News from HQ

We recently shared the news that Hugh Bowring & Tris Kaye from the expedition’s Operations HQ are part of a four-man relay hoping to swim across the English Channel in aid of The Coldest Journey’s chosen charity Seeing is Believing. The team, known as the Channel Arm Bandits, will hopefully be setting off from Dover in just over 6 hours from now if the weather permits, at 0230hrs Tuesday…

Good evening! Sorry for the lack of updates these last few days but I have been having some problems getting logged in. It seems that all is better now so I will shortly post a few things you have missed the last few days, including a rather shameless plea for sponsorship for Tris and my cross-Channel relay swim! Best wishes Hugh, Operations…

Thank you to Doug Quelch of Amber Promotions for arranging for Hugh and me to visit the Top Gear set to see the filming of one of the new episodes. What an awesome day it was. As someone familiar with technical projects and working within engineering, I am no stranger to the bait-room posters of Ferraris and ‘Lambos’ that are a staple and traditional wallpaper of the UK industry (<cough&gt…

One of the ‘White Mars’ experiments which the Ice Team are conducting, in conjunction with the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin, is to investigate how isolation and other environmental factors affect brain function, sleep quality, and the autonomic nervous system. Today the Ice Team had a conference call with a symposium of European researchers who are interested in human physical and…

This afternoon it was our pleasure to receive this message of support from Colonel John Blashford-Snell, President of the Scientific Exploration Society, who kindly invited us to share it with our followers. “I have read the progress reports of the expedition with much admiration, although no envy! Without doubt Brian Newham and his team deserve the highest praise for their incredible effort in…

To all of our supporters, The first ever attempt to cross Antarctica in winter, dubbed “The Coldest Journey”, has covered over 300 kilometers and climbed from sea level to almost 3,000 meters up to the polar plateau, since the five man team set out on 21st March this year.  This is the furthest distance and longest period that any expedition has travelled in the polar winter months.  Using…

Having consolidated a position on safe ground away from the crevasses, the Ice Team are taking stock of their situation. It is clear from their recent reconnaissance work that the terrain to the south is a complex and uncharted mass of crevasses which are hard to detect in the darkness, covered, as they are, by snow bridges.  Painstaking efforts have been made with the ground penetrating…

Here’s a pic of the new camp taken at twilight by Brian Newham. To avoid any confusion, the Ice Team are getting about two to three hours of twilight a day, and the rest of the time it is dark. This period is diminishing every day, and if they were further south there would be full darkness around the clock by now. Today the mechanics have been making the most of gentle winds to carry out…

It was -50C this morning and with winds at around 30 knots, the wind chill factor had it feeling more like -70C. That’s the coldest it has been so far and is pretty difficult for us back home to imagine! At the time of the last reading at 1800 (GMT+2) the temperature had crept up to a comparatively balmy -42C. If Spencer and Richmond had hoped for a lie in the comfort of their bunks this…

The GPR is still not working, I am sorry to report. The team have not been able to get advice from the providers of the equipment because it is a Sunday and so they have not been able to work on it today. Spencer and Richmond on the other hand, have been getting busy trying to fix an as yet unidentified problem with one of the Cats which has resulted in power loss. Given the moderate winds and…