Related article

The Icebreaker Yamal

View inside the Yamal. What we see is the mechanism moving the rudder.

On July 15th, 2005, we left Murmansk at 69° 02.630’ North latitude, 33° 04.238’ East longitude. It is a large harbor on the Russian coast of the Barents Sea. On board the nuclear icebreaker Yamal there were 90 (very) international passengers. Nuclear power would elegantly solve the problem of carrying excessive fuel to the pole and back. We had about 1300 nautical miles to go to reach the North Pole.

My GPS indicates that we are 0.075 nautical mile from the North Pole.

On the way back from the pole, the Yamal had to break the ice again.

It took two full days to reach the ice pack (82° North latitude) between the island of Svalbard in Norway and the Franz Josef archipelago in Russia. From there, the icebreaker broke her way up to the pole. While in open sea, the movement of the ship was a sickening regular roll, now it was a brutal and erratic shaking.

On July 17th, we were fortunate to observe 18 polar bears at different sites. One day later, we had an important ceremony enacted by the members of the Russian crew. They were wearing costumes representing the marine gods of antiquity. The captain begged Neptune to give him the key to the North Pole. We eventually arrived at the North Pole at 21:41 pm (Moscow time) on July 20th. Keep in mind that at the Pole, there is no hourly time any more, as it is possible to change time zone by walking a few meters around the pole. How did we know that we were at the pole? Of course, the captain claimed that we were there. But, this was not enough for us. Several passengers had hand-held Global Positioning Systems (GP'S’s). Mine indicated a maximum latitude of 89° 59.975’, just 46.3 meters from the Pole. At this point, the ship proceeded further North and the latitude fell to 89° 59.952’. Considering the size of the ship, the uncertainty on the GPS, and the coherent readings from independent devices held by my travel companions, the ship must have been really close to the Pole. Happy to have reached this magical destination, there was now only one way to go: South.

The crew donned costumes representing the marine gods of antiquity—requesting the key to the North Pole.

A dive in –1.8 deg C water, in possibly the deepest swimming pool in the world, was like fainting.

Our plan was to land, but there was only water, and our monster icebreaker was reducing any sizeable ice floe to ice cubes. We eventually “parked” the Yamal a few miles away from the pole, went down to the ice, walked on it and even started a dance around a pole with the flags of all the nationalities representing this group of travelers. Volunteers were then called to experience the feeling of swimming in sub-zero-Celsius sea water. Each swimmer was safely tied with a rope and the ship’s doctor assured us that nobody had died in such attempts. We were only a few, but I needed to be part of the group. The dive in the water is like fainting. I fell almost unconscious. I quickly grabbed the ladder, rushed out and drank a glass of vodka in one go. Note that this was probably the deepest swimming pool in the world with as much as 4087 metres (13,410 feet) of water below us.

Six hours later, the whole ice floe had drifted by two miles. On the way back from the pole, the Yamal had to break the ice again. Even though we were following almost the same path that we took to the pole we could see that the ice barrier had been quickly rebuilt. The trip took us to the Franz Josef archipelago—but that is another story.