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July 2024 – Volume Thirty, Number Seven
Celebrating our 30th year!
EXPEDITION NEWS, founded in 1994, is the monthly review of significant expeditions, research projects, and newsworthy adventures. It is distributed online to media representatives, corporate sponsors, educators, research librarians, explorers, environmentalists, and outdoor enthusiasts. This forum on exploration covers projects that stimulate, motivate, and educate.
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Sir David Hempleman-Adams is part of a daring 2024 hydrogen balloon
flight across the Atlantic. (Photo: BBC)
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BALLOONISTS ABORT TRANSATLANTIC BALLOON ATTEMPT
“Spirit of exploration never fades”
British explorer Sir David Hempleman-Adams, 67, American balloon manufacturer Bert Padelt, 62, and Swiss scientist and entrepreneur Dr. Frederik Paulsen, 72, made a transatlantic balloon attempt in the Torabhaig Atlantic Explorer Balloon in late June. The craft launched from Presque Isle, Maine, but after about seven hours in the air, the crew was forced to land near New Brunswick, Canada, due to weather conditions.
This was to be, reportedly, the first Atlantic crossing in an open basket gas hydrogen balloon and may also mark the longest distance covered in this type of balloon … piloted by the oldest team to ever do so. The expedition carried an Explorers Club flag.
The planned route was to take the crew from Maine, traveling at around 8,000 feet, and touching down a few days later on the other side of the Atlantic.
Sir David, who lives in Wiltshire, England, said: “At 67, I’m still young enough to take on a daring hydrogen balloon flight across the Atlantic – age is just a number and the spirit of exploration never fades.”
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Interior of cramped Torabhaig Atlantic Explorer basket.
The lawn chair is a nice lightweight touch.
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When the attempt resumes, at a future date to be decided, the team will use Starlink to provide internet for their trip and hope to conduct live television interviews during their flight via WhatsApp.
They will conduct experiments including a study to ascertain how particles from forest fires travel through the atmosphere and affect conditions such as asthma.
The balloon is named after supporter Torabhaig single malt whisky; one bottle will christen a safe landing with the other auctioned for charity.
For more information:
https://torabhaig-atlantic-explorer.com/
EXPEDITION UPDATE
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Wind-Powered Windsled Completes Greenland Expedition
The Inuit Windsled SOS Arctic Greenland Expedition 2024 has made a traverse of the Greenland ice cap from south to north, Narsaq to Upernavik. The expedition covered 1500 km in 23 days, from May 13 to June 4, 2024, navigating some days up to 300 km. (See EN, March 2022)
The Inuit Windsled is reportedly the only zero-emissions polar vehicle designed for efficiently traveling thousands of kilometers in the polar plateaus of Greenland and Antarctica. The wind-powered concept was created and developed by polar explorer Ramón Larramendi during 25 years of work mixing Inuit and modern techniques and using the force of the wind.
Windsled is composed of a convoy of five sleds measuring 20 meters and transporting eight passengers and three tons of weight via kite sail.
The expedition's goal was to test the cargo potential of the windsled. According to expedition leader Ramon Larramendi, it involved five scientific projects relating to microorganism studies in the air; monitoring and detection of PFAS; atmospheric air monitoring; impurities in snow, including microplastics; and snow sample analysis of trace metals, mercury, and emerging contaminants (CEAC), and prokaryotic microorganisms and cold-adapted bacteria.
“The success of this expedition proves the enormous potential for totally clean scientific exploration of the remotest parts of Greenland and Antarctica,” expedition leader Ramon Larramendi tells EN.
For more information:
www.windsled.org
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Humane’s Ai Pin is a Flop
Remember how we recommended the Humane Ai Pin in our annual EN Gift Guide last December? At the time we said, “By always being ready to search the web and communicate, it is supposed to quash dependency on smartphones while looking like a stylish two-ounce tin of mints.” A $700 can of mints at that.
Well, scratch that. One reviewer has called it “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.”
Humane’s laser display consumed too much power and overheated; the battery wasn’t big enough to last long; and it can be a fire risk. (Editor’s note: Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?”)
It’s back to the drawing board for this particular gizmo. Read how big a flop this high-tech brooch has become:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/technology/humane-ai-pin.html
EXPEDITION NOTES
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Austin-based expedition co-leader West Hanson | |
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The 2025 North by Northwest Passage
Kayak Expedition Seeks Team Members
The First Kayak Expedition Through the Northern Route of the Northwest Passage, planned for 2025, is seeking eligible team members with sea kayaking experience or those willing to engage in a training program.
Route: Cape Sherard, Devon Island to Griffiths Point, Prince Patrick Island. The route may be altered, depending on sea ice conditions.
Expedition Leaders: West Hansen and Jeff Wueste. In 2023, they both led the first human-powered (kayak) navigation through the entire Northwest Passage. They are also the first to paddle the entire Amazon and Volga Rivers from most distant sources to the sea. (See our story about the Arctic Cowboys in the November 2023 issue of EN.)
Dates: Pending weather/sea conditions, the team will gather in Ottawa near the end of June 2025 to travel together to the launch site.
For more information:
https://westhansen.com/contact/
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”
– Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), American novelist and poet
EXPEDITION FOCUS
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Candid Critters: Christopher Sichko, Ph.D., has placed
numerous camera traps in Colorado.
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His Camera Traps Help Conserve Wildlife and Wild Places
If you happen to see a square box mounted to a tree in the woods while hiking in Colorado, smile. You might have been photographed by one of Dr. Christopher Sichko’s camera traps documenting the state’s wildlife. The 35-year-old is an accomplished wildlife photographer, Wilderness First Responder, and commercially licensed pilot.
The Coloradan has spent the past few years staking out wildlife corridors to document local predators, both relatively common – bears, foxes, coyotes – and rarer, more elusive species such as mountain lions, bobcats, and wolves. He is a regular contributor to iNaturalist, with over 3,000 observations and 800 different species of plants, mushrooms, lichen, and animals.
A graduate of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Vanderbilt University, his current focus in photography is documenting the return of wolves to the area. Sichko is an environmental Research Economist for the USDA, focusing on the American Great Plains, and in particular, the drought and subsequent migration of the Dust Bowl era (think John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath).
“My ultimate goal is to support the regeneration and rewilding of the American Great Plains, building a region that supports robust, healthy, and vibrant human and animal coexistence,” Sichko says.
Learn more about his camera trap work at www.sichko.org
Camera traps, also known as “game cameras” or “trail cameras,” have increasingly been used in wildlife research over the last 25 years. Although early units were bulky and the set-up was complicated, modern camera traps are compact integrated units able to collect vast amounts of digital data.
“Camera-trapping is an indirect, noninvasive method that is widely used in terrestrial vertebrate research, especially for mammals. Remotely triggered cameras automatically take photographs of objects passing through the field of view. Camera trapping is especially useful for the study of solitary, cryptic and/or highly mobile species that tend to occur at low densities, according to the Wildlife Society Bulletin (Jan. 18, 2024).
Recent advancements are a wireless transmission system where cameras communicate in a network and those that incorporate solar panels as a camera's sole power supply. Walmart sells a critter cam for $60.75. A Campark trail camera using solar energy, WiFi, and a dual lens sells for $169.99.
MEDIA MATTERS
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Stockton Rush, OceanGate's late CEO | |
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Wired Investigates Titan One Year Later
One year after OceanGate’s submersible imploded, thousands of leaked documents and interviews with ex-employees reveal how the company’s CEO Stockton Rush cut corners, ignored warnings, and lied in his fatal quest to reach the Titanic. Wired investigative reporter Mark Harris believes his “inside story” is more disturbing than anyone imagined. (See related story below.)
Harris writes in his June 11 investigation that a trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to Wired by anonymous sources, “show how Rush, blinkered by his ambition to be the Elon Musk of the deep seas, repeatedly overstated OceanGate’s progress and, on at least one occasion, outright lied about significant problems with Titan’s hull, which has not been previously reported.”
Harris adds, “David Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company … became convinced that Titan was unsafe. In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the submersible, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes, and missing bolts, to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the next day.
“Now the bottom of the North Atlantic is littered with more evidence of human hubris, tiny pieces of a plastic video-game controller nestling among the barnacle-encrusted gold fixtures of the Titanic. Both vessels were at the cutting edge of technology, both exemplars of safety in the eyes of their overconfident creators. And in both cases, their passengers paid the price,” Harris writes.
The U.S. Coast Guard is currently leading an international investigation into the five deaths that occurred on June 18, 2023.
Read the story here:
https://www.wired.com/story/titan-submersible-disaster-inside-story-oceangate-files/
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Mountain Gazette and Summit Journal are recent resurrections of dormant titles in the outdoors world. Their owners are also their editors. (Cover photos: Chanelle Nibbelink (left), Sam Bié (right). | |
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Outdoor Magazines are Thriving,
Fighting the Fire Hose of Online Content
Many of the outdoor print magazines that frequently cover expeditions and research projects are – great news! – thriving, providing continued outlets for explorers and adventurers to educate the public about their projects.
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“People will have this in their hands, on their coffee table. That was the idea. We’re all exhausted from our screens. We want something to savor,” says Steve Casimiro, 62, founder and publisher of Adventure Journal, an unapologetically analog magazine at the heart of an old-school trend, reports John Branch in the New York Times (June 23).
The magazine is part of a burst of small-batch, independent outdoor magazines that are finding success in print. Others in this category include Mountain Gazette, Ori, and Summit Journal.
“Most do not put content online; this is journalism meant to be thumbed through, not swiped past,” writes Branch.
Adds Casimiro, “The screen experience is so reductionist. It just flattens the world, so that a Pulitzer Prize-winning story feels the same as spam. Some things deserve better.”
Read the Times story here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/business/media/outdoors-print-magazines.html
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Exploration Quarterly Launches
In a related story about the resurgence of print, longtime explorers and co-founders of the overlanding movement in America, Roseann and Jonathan Hanson, have launched a new magazine, Exploration Quarterly.
Each year the Exploration Quarterly team plans to deliver two 112-page print issues filled with adventures, expeditions, equipment reviews, field arts features, and photography, plus two online-only issues with long-form content, videos, interviews, and in-depth field tests and white papers about gear and vehicles.
The first issue is a diverse mix of stories, including deadly mosquitoes, the first circumnavigation by a scooter with a sidecar, and the histories of the gin and tonic, and Hudson’s Bay Point blanket.
Preview excerpts from the first issue here:
https://www.exploringoverland.com/explorationquarterly
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New Zealand actor Manu Bennett | |
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CBS Orders Reality Competition The Summit
The Everest conga line might get even longer once actor and New Zealander Manu Bennett starts hosting a new CBS reality series called The Summit, based on the Australian series of the same name. Air date in the States is still pending.
Yup, popular culture can do that.
Case in point: Dubrovnik, the Croatian city that was featured on Game of Thrones. It logged a record million-plus people visiting the city in just a few months. The show also contributed to some of the overcrowding at Iceland's Fjadrárgljúfur Canyon, according to Business Insider (Nov. 3, 2022).
Soon airing: The Summit follows sixteen strangers as they set out on an arduous journey through the treacherous New Zealand Alps in an attempt to reach the peak of a distant, towering mountain, according to Variety (Jan. 17).
“With their backpacks containing an equal share of $1 million, the group must traverse an exhausting distance in just 14 days in order to win the cash they are carrying. But not everyone will make it, as these strangers must work together to tackle the dangerous terrain, unforgiving Antarctic winds, heart-pounding challenges and gut-wrenching eliminations on their way to the peak,” reads the breathless official announcement.
“Set against a breathtaking mountain backdrop, this is a high-stakes, adrenaline-filled game with thrilling twists and turns that make for riveting and inspiring television,” said Amy Reisenbach, president of CBS Entertainment.
We’ll see about that.
Learn more here:
https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/cbs-entertainment/shows/the-summit/about/
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X Trillion Documents Great Pacific Garbage Patch
X Trillion – a film following the all-women eXXpedition North Pacific to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – premiered recently in London and will soon be in theaters throughout the U.K. and the rest of the world.
The feature follows the grueling journey of eXXpedition’s 14-member all-women crew led by British skipper and ocean advocate Emily Penn, as they sail 3,000 miles across the North Pacific Ocean through the densest accumulation of ocean plastic on the planet.
The crew was made up of scientists, filmmakers, circular economists, engineers, teachers, packaging designers, and creators.
Emily Penn, eXXpedition director says, “We know that there is no silver bullet to solve the plastic problem. Our expeditions help people understand the true challenge of ocean plastic pollution, so they can use their skills to solve it from sea to source. … We don’t need everyone to do everything, we need everyone to do something.”
Michelle Byle, crewmember and packaging designer, sums up in the film: “We are about as far away from civilization as one can get. Yet here, all around us, is evidence of our daily lives on land. Our choices. Our purchases. This is your old toothbrush, my empty shampoo bottle, the lid to his coffee cup.”
The scientific data they gathered has been used as part of ten international research projects to date.
See the trailer here:
https://www.xtrillionfilm.com/pr
EXPEDITION INK
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Challenger Disaster Remembered
Rachel Slade, in her New York Times Book Review (May 13) critique of Challenger by Adam Higginbotham (Avid Reader, 2024), recalls how she was a schoolchild when she watched on TV the destruction of the Challenger in January 1986.
“… a mere 73 seconds after lift-off, the 526,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen exploded, instantly blowing apart the orbiter. The reinforced cockpit carrying the seven crew members traced a two-minute arc over the Atlantic Ocean before smashing apart upon hitting the surface of the water … a Reagan-era snuff film.”
Rather than die instantly, Slade reports the book reveals that audio captured from a painstakingly reconstructed magnetic tape of the shuttle’s black box indicates that at least one astronaut, Mike Smith, had survived the entire journey, counting down the seconds to certain death.”
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The book details how Morton Thiokol engineers noticed that the shuttle’s 12-foot-diameter rubber gaskets weren’t working as designed. It was a bad joint, bound to fail, especially in colder temperatures.
As the renowned physicist Richard Feynman wrote after the Challenger investigation: “When playing Russian roulette, the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.”
Read the review here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/books/review/adam-higginbotham-challenger.html
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The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions
The archetype of the American explorer, a rugged white man, has dominated popular culture since the late eighteenth century when Daniel Boone’s autobiography captivated readers with tales of treacherous journeys. But commonly held ideas about American exploration do not tell the whole story – far from it.
The Explorers rediscovers a diverse group of Americans who went to the western frontier and beyond, traversing the farthest reaches of the globe and even penetrating outer space in their endeavor to find the unknown. Many escaped from lives circumscribed by racism, sexism, poverty, and discrimination as they took on great risk in unfamiliar territory.
In The Explorers (William Morrow, 2024), published last month, explorer profiles by historian Amanda Bellows include Matthew Henson who had to dispel notions that Black men “couldn’t stand the cold;” Amelia Earhart who was told, “flying was a man’s sport;” and female astronauts who had to fight a dubious U.S. space establishment, even long after the Russians had them.
Bellows also gives a shout-out to Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who helped guide Lewis and Clark to the Pacific in 1804-06.
Read the WSJ review here:
https://tinyurl.com/WSJExplorers (paywall may apply)
WEB WATCH
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Titan Investigation Airs on 60 Minutes Australia;
James Cameron Doesn’t Mince Words
A year after the OceanGate Titan submersible tragedy, there are still many unanswered questions. Most fundamentally, why did the strange-looking experimental craft on a mission to the wreck of the Titanic fail so spectacularly? And why, for days on end, was the world wrongly led to believe there was hope for a successful rescue mission?
The lack of credible information about what happened is now becoming increasingly unfathomable, not only for the families of the victims but also for other undersea explorers like legendary Hollywood director James Cameron. Speaking exclusively to 60 Minutes Australia last month, Cameron revealed this catastrophe could and should have been avoided.
“You don’t move fast and break things,” Cameron says about OceanGate’s Stockton Rush, “if the thing you’re going to break, has got you inside it.”
Cameron, who believes the U.S. Coast Guard has “egg on its face,” adds, “These guys (OceanGate) broke the rules and should not have been allowed to carry passengers.
“Taping sounds were ridiculous … that’s like listening to a sparrow fart over the cacophony of an airport.
“Exploration will proceed because it must, and because it’s part of the human spirit,” Cameron tells 60 Minutes Australia’s Amelia Adams, “The knucklehead who made a mistake shouldn’t be holding everybody back and it won’t.”
Watch the 19-min. June 9 segment here. It’s already been viewed 5.75 million times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb9uqlr7b4Q
BUZZ WORDS
Hyponatremia
Having too much water in the body can dilute sodium levels. It can cause muscle cramps, nausea, vomiting, confusion, seizures, coma, headache, muscle weakness, and possibly death. It’s suggested to always bring enough water on a hike or long-distance trek, but don't skip the electrolyte drinks and salty snacks that will help replenish valuable sodium that the body continues to flush out during strenuous exercise.
Source: Kevin Fedarko, 59, during an SRO book talk on June 12 at the Boulder Book Store. In his new book, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon (Scribner, 2024), he reports his co-team member, photographer Pete McBride, was affected by hyponatremia during their 750-mi. hike.
Fedarko calls their account, “The tale of two nincompoops traveling through the heart and soul of the most gorgeous landscape on Earth.”
Piteraq
A piteraq is a cold katabatic wind that originates on the Greenlandic icecap and sweeps down the east coast. The word "piteraq" means "that which attacks you" in the local language. Piteraqs are most common in the autumn and winter, yet Ousland Explorers managed to escape one headed their way in Greenland in late May. Wind speeds typically reach 50 to 80 mph.
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Get Sponsored! – Need money for your next project? Read about proven techniques that will help you find both cash and in-kind sponsors. If the trip is bigger than you, and is designed to help others, well, that’s half the game right there. Read Jeff Blumenfeld’s "Get Sponsored: A Funding Guide for Explorers, Adventurers and Would Be World Travelers." (Skyhorse Publishing).
Buy it here:
http://www.amazon.com/Get-Sponsored-Explorers-Adventurers-Travelers-ebook/dp/B00H12FLH2
Advertise in Expedition News – For more information: blumassoc@aol.com
EXPEDITION NEWS is published by Blumenfeld and Associates, LLC, 290 Laramie Blvd., Boulder, CO 80304 USA. Tel. 203 326 1200, editor@expeditionnews.com. Editor/publisher: Jeff Blumenfeld. Research editor: Lee Kovel. ©2024 Blumenfeld and Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN: 1526-8977. Subscriptions: US$36/yr. available by e-mail only. Credit card payments are accepted through www.paypal.com. Read EXPEDITION NEWS at www.expeditionnews.com.
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