Pen Hadow
Since then, he has been preparing to lead the Arctic Survey, a
pioneering £2.5million scientific study in which a three-strong team
will map the thickness of the Arctic sea ice by hauling portable radars
along a 2,000-kilometre route to the North Pole. He talks to Natalie Hoare about the events leading up to the establishment of this expedition and his aim to deliver this valuable data set to the pivotal UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December next year
I was a man very much without a plan. Before heading out with an anemometer, during my geography A-level fieldwork, and making some very confusing – yet interesting – findings about the effects of buildings on prevailing wind speed and direction, I really wasn’t anticipating going to university at all.
I recorded the truth as I saw it and discovered an eddy – a cell of circulating air – that was created in the space beyond an exposed building on top of Harrow-on-the-Hill in northwest London: a 122-metre prominence on otherwise largely flat terrain.
After securing a place at UCL, I resurrected the Bloomsbury Geographer, a semi-academic journal that had fallen by the wayside about five years before. I rowed from Henley-on-Thames to Putney Bridge to raise the money to do it – and went on to win the Bill Mead Scholarship for the editorial quality of the journal. You could say that it was a nice marriage of geography and physical endurance that was to characterise my polar career later on – after a long stint as a sports marketing executive.
I was becoming increasingly frustrated representing the most famous sportsmen and women in the world. It was a dream job in many ways, working for Mark McCormack’s celebrated sports organisation [International Management Group], but it really wasn’t what I was cut out for.
I had an epiphany at the Royal Geographical Society. One day, during my lunch hour, I asked to go up to the then little-used reading room at Lowther Lodge, which had all these wonderful old brass grilles covering all the bookshelves. I got the librarian to unlock one at random and retrieved a book about Bernhard Hantzsch, a German ornithologist and natural historian who died trying to travel across Baffin Island. I was absolutely gripped.
That afternoon, I wrote my resignation letter and handed it in the next day. Some people fund their trips by writing books, public speaking or the like; I decided to do mine by running a guide service to the Arctic and Antarctic, setting up the world’s first specialist polar guide service, the Polar Travel Company, in 1995. But for the past four years, it’s all been about the Arctic Survey.
Global warming caused me to have to swim during my 2003 solo expedition to the North Pole. I realised this when I was conducting research for my book. Then, as I looked into it, I discovered that no-one had the critical data to be able to project, much more accurately, when the perennial sea-ice cover of the Arctic Ocean would disappear. The last four degrees of latitude – some 620,000 square kilometres – have never been observed by satellites monitoring sea-ice thickness.
The only way to find out is to go back to good old-fashioned sledge hauling to capture, for the first time, detailed information about the thickness of the ice and snow to help determine just how long the ice cap will exist. We’re heading off in February next year. You could say it’s the ultimate geography field trip.
A state-of-the-art, custom-built, sledge-mounted portable impulse radar, weighing just four kilograms, will record ice thickness across the ice floes that make up the sea ice to produce more than ten million individual thickness measurements. This detailed surface-based survey, the first of its kind, will determine directly the actual thickness of the sea ice.
There’s no hope of the Kyoto Protocol being replaced on schedule without agreement on the carbon emission levels to be nailed down at the UN Climate Change Conference next year. We have a deadline by which we need to have delivered the scientific findings based on the data we’re going to collect on our journey. And we’re probably the only guys who can do that; we have the skills, the experience and the preparedness to put up with the risks, horrors and discomfort of sledge-hauling there.
There’s no point in making discoveries and not being able to communicate the findings. Another big aim of this project is public engagement – on as global a scale as possible. We’re taking responsibility for delivering the final scentific report based on our findings from the world’s leading sea-ice-modelling scientists at NASA, the US Navy, the Met Office and two or three other institutions.
What’s motivating me isn’t the trek or the physical endurance – I hardly think about that. What’s motivating me is simply the idea of starting with a blank sheet of paper and seeing if, through the team that I’ve built around me, I can start with a simple idea and actually shift the perceptions of the most influential people in the world at this particularly critical summit on climate change, in however small a way, to get a better-informed decision on one of the biggest threats to the planet.
Curriculum vitae
• 1962: born 26 February, Perth, Scotland
• 1967–80: attended PNEU School, Temple Grove School (both in East Sussex) and Harrow School in Middlesex
• 1977: completed first marathon in three hours
• 1981–84: studied geography at UCL
• 1985–88: became the youngest ever executive to work at Mark McCormack’s sports organisation, the International Management Group
• 1995: established the Polar Travel Company
• 2003: became the first to reach the North Pole solo and without resupply
• 2004: became the first Briton to trek, without resupply, to both poles
To find out more about Pen Hadow and the Arctic Survey, visit www.thearcticsurvey.com
September 2008
I was a man very much without a plan. Before heading out with an anemometer, during my geography A-level fieldwork, and making some very confusing – yet interesting – findings about the effects of buildings on prevailing wind speed and direction, I really wasn’t anticipating going to university at all.
I recorded the truth as I saw it and discovered an eddy – a cell of circulating air – that was created in the space beyond an exposed building on top of Harrow-on-the-Hill in northwest London: a 122-metre prominence on otherwise largely flat terrain.
After securing a place at UCL, I resurrected the Bloomsbury Geographer, a semi-academic journal that had fallen by the wayside about five years before. I rowed from Henley-on-Thames to Putney Bridge to raise the money to do it – and went on to win the Bill Mead Scholarship for the editorial quality of the journal. You could say that it was a nice marriage of geography and physical endurance that was to characterise my polar career later on – after a long stint as a sports marketing executive.
I was becoming increasingly frustrated representing the most famous sportsmen and women in the world. It was a dream job in many ways, working for Mark McCormack’s celebrated sports organisation [International Management Group], but it really wasn’t what I was cut out for.
I had an epiphany at the Royal Geographical Society. One day, during my lunch hour, I asked to go up to the then little-used reading room at Lowther Lodge, which had all these wonderful old brass grilles covering all the bookshelves. I got the librarian to unlock one at random and retrieved a book about Bernhard Hantzsch, a German ornithologist and natural historian who died trying to travel across Baffin Island. I was absolutely gripped.
That afternoon, I wrote my resignation letter and handed it in the next day. Some people fund their trips by writing books, public speaking or the like; I decided to do mine by running a guide service to the Arctic and Antarctic, setting up the world’s first specialist polar guide service, the Polar Travel Company, in 1995. But for the past four years, it’s all been about the Arctic Survey.
Global warming caused me to have to swim during my 2003 solo expedition to the North Pole. I realised this when I was conducting research for my book. Then, as I looked into it, I discovered that no-one had the critical data to be able to project, much more accurately, when the perennial sea-ice cover of the Arctic Ocean would disappear. The last four degrees of latitude – some 620,000 square kilometres – have never been observed by satellites monitoring sea-ice thickness.
The only way to find out is to go back to good old-fashioned sledge hauling to capture, for the first time, detailed information about the thickness of the ice and snow to help determine just how long the ice cap will exist. We’re heading off in February next year. You could say it’s the ultimate geography field trip.
A state-of-the-art, custom-built, sledge-mounted portable impulse radar, weighing just four kilograms, will record ice thickness across the ice floes that make up the sea ice to produce more than ten million individual thickness measurements. This detailed surface-based survey, the first of its kind, will determine directly the actual thickness of the sea ice.
There’s no hope of the Kyoto Protocol being replaced on schedule without agreement on the carbon emission levels to be nailed down at the UN Climate Change Conference next year. We have a deadline by which we need to have delivered the scientific findings based on the data we’re going to collect on our journey. And we’re probably the only guys who can do that; we have the skills, the experience and the preparedness to put up with the risks, horrors and discomfort of sledge-hauling there.
There’s no point in making discoveries and not being able to communicate the findings. Another big aim of this project is public engagement – on as global a scale as possible. We’re taking responsibility for delivering the final scentific report based on our findings from the world’s leading sea-ice-modelling scientists at NASA, the US Navy, the Met Office and two or three other institutions.
What’s motivating me isn’t the trek or the physical endurance – I hardly think about that. What’s motivating me is simply the idea of starting with a blank sheet of paper and seeing if, through the team that I’ve built around me, I can start with a simple idea and actually shift the perceptions of the most influential people in the world at this particularly critical summit on climate change, in however small a way, to get a better-informed decision on one of the biggest threats to the planet.
Curriculum vitae
• 1962: born 26 February, Perth, Scotland
• 1967–80: attended PNEU School, Temple Grove School (both in East Sussex) and Harrow School in Middlesex
• 1977: completed first marathon in three hours
• 1981–84: studied geography at UCL
• 1985–88: became the youngest ever executive to work at Mark McCormack’s sports organisation, the International Management Group
• 1995: established the Polar Travel Company
• 2003: became the first to reach the North Pole solo and without resupply
• 2004: became the first Briton to trek, without resupply, to both poles
To find out more about Pen Hadow and the Arctic Survey, visit www.thearcticsurvey.com
September 2008
