[waves crashing against a ship]
[waves and wind]
Narrator: Humans have been living alongside, migrating over,
frustrated by, and depending on Arctic sea ice
for thousands of years. But it was not until after we had landed
on the moon, six times, that we had a reliable picture of just how much ice
there was and how much it changed from season to season,
and year to year.
Perhaps the first scientific account we have of sea ice is from the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia,
who sailed north around England and reported reaching a frozen ocean and
long summer days when the sun never set. Pre-Inuit people
lived and migrated on the ice, and Vikings kept records of sea ice
observations as they explored and settled new lands.
Since then, many Scandinavian and Russian Pomor peoples have lived with sea ice,
and Inuit culture has been intimately tied to the ice for a thousand years.
In the Great Age of Exploration, seafarers
like Corte-Real and Frobisher experienced or were thwarted by sea ice
as they searched for new passages across the North and riches to exploit.
And mapmakers like Mercator gave the sea ice pack its first rough outline.
In the 1700s Mikhail Lomonosov
distilled centuries of Russian seafarer’s observations into a
groundbreaking analysis of the Arctic. More than a hundred years later,
Fridtjof Nansen intentionally froze his ship into the ice
and drifted for three years, confirming large-scale circulation
of sea ice. In 1878,
Adolf Erik Nordenskiold led the Vega expedition through the Northeast
Passage and in 1906 Roald Amundsen made the first
transit of Northwest Passage, sneaking through the icepack in his ship
the Gjøa.In 1926, two days
after Richard Evelyn Byrd attempted the Pole in a small aircraft,
the airship Norge carried Amundsen and his crew from Norway over the
Pole to Alaska.
Soon after, a slew of scientific research camps migrated on the shifting ice,
including 88 Soviet stations logging more than 100,000
total miles of drift, and the famous American T-3 camp
on Fletcher’s ice island, which was maintained for 20 years.
And in 1958 the USS Nautilus traveled under
the North Pole and the entire ice cap, beginning a new era
of submarine mapping of the rugged underside of the ice.
Murrow: This is Ed Murrow. And this the canopy of ice that covers
the Arctic Ocean. The frozen barrier that throughout history
has barred shipping from a body of water five times the size of the Mediterranean sea.
Only once, shortly
after the turn of the century, has Man reached the North Pole by a surface route.
No ship has ever
reached the pole. Even the most powerful icebreakers are helpless against
this frozen barrier. [crashing into ice]
[sound of rocket liftoff]
[beep beep, beep beep]