PoleTrack

The mission

Skiing from the legendary drifting polar base “Barneo” to the Geographic North Pole, you will cover the last degree of latitude on ski's. This is a distance of about 100 kilometers, depending on the exact position of the station. You will cross thin ice, multi year ice, open water and pressure ridges, all making up for a chaotic labyrinth through which navigation is a challenge. This is the territory where famous explorers like Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen went before.

You will also follow in the footsteps of modern day explorers who travelled across the Arctic Ocean all the way from the coast to reach the magical destination 90°N on ski’s. Marc Cornelissen, being one of these modern day explorers, will guide you through. Except for the adventure there is another aspect that makes it a special mission.

Along the way to the North Pole you will assist to collect data on sea ice thickness by drilling through the pack ice at regular intervals around the campsites. The data is to be used as a ground truth reference for the satellite CryoSat-2. It is to measure the thickness of sea-ice and the surface elevation of ice sheets in both Northern and Southern hemispheres over a period of at least three years.