Ultima Thule

[+Kiamichi Muskrat]

Sounds like the perfect spot for the world's most difficult cache, to me! That and the Titanic wreckage.

 

By CHARLES BURRESS

San Francisco Chronicle

 

  The lamp of fame casts a fickle glow.

So far it has shed little glory on an expedition organized by a veteran explorer who may have found a long-sought grail of ancient lore.

When Dennis Schmitt and five companions stepped from the treacherous sea ice onto a tiny island in the Arctic Circle last summer, they may have finally realized the age-old quest to reach the uppermost land on Earth.

“We were in a pretty euphoric state, I can tell you,” recalled Schmitt, 58, of Berkeley, Calif. He got the adventure bug at age 19 when he walked to the Soviet Union across the Bering Strait pack ice during the height of the Cold War and was later held by the FBI for two days.

“We were just in tears,” he added, referring to last summer’s expedition. Schmitt works also as a guide and composer.

For expedition member Peter Skafte, 62 of Santa Barbara, Calif., it was the fulfillment of a dream he’d had since 1960.

“It’s been an idea that has been with us for over 2,000 years as a magical, transcendent, mysterious place,” said Skafte, a lifelong adventurer and native Dane.

The feat, however, has won scant notice. Eleven months afterward, for instance, The New York Times noted it in a short story deep inside the paper. Nothing else has appeared in print, said Schmitt, who’s written an article for the American Alpine Journal.

“A century ago this kind of thing was the hottest topic around and the stuff of packed lecture houses,” said University of Delaware geologist Fritz Nelson. “I think that today it will be seen as quaint, but certainly of interest.”

The desire to find the world’s northernmost land — called “Ultima Thule” by the ancients — long fired the Western imagination.

The Greek navigator Pytheas thought he’d found it north of Britain 1,800 years before Columbus, but no one knows for sure where he landed. Over the centuries, would-be discovers have braved the frozen north on what Longfellow called “the unending endless quest.” The North Pole doesn’t count because it is ice, not earth.

Robert Peary declared he’d found it at the northern tip of Greenland in 1900. But in 1969 a Canadian expedition found that the northern tip of nearby Kaffeklubben Island (”Coffee Club Island” in Danish) was eight football fields farther north than Peary’s spot, the Encyclopedia Britannica says.

Kaffeklubben’s reign, however, ended nine years later when the search for Ultima Thule plunged into a twilight zone of disappearing islands and explorer rivalry.

In 1978, Danish surveyors found a gravel bar a mile farther north at 83 degrees 40 minutes latitude and named it Oodaaq, after Peary’s Eskimo companion. Since then, two or three such islands have been found in the shifting landscape of snow, ice and mounds of rocks and debris on the submerged continental shelf off northern Greenland.

But the 120-foot-long pile of dirt, rocks and ice reached by the Schmitt expedition at 83 degrees 42 minutes latitude on July 6, 2003, appears to be farther north than any other known land.

It was a place that Schmitt and Skafte say they first spotted from an airplane in 1998.

Frank Landsberger, 60, an American entrepreneur who teaches in a bioscience program at Cambridge University, said he urged Schmitt to take the first step onto the island, in the Neil Armstrong manner. But Schmitt, who called Landsberger the expedition’s assistant leader, insisted that they both step on the island together, Landsberger said.

“I’m not going to name it,” Schmitt said, deferring to the authorities of Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark. “We’ll call it 83-42.”

As the island awaits Danish government evaluation, rival explorer John Jancik of Colorado said “83-42” is probably an island he first spotted with others from a plane in 1996, a claim dismissed by Schmitt, who helped organize the 1996 trip and was on the same plane.

Jancik described these tiny islands as impermanent “unconsolidated piles of rubble” that big ice plates and Arctic seas can push around.

Skafte called Jancik’s remarks “sour grapes” and noted that slow-growing lichen was found on “83-42.” Schmitt acknowledged that some geologists subscribe to the movable-island theory.

“How long it (’83-42’) will last I do not know. It is a primeval fulfillment to have been out there, beyond the known world.”

[PyroDave]

I was gona place one there tomarow but the waters still a little cold for me.