Former student retraces the steps of Arctic Exploration 80 years ago

A former BBE student has retraced the steps of his great uncle, an explorer who led a pioneering British Arctic Expedition 80 years ago.

Alec Greenwell, and his friend Ed Cooper, paid tribute to geographer and ornithologist David Haig-Thomas, who undertook the groundbreaking trip to study the ozone layer – then a conquest almost unheard of.

In 1938, the group’s 1,500 route took them from Qaanaaq in north-west Greenland, crossing Ellesmere Island and sledding to Amund Ringes Island, Axel Heiberg Island and what later became Haig-Thomas Island. Nearly 80 years on, the pair begun their trip near Qaanaag, before flying north to Eureka on Ellesmere Island to ski, on increasingly thin ice, to Haig-Thomas Island.

Travelling through temperatures of less than -40C, the pair have observed how the social and environmental factors affecting the region and its native peoples have changed over the last eight decades. The amateur explorers have experienced homesickness, severe weather, snow blindness and a surprise encounter with wolves and a bear.

During the original expedition, Haig-Thomas took with him two geologists, who performed some of the earliest work in to the significance of melting glaciers and the ozone layer many years before this became the global issue that it has become today.

There has been renewed interest in the Arctic over the last decade as environmental changes have opened up access to the region. Through referencing the work of Haig-Thomas, the expedition team are making a new account of the impact of these changes on the region. The pair have also documented modern hunting techniques in order to compare them with the accounts recorded by David Haig-Thomas during the British Arctic Expedition 1937-38.