Ben Saunders

Haile Gebrselassie

Inspiration for a Monday morning: the incredible Haile Gebrselassie broke the world marathon marathon record yesterday, setting a new time of 2:04:26 and knocking nearly half a minute off Paul Tergat's old record.

It turns out that Haile's peculiar running style comes from the fact that he used to run 100km a week (62 miles) as a child, clutching a pile of school books under his left arm.

— Filed under Inspiration

Melting ice in Antarctica – "After analyzing 20 years of satellite data, scientists have concluded that persistent melting has been occurring increasingly farther inland and at higher altitudes over the past two decades." (Thanks Anthony.)

— Filed under Aside

Special Delivery

A dear friend of mine, the inimitable Paul Deegan, is showing the premiere of his new film, Special Delivery, at the London Apple Store on the evening of Thursday 11 October. The film, some seven months in the making, promises a fifteen-minute slice of high definition Himalayan heaven. I'll be there, and you're invited too.

— Filed under Miscellany

Incredible blue ice at Glacier Grey in the Torres del Paine National Park, Chile (spotted in the wonderful Tired of Tulips Flickr pool).

— Filed under Aside

Northwest Passage

It's been all over the news recently, but I've just stumbled across this incredible hi-res image from the European Space Agency's ENVISAT (which has been monitoring Arctic sea ice levels for nearly 30 years), showing the route of the Northwest passage (the orange line) free of sea ice for the first time in history.

According to Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre, the ice-covered area (light green in this image) is currently around 3 million sq km, which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minimum levels recorded in 2005/6. Over the last ten years the sea ice coverage has shrunk by around 100,000 sq km per year, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is an enormous change.

"The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected and that we urgently need to understand better the processes involved."

— Filed under Climate Change

A Frivolous Life

Food for thought from Richard Bode's Beachcombing at Miramar (via Al's blog):

"I have a choice, the same choice that faces every man. I can live a frivolous life, trying to impress others with the house I live in, the clothes I wear, the car I drive. I can strive to be a success in the way of the world, seeking the admiration of others, reveling in their jealousy. I can seek domination over my family and fellow workers in a vain attempt to hide my own deficiencies. I can seek fame, which is the most elusive pursuit of all, for it has no substance and soon vanishes in the air.

I can indulge in endless prattle about my friends and neighbours, dissipating my life's energy a little at a time. I can wallow in self-pity, refusing to accept responsibility for my own circumstances. I can manipulate others into taking care of me, which is the way of all petty tyrants. I can complain about boredom, as if it were up to those around me to inject excitement into my day.

These are the patterns of the living dead, people who have forsaken life, who are willing to squander their most precious gift, because they refuse to face up to the reality of death. If they wanted to live, truly wanted to live, they would rise up in a resurrection of their own making and commit themselves to the life they have."

Mind you, speaking of impressing others with the clothes you wear, I'm utterly smitten with the Polar Gardening t-shirt from Threadless. Shame they're out of mediums.

— Filed under Inspiration, Miscellany

FHM, Top Gear, Sacrifice and Opportunity

First up, a bit of shameless self-promotion: yes, that's me being a poseur in the September issue of FHM, no, I didn't get to keep the jacket, and no, I have no shame.

Secondly, a few people have asked me what I thought of the Top Gear 'North Pole special' (for those of you outside the UK, Top Gear is a popular TV show about cars, mostly – you can watch this particular episode on YouTube). Yes, it was fun to watch. No, it wasn't the North Pole. (They drove to the 1996 position of the Magnetic North Pole, a couple of hundred miles south of its current position, and several hundred miles south of the geographic North Pole). Interestingly, some Russians airlifted a modified Lada on to the pack ice and tried to drive the last degree of latitude to the geographic Pole a few years ago. I've no idea how they got on, but I spotted the crazy vehicle parked up in a garage in Khatanga back in 2001.

Anyway, enough pedantry. Two links for your perusal and delectation: Maciek Duczynski's glorious photos of Norway, and secondly, Hugh McLeod's outstanding essay on how to be creative (now two years old, but it deserves to be revisited, and it's about much more than creativity)…

"The pain of making the necessary sacrifices always hurts more than you think it's going to. I know. It sucks. That being said, doing something seriously creative is one of the most amazing experiences one can have, in this or any other lifetime. If you can pull it off, it's worth it. Even if you don't end up pulling it off, you'll learn many incredible, magical, valuable things. It's NOT doing it when you know you full well you HAD the opportunity- that hurts FAR more than any failure."

— Filed under Miscellany

A Fast-Changing Arctic

The extent of Arctic sea ice cover is expected to reach a record low this summer – US National Snow and Ice Data Centre data showed the sea ice extent for 8 August as 5.8m sq km (2.2m sq miles), compared to the 1979-2000 August average of 7.7m sq km (3.0m sq miles).

That's a difference of 1.9 million square kilometres, a missing area of sea ice area the size of Mexico. By my rusty arithmetic, that's 28 square centimetres of melted ice for every human being on the planet. Here's an idea of what 28 sq cm looks like.

— Filed under Climate Change, Rumination

The Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition

The first surface crossing of Antarctica via the South Pole, the 1955–58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition was a camping trip of epic proportions, with government funding from four countries, the Queen as patron, a leader that came home to a knighthood, a ton of corporate sponsorship, and ships, planes, huskies, sno-cats, tractors and skidoos. I'd read The Crossing of Antarctica, Sir Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary's account of the expedition, but I didn't realise there was a film of the trip until I unearthed it on YouTube this morning.

[This is part one of five, the rest are here: 2, 3, 4, 5.]

The films were painstakingly digitised and uploaded by Simon Coggins, who works for the British Antarctic Survey, and first came across the original cine film reels while over-wintering at Halley Research Station.

"Halley has a great selection of old 8mm cine film reels, with the best of the bunch being a 50 minute colour documentary of the 1955-58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It usually gets a few showings a year and the quality is starting to fade, so during my first winter Mark Maltby recorded it to a digital format by projecting the reel onto the darkroom wall then recording it with his digital video camera. The results were surprisingly good so I made sure I took a copy back home with me."

— Filed under Inspiration, Other expeditions, SOUTH

Russian submarines have touched down on the seabed, 4,200m (14,000ft) beneath the North Pole. The BBC have also published a good article on the background to the territorial claims currently being disputed in the high Arctic.

— Filed under Aside

Life Beneath Antarctic Ice – a gorgeous series of photos from Time Magazine. Number ten is slightly spooky – I've swum across similar-looking leads (cracks in sea ice) in the Arctic…

— Filed under Aside

Andy Kirkpatrick's wonderful "Scottish Approach". It looks like a photograph Frank Hurley could have taken. (After a bit of searching, here's the photo it reminded me of.)

— Filed under Aside