Polar Evening at the Ishavsmuseet on Friday, February 19: A Year in the Arctic Ocean
Audun Tholfsen has more than 20 months of experience on various ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. Through pictures and words, he will try to give an impression of what it is like to be on the sea ice throughout the different seasons. We will hear all about this when he visits the Ishavsmuseet with a lecture on Friday 19 February at 19 pm.
Audun has extensive experience in polar regions and drifting over ice. He usually lives in Svalbard where he guides tourists and provides field logistics for researchers, among others.
In the last ten years, he has taken part in three longer trips across the Arctic Ocean. These trips have given Audun more than 20 months of experiences on the ice. In his lecture at the Ishavsmuseet, he will visit all of these expeditions. He will tell us about ice, cold, darkness, polar bears - and an obsession.
He will probably emphasize the most the latest expedition where he traveled 1.900 kilometers through the Arctic on an ice floe. Audun Tholfsen and Professor Yngve Kristoffersen were frozen in the drift ice above the North Pole for almost a year on the hovercraft "Sabvabaa", which means "floating quickly" in Inuit.
Together with polar explorer Yngve Kristoffersen, Audun Tholfsen traveled across the North Pole in a hovercraft – parked on a half-square kilometer ice floe. The icebreaker “Polarstern” transported the two men with boat and equipment until they were 280 km from the North Pole “on the other side”. Tholfsen and Kristoffersen are the first Norwegians to embark on an ice-drift expedition since Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram expedition in 1893-96. Or, to be fair, the Lillehamringen Tholfsen has been frozen in the ice before. In 2007, he participated in a French expedition that got stuck in the ice with the schooner “Tara” and drifted across the Arctic Ocean for 500 days. He has also crossed Greenland on skis and used skis and kayaks on the trip from the North Pole to Longyearbyen.
M/S "Havsel" with skipper Bjørne Kvernmo picked up the expedition when they broke free of the ice in August 2015. At that time, there was not much left of the ice floe they were on. They returned to Longyearbyen after completing a feat no one has done since Nansen and Johansen – wintering alone in the central Arctic Ocean. Kristoffersen and Tholfsen returned home with unique scientific material, including a series of seismic data, as well as geological samples from the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range between northern Greenland, across the North Pole and Siberia.
Living like this for a whole year could often be a challenge, says Audun, but the capacity of the freezer was overwhelming… In the midst of their solitude, without warning, they were suddenly visited one day by a submarine that came up through the ice. One day, a polar bear also stood there, knocking on the windshield of the hovercraft. You can hear more about these unexpected visits, and the entire unique expedition, at the Ishavsmuseet on Friday, February 19 at 19 p.m.
After the lecture, there will be a real "cod meal" in the museum café as the Ishavsmuseet serves fresh cod with liver, roe, scallops and other delicious accompaniments. Registration for dinner is required.
