Sunday, April 15, 2012

Past Halfway

After a trail day with relatively few pressure ridges, the team is resting for the night at north 89 degrees and nearly 36 minutes, east 166 degrees, 55 minutes. With fewer obstacles in their way, the team clearly gave a huge effort to cover a great distance while conditions allowed.

Making Miles in the Flats



If you've been following for a couple days now, you might have noticed that in addition to traveling many minutes of one degree of latitude, the team has covered many full degrees of longitude. This is because, unlike degrees of latitude that are a constant 60 nautical miles wide but vary in length, lines of longitude have a constant length, but, near the Poles, their width compresses. So the team allocates 7-10 days to travel the width of one degree of latitude, but, depending on icecap drift, they might travel across many "compressed" degrees of longitude in just one day.

Check back tomorrow for another update from the Arctic!








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