WEBVTT FILE

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[waves crashing against a ship]

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[waves and wind]

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Narrator: Humans have been living alongside, migrating over,

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frustrated by, and depending on Arctic sea ice

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for thousands of years. But it was not until after we had landed

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on the moon, six times, that we had a reliable picture of just how much ice

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there was and how much it changed from season to season,

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and year to year.

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Perhaps the first scientific account we have of sea ice is from the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia,

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who sailed north around England and reported reaching a frozen ocean and

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long summer days when the sun never set. Pre-Inuit people

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lived and migrated on the ice, and Vikings kept records of sea ice

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observations as they explored and settled new lands.

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Since then, many Scandinavian and Russian Pomor peoples have lived with sea ice,

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and Inuit culture has been intimately tied to the ice for a thousand years.

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In the Great Age of Exploration, seafarers

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like Corte-Real and Frobisher experienced or were thwarted by sea ice

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as they searched for new passages across the North and riches to exploit.

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And mapmakers like Mercator gave the sea ice pack its first rough outline.

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In the 1700s Mikhail Lomonosov

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distilled centuries of Russian seafarer’s observations into a

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groundbreaking analysis of the Arctic. More than a hundred years later,

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Fridtjof Nansen intentionally froze his ship into the ice

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and drifted for three years, confirming large-scale circulation

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of sea ice. In 1878,

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Adolf Erik Nordenskiold led the Vega expedition through the Northeast

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Passage and in 1906 Roald Amundsen made the first

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transit of Northwest Passage, sneaking through the icepack in his ship

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the Gjøa.In 1926, two days

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after Richard Evelyn Byrd attempted the Pole in a small aircraft,

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the airship Norge carried Amundsen and his crew from Norway over the

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Pole to Alaska.

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Soon after, a slew of scientific research camps migrated on the shifting ice,

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including 88 Soviet stations logging more than 100,000

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total miles of drift, and the famous American T-3 camp

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on Fletcher’s ice island, which was maintained for 20 years.

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And in 1958 the USS Nautilus traveled under

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the North Pole and the entire ice cap, beginning a new era

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of submarine mapping of the rugged underside of the ice.

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Murrow: This is Ed Murrow. And this the canopy of ice that covers

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the Arctic Ocean. The frozen barrier that throughout history

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has barred shipping from a body of water five times the size of the Mediterranean sea.

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Only once, shortly

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after the turn of the century, has Man reached the North Pole by a surface route.

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No ship has ever

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reached the pole. Even the most powerful icebreakers are helpless against

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this frozen barrier. [crashing into ice]

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[sound of rocket liftoff]

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[beep beep, beep beep]

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