person universally acknowledged to have walked to the Pole, he and his team had been on the ice for fully a year, having been forced to make camp over the long Arctic winter and wait until currents carried the sea ice in a favorable direction. In 2017, those of us on board 50 Let Pobedy made the trip in less than five days.
We arrived in Murmansk, the second- largest port in northwestern Russia, on an August afternoon and began our smooth, steady journey northward that evening. We had been instructed not to take any photographs until we were clear of the port, which is home to the Russian nuclear fleet; but as the ship slipped from its moorings, as the mood lightened and as the celebratory on-deck toasts loosened inhibitions, that admonition was soon forgotten. Cam- eras and cellphones clicked away as Victory eased quietly out of harbor, into Kola Bay and northward into the Barents Sea.
Within two days, we had reached Franz Josef Land, an archipelago of 192 islands that is the most northerly land in Eurasia – at its northernmost point, a mere 560 miles from the Pole. We would visit it again on the way south, but in between, once the archipelago had slipped over the horizon astern of us, we would see no land. The journey to the Pole was devoid of craggy cliffs and stunning vistas, the only variants the extent and thickness of the ice floes that surrounded us, the amount of water that separated them and the wildlife that crossed our path or tailed in our wake. Our first sightings of ice came as we made our way past the archipelago, but it was in the evening that we left the islands behind us that the sea ice shifted from being an occasional interloper to the dominant feature of our surroundings. The ship rattled and shuddered as it entered the Arctic Ocean ice pack, crushing and plowing through the floes. Smaller ones were tossed casually to one side, but even the larger sheets offered little to no resistance.
“The experience of hearing and watching the ship break ice is as mesmerizing as watching fire,” ad- vised Solan Jensen, a hyper-efficient Alaskan with a Zen mien who functioned as assistant expedition leader for Quark Expeditions, the adventure travel company that had chartered the vessel. As if to prove him right, I leaned over the bow for hours on end and watched as a crack would appear in the ice then race ahead in jagged fashion, splitting a floe asunder then widening and ultimately separating the floe into two or more pieces as Victory waltzed arrogantly through.
Victory makes only five trips to the North Pole with paying passengers each year, chartered alternately by Quark and Poseidon Adventures; it spends the bulk of its life breaking through the ice of the Northern Sea Route, which connects the Barents Sea to the Bering Sea across the top of Russia, opening pathways at the head of convoys of cargo and container ships. It is a working ship, not a cruise liner, and the accommodations – notwithstanding the journey’s starting price tag of $27,000 for the 11-day round trip – reflect as much. Still, if the cabins were not ornate, they were functional – the one I shared with friend and fellow Arctic obsessive Geoff York had a pair of bunks, a desk, a small bathroom with shower and plenty of storage space – and replete with nice touch- es, including daily housekeeping service topped with a nightly treat of 50 Let Pobedy-branded chocolate.
The bunks were plenty comfortable, too, so much so that neither Geoff nor I was in any hurry to rouse ourselves from them in response to a 6 a.m. call over the ship’s PA system that a polar bear was on the ice nearby. We had both seen plenty of polar bears – Geoff is a polar bear biologist and senior director of conservation for Polar Bears International; I have had a lifetime of writing about the environment and wrote a book about polar bears in 2011 – and by the time I hauled on my layers of cold-weather clothing, this one would surely be disappearing into the distance. It took a series of increasingly insistent calls, like an alarm clock that refused to be held back by the snooze button, before I hauled myself out of my slumber and onto the deck, Geoff in close pursuit.
We peered over the ship’s bow at the scene unfolding in front of us. The initial male bear had been joined by a second, picking his way among the ice floes, sniffing the air and investigating the unfamiliar aromas that were gently wafting their way toward him. If either bear was in any way concerned by the presence of the nuclear-powered icebreaker, neither registered any visible displeasure.