HR: 0800h
AN: ED11A-0121    [Abstracts]
TI: Going with the Floe? An Analysis of the Epic Expeditions of Fridtjof Nansen and Sir Ernest Shackleton
AU: * Pfirman, S
EM: spfirman@barnard.edu
AF: Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
AU: Tremblay, B
EM: bruno.tremblay@mcgill.ca
AF: McGill University, 805 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC H3A 2K6,
AU: Fowler, C
EM: cfowler@colorado.edu
AF: University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research 431 UCB ECNT 323, Boulder, CO 80309-0431, United States
AB: One hundred years ago, the heroic age of polar exploration was underway. At first glance the Arctic-based Fridtjof Nansen and Antarctic-based Sir Ernest Shackleton, and their most famous expeditions, are literally poles apart. But the expeditions wound up having much in common, including the fact that their fates were largely dependent on their drift trajectory in the sea ice pack and, in Shackleton's case, the wind and ocean currents. These are natural forces, outside the control of the expedition leaders. Were Nansen and Shackleton lucky that the ice and ocean delivered them and their crew to locations from which they could return? Or were their fates more or less inevitable, within the normal range of natural conditions? While we cannot reconstruct the wind and ocean patterns that actually existed 100 years ago to answer this question, we looked at variability over the past three decades to explore potential alternate fates of these expeditions. Our analysis indicates that Nansen and Shackleton were both lucky and unlucky in the natural conditions that they encountered during their expeditions. Most years since 1979, Nansen would have gotten much closer to the North Pole – his goal -- than his ship did in 1895, so he was unlucky in that respect. On the other hand, he was lucky with the relatively short drift duration of his ship in the Arctic pack ice. Shackleton was also lucky in the rapid pace of drift within the pack. The fact that his trajectory was so far to the west might have been a factor in the crushing and sinking of his ship, but it did allow him to land most of his men on Elephant Island while he went for help. Shackleton's heroic, and harrowing, boat journey to South Georgia turned out to be helped by prevailing conditions: it was within the likely ocean drift trajectory from Elephant Island. Analyses such as these, including "Nansen's Luck" by Roger Colony, and "The Coldest March" by Susan Solomon, help set history and profiles of leadership within a scientific framework, engaging an interdisciplinary suite of scholars, students and the general public in understanding the role of the environment, environmental variability, and environmental change.
DE: 0750 Sea ice (4540)
DE: 0810 Post-secondary education
DE: 0815 Informal education
DE: 0825 Teaching methods
DE: 4207 Arctic and Antarctic oceanography (9310, 9315)
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting