Six-Week High Point

Ivan Papanin’s 1939 book in English, “Life on an Ice Floe,” consists of his daily journal entries on the subject of drifting with three Soviet companions from near the geographic North Pole to a point 1200 miles to the south, along the eastern coast of Greenland. The book is astonishing for the very fact that it was approved for publication by government sources within the highly secretive society of the Soviet Union. The account is further astonishing for the unmitigated courage displayed by the four pagonauts. While drifting through the winter months of 1937-38, they could not help wondering whether their countrymen really had the capability of rescuing them from the ice before it was dashed to bits or melted out from under them months after they started to drift southward in the Transpolar Drift stream. This drift had been suspected for decades, but only roughly confirmed in 1896. About four months into their drift, it became clear that something was terribly wrong: they were racing southward twice as fast as had been predicted, and might enter warm Atlantic water in midwinter.

Reading this nearly forgotten classic of Arctic exploration, I found myself riveted by the information, the human drama, the context of this historic achievement in a torrent of events leading toward World War II, and by Papanin’s terrifying assignment. It was the forerunner to a decades-long series of postwar (Cold War) floating research stations in the Arctic Basin commissioned by scientists in the USSR, the US and Canada. Most astonishing of all is to plot the trajectory of the 1937-38 drift of Papanin’s ice floe in comparison with six decades of more recent and technologically sophisticated oceanographic information. It turns out that Papanin, Krenkel, Shirshov and Feodorov were set adrift in the most perilous part of the most dynamic stream of Arctic sea ice. Their mid-February rescue by icebreakers and airplanes bordered on both miraculous and heroic. In deference to the experience gained from this close call, nobody has ever asked ice-drifting researchers to run the same risk as Papanin’s crew ran in such blind faith.

If I’m lucky, an opportunity will arise to challenge students with this thought experiment: If the Soviet icebreakers and airplanes had failed in February 1938 to reach Papanin’s pagonauts in time, what would have happened to Arctic oceanography, resource development, meteorology, and how different would our understanding be today of the Arctic Basin?