This is too funny. She almost qualified for the Darwin Award.
Favorite quote:
- Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.
- "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."
So global warming got the blame for the extreme cold and frostbite.
I'll give credit where credit is due: they stay on message.
MINNEAPOLIS - A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.
"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.
On Monday, the pair was at Canada's Ward Hunt Island, awaiting a plane to take them to Resolute, Canada, where they were to return to Minneapolis later this week.
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.
She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen's foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.
The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft's 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.
Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.
"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."


Comments: 10
You don't even know what you're talking about do you?
Name calling; personal attacks; viewing anyone who doesn't share their worldview as evil, or in this case ignorant.
LOVE IT!
This article also points out the ignorance of "enviromentalists"
Do you have, you know, an actual argument? Because I don't see one. This would involve presenting real facts, citations to journaled articales, understanding the meaning of words like "climate" and then reasoning from them. One wonders if you're up to it.
and yes, I said it is ignorance of the enviromentalists to just think because they blindly follow Al Gore's reasoning that we are all doomed, that it was going to be just a hunky dory picnic on the frozen tundra. Just by the statement that they were putting "hot water bottles" on frozen feet tells me they are lucky to be alive. Anyone who truly knows about nature and being in the wild, KNOWS you NEVER EVER put HOT water on frostbite. And if their tent was at 51 below, and I am assuming this in in farenheit, then they didn't know anything about winter survival and winter camping. The tent warms up just by body heat, and you make a snow cave for your tent. Snow is a good insulator, the Inuits have proven this with their igloos for thousands of years. Also the North Pole sits on sits on thousands of feet of water, some frozen, some not. Currents keep channels open. There is NO land on the North Pole, except for the ocassional island. it is FROZEN WATER, water that is constantly on the move. Tides, storms, moon phases, currents, channels that continually open and close, keep the North Pole on the move. So to speak. We are at the END of an Ice Age, only a mere 10,000 years ago, New England was under 1-2 miles of glacial ice. 10,000 years geologically speaking is a nanosecond. This Ice Age was NOT the first to occur on the Earth, many Ice ages have come and gone. These melting periods occurred LONG before internal combustion engines and coal burned fuel. Long before puny homosapiens drove around in SUVs. MMMMM, how and WHY did you think the Earth HAD all these changes, BEFORE we became industrialized???
Global Warming is nothing more than Chicken Little crying out "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!"
Climate change however is a fact and there is NOTHING we puny homosapiens can do about it.
BTW Cindy, Ann Bancroft has been on several expeditions to the north pole as well and the south. She knows what she's doing. She is a tough, seasoned explorer who has been through places you wouldn't last five minuets in.
Like all wingnuts Cindy, you like to talk the talk. But I bet you've never in your life camped on the tundra, much less in the arctic circle. You know nothing about what you're talking about, nothing at all.