Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Apparently, The North Pole Is Colder Than They Thought

This is more Ken's pet project, but since he is busy for the rest of his life, I thought I would post it. It seems that two women who were walking to the North Pole to raise awareness for global warming were forced to turn back after one of them got frostbite.

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.
As Cafe Hayek points out, they still manage to blame the cold on global warming.
"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."

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