Day 18 - 17th May

Day 18 (17th May 2006)

Current location
As previous

Update
Sleeping and eating were the order of the day as the Foxes made the most of the time to rest.

They have also enjoyed some lovely weather with glorious sunshine and temperatures around -5 degrees centigrade.

Rubber dub dub, four Foxes in a tub
Well, not quite.  Anyway, today is washing day.  If anyone has wondered how one washes in sub-zero temperatures while crossing an ice sheet in record time, then now your thirst for knowledge will be quenched. The answer is you don't. For the past 16 days the Foxes have made do with a quick dab of the baby wipes.  Now, however, comes the ideal chance for a proper scrub.  Current plans are to boil up a pan of water, strip off and throw it around and over themselves – as if the Greenland ice sheet wasn't melting quick enough already!  (Joking aside: point of fact, the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at up to 3 feet per annum in some areas).

Depot drops
Today the Foxes where having their much-anticipated food and fuel drop.  Supplies are running low so the food drop will be most welcome.  The drop was meant to happen on Sunday but has been delayed due to poor weather on the east coast.

Among the rations being dropped is a bottle of Baileys.  Why drink Baileys on ice when you can drink it on an ice sheet?  As ever, the Foxes are doing it in style

Podcast
The new podcast will be live in the morning.

Ice sheet or ice cap?
Are the Foxes trekking across an ice cap or an ice sheet?  Indeed, what is the difference?

An ice sheet is a mass of glacial ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km² (19,305 mile²). The only current ice sheets are Antarctic and Greenland; during the last ice age at Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of Canada and North America, the Weichselian ice sheet covered northern Europe and the Patagonian Ice Sheet covered southern South America.

Ice sheets are bigger than ice shelves or glaciers.

Masses of ice covering less than 50,000 km² are termed an ice cap. An ice cap will typically feed a series of glaciers around its periphery.  Therefore an ice cap can be thought of a miniature ice sheet.

Although the surface is cold, the base of an ice sheet is generally warmer, in places it melts and the melt-water lubricates the ice sheet so that it flows more rapidly. This process produces fast-flowing channels in the ice sheet - these are ice streams.
The present-day polar ice sheets are relatively young in geological terms. The Antarctic Ice Sheet first formed as a small ice cap (maybe several) in the early Oligocene, but retreating and advancing many times until the Pliocene, when it came to occupy almost all of Antarctica. The Greenland ice sheet did not develop at all until the late Pliocene, but apparently developed very rapidly with the first continental glaciations. This had the unusual effect of allowing fossils of plants that once grew on present-day Greenland to be much better preserved than with the slowly forming Antarctic ice sheet.

/Foxy HQ