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THE ARCTIC OCEAN PIE |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Friday, 03 August 2007 |
While chilling here in Sumatra (see Sumatra Sunrise)
after writing an exposition of one entire ocean (the Indian: see The French Ocean),
I never thought I'd soon be writing about another, and one so far away.
Yet the Russians' stunt of planting their flag on the bottom
of the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole is such a dangerous joke that I'm
compelled to do so. The joke is on the
Russians, for there already is an American flag planted there.
Evidently, the six Ruskie explorers in their Mir mini-subs
didn't look around very much when they reached the sea floor at 14,000 feet
down. If they had, they would have seen
the stars and stripes - or at least what it's encased in.
It's quite a story of how that American flag got there. And it provides quite an opportunity to
create an Arctic Ocean Pie - one that the UN doesn't get a slice of.
I've been to the North Pole 21 times. I'm in Guinness for the first free-fall
sky-dive onto the North Pole ("northern-most parachute jump"). I organized and led the first commercial
expedition to the North Pole in 1978.
We chartered an expedition aircraft (a DeHavilland Twin Otter) with
hydraulic skis from Kenn Borek Aviation that serviced the Inuit (Eskimo)
villages in the High Canadian Arctic.
It had never been done before. The Otter is a tough plane, capable of landing on the rough icy
surface of a frozen ocean with skis.
It's "STOL" - short take-off and landing - so it can get you on and off
the ice quickly (once we landed and took off on an ice floe only 700 feet
long).
The Otter's liability is that has no range - flying less
than 600 miles or so before running out of fuel. The Pole is a long ways away, even from Canada's northern most
island, Ellesmere, as you can see from this map:
The colored region is within the circle of 66.33.39 north latitude, or the Arctic
Circle (within which the sun shines for 24 hours on June 21, the summer
solstice, and doesn't shine for 24 hours on December 21, the winter solstice.)
Only five countries border the Arctic Ocean: Russia (yellow, marked Soviet Union on this
old map, which is appropriate given current developments), Norway (pink, as it
owns Spitzbergen or Svalbard), Denmark (brown, as it owns Greenland), Canada
(orange), and the US (green, as it owns Alaska).
Ellesmere is the Canadian island nearest Greenland. We decided to use a hut on Lake Hazen in
northern Ellesmere as our base camp and main fuel cache. Here's a NASA sat photo of Hazen:
All that white around the top of Ellesmere is Arctic Ocean pack ice.
The Geographic North Pole is by definition at 90 degrees
north latitude, at right angles to the Equator (0º). There are 60 nautical miles (nm) to the degree (1 nm=1.15 statute
miles). With the Hazen camp at not
quite at 82º, we were more than 8 degrees from the Pole, over 550 miles
away.
This meant we had to place a fuel cache - several drums of
av-gas - up on the ice of the Arctic Ocean around 86º with a radio beacon, plus
carry seven more drums aboard the Otter.
The only safe time of the year to attempt this is in April,
a few weeks after the spring equinox of March 21 for the sun to get high enough
above the horizon so there's sufficient sunlight to see the shadows on the ice
blocks - but before the sun starts creating ice crystal fogs and thinning the
ice.
The plan worked. In
April, 1978, we made it to the Pole, setting down on the sea-ice at the very
top of the world. We celebrated with
champagne and caviar, which had to be consumed quickly before it froze at 25º
below zero.
On April 15, 1981, on my sixth expedition to the Pole, we
landed right at 90, everyone got out, we dumped out the fuel drums, took the
door off the plane, the pilot - Capt. Rocky Parsons - and I got back in, and we
flew to 8,000 feet. I wanted over a
mile of free fall.
I bailed out way above the tiny black specks of my clients
on the vast white ocean and had the sky-dive of my life. Just as I landed, one of the folks, Steve
Drogin, snapped this picture:
Guinness World Record.
But the next year, 1982, I decided not to go the Pole, or
run any expeditions at all. I had
become a hermit, hiding away in a remote part of Malibu in California, for the
greatest tragedy of my life had occurred.
The love of my life, the woman I was to marry, born and
raised in the French Alps as the daughter of a cheesemaker, the star of the Folies
Bergere in Paris and Las Vegas, who had been with me on an expedition to a
cannibal tribe in New Guinea, to the Pole, to the Alps retracing the route of
Hannibal (with two elephants!), who was my life partner, Jacqueline Vial, had
passed away in my arms from breast cancer.
All I could do was mourn.
So when a friend who was trying to get his own expedition business
started, Mike Dunn, called and asked how he could run a Pole trip if I wasn't,
I said okay and explained how to do it.
It didn't turn out so well.
Landing a plane on the sea-ice of the Arctic Ocean is
tricky. You need a very particular
configuration of ice called an old frozen-over lead. "Leads" (leeds) are shear lines in the pack ice, split by
the ocean currents and forming rivers of open water. These then freeze back up, with the ice smooth and flat.
They look like runways, an easy place to land. But they can be disastrously deceiving, for
if it is a young frozen-over lead, the ice is too thin to land on. You want an old one, locked in over
the winter, solid and several feet thick.
So you've got to fly over them and inspect them, especially the edges,
very carefully.
Mike had Rocky Parsons as his pilot. Rocky is as good and experienced as they
get, but somehow, Mike got him to land on a frozen-over lead right at 90 that
looked perfect - too perfect.
The Otter set down, came to a stop, and everyone began
clambering out on the ice with that incredible exhilaration you get from
standing on the summit of the earth.
Then the left ski sank through the ice and into the water. It was a young lead, only a foot or so thick,
and it couldn't take the weight of the plane.
Mike and Rocky hurriedly threw out the emergency gear, heavy
sleeping bags, food, etc., and got everyone off the lead and onto the pack
ice. They watched the Otter fall
through the ice to be swallowed up by the sea.
Rocky radioed for the back-up Otter (there's always a
ski-equipped Otter available for rescue), which took a good many hours to get
there from the airbase at Resolute, 1100 miles to the south. After a very risky landing on the
rough pack ice, everyone was safely evacuated.
Rocky's Otter was meanwhile slowly sinking into the depths
of the Arctic Ocean, finally coming to rest on the sea floor of the North Pole,
right where the Russian mini-subs settled 14,000 feet under the frozen surface.
And here's the kicker.
On the Otter was an American flag.
There's nothing at the Pole, for it's at the center of a sea
with the ice always shifting and moving.
If you want a candy-stripe pole, you have to bring your own - such as
mine, shown here with Jackson in 2003:
I would also bring an American flag, and thus so did
Mike. That Old Glory stayed on the
Otter - all the way to the bottom.
Sorry, Ruskies. Our flag beat
you to it - by 25 years.
The Canadians laughed at the Russians for "planting flags" like they
were living in in the 1500s. But the
Kremlin mind-set still being stuck in the days of Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584)
is all too frighteningly true. The Russian
bear still deals with the world through threats and bullying intimidation.
For Russia to claim the entire sea floor of the Arctic Ocean
based on the geology of the "Lomonosov Ridge" is ridiculous:
You can see the undersea ridge runs all the way across the
ocean floor from the Russian continental shelf to that of Greenland/Ellesmere. In fact, last year (2006) a joint effort by
the Canadian and Danish governments was begun to "demonstrate
that the Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of the North American continent." The project is called LORITA, the Lomonosov
Ridge Test of Appurtenance.
The US made fun of the Russian arctic antics as well. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said,
"I'm not sure of whether they've put a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bed sheet
on the ocean floor... (but even if) they went and spray-painted a flag of Russia
on those particular ridges is not going to make one iota of difference."
And yet, and yet...
once the ridicule is over, if GW uses his brains, he'll spot the
opportunity (or maybe a presidential candidate will - like Rudy?).
The opportunity is to convene a conference strictly limited
to the five nations directly bordering the Arctic Ocean (Russia, Norway,
Denmark, Canada, and the US) for the purpose of dividing up ownership of the
Arctic Ocean between them.
The Arctic Ocean would be a private pie, the slices running
from where the countries' borders meet in a straight line coming together at
90º North. The billions of barrels of
oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas can then be extracted by each
country in their now-territorial waters.
No bullying, no threats, no stunts - just a win-win deal
between everyone. And just maybe, it
would dawn of the Russians that such win-win deals are actually possible, for
their medieval mind-set has always been win-lose. For they would get by far the biggest slice of the Arctic Ocean
Pie.
The other great benefit to this deal is it shuts the UN
out. No "Law of the Sea" treaty with
the UN owning the seabed. A private
ocean with no UN participation or involvement.
For unless the ocean is privately and peacefully divided up
by its bordering countries, the UN camel will get its nose under the arctic
tent, claiming it has the authority over all those billions of tons of
oil.
So - which current or aspiring White House occupant will be
the first to recognize the geopolitical and economic bonanza of the Arctic
Ocean Pie?
Ps: Here's
the kind of plane lying at the bottom of the sea floor at the Pole that the
Ruskies failed to see:
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