Pen Hadow, a veteran polar explorer, will lead a three person team into the arctic next year to make a survey of the ice in an attempt to determine how quickly it is receding and estimate how much longer it will be around.
Today CNET has posted a Q&A session with the explorer. in which he discusses why the survey is important, what they expect to find, and the impact of technology (CNET is a tech site after all) on the expedition.
Originally the team had expected to depart this February, but they have delayed until 2009 in the hopes that they can attract more attention from various scientific circles and collect more data from existing studies on the age of the ice caps already. Joining Hadrow on this expedition will be Martin Hartley, the teams photographer, and Ann Daniels who is in charge of the teams general operations. They'll depart from Point Barrow, Alaska and make their way to the Eureka Research Station at the North Pole.
Looks like another very ambitious expedition. It seems we're getting more and more of these scientific outings looking to collect research on the impact of global warming on the Poles. The article estimates that the North Polar Ice Cap has somewhere between 5-100 years of life left, so clearly it's melting is going to have a huge impact on our planet.
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