SOS Arctic 2024: Mission Accomplished!

WindSled2024’s team has reached its goals crossing the Greenlandic ice cap by the wind-powered prototype.

Nuuk - More than 1500 kilometers crossing the icy interior of Greenland, using exclusively wind and solar energy. An 8-person team developed the zero-impact expedition for extreme polar conditions, to explore the inaccessible Greenlandic ice cap, to find out more about climate change and ice conditions. Everything without using a single engine, but only thanks to the huge kite pulling the 3-ton sled developed by the Spanish Polar explorer Ramón Larramendi. “The expedition is now over, and it has been a wonderful and very complex adventure. We have collected several scientific data, also thanks to the active participation of the Istituto di Scienze Polari (Institute of Polar Sciences) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), the University of Maine´s Climate Change Institute (USA) and the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid.

Among the scientific programs operated during the journey, WindSled 2024’s team has provided all the activities needed to perform several experiments such as “Snow Samples” (to elucidate the role of melt dynamics and snow cover trends on the accumulation of pollutants), “PIONEER project” (to develop low-cost sensor (LCS) wireless networks technologies for environmental monitoring of remote areas of the Planet), “MicroAirPolar Project” (to study micro-organisms in the air, provided by Universidad Autónoma of Madrid’s researchers, and “Monitoring and detection of PFAS”, operated by Climate Change Institute (CCI), University of Maine. The WindSled project began 25 years ago, and the Arctic and Greenland have changed a lot since then. The sea ice extent has decreased considerably, while rising temperatures have melted the frozen ground, the “permafrost”, contributing to increased CO2 and methane emissions.

“SOS Arctic - WindSled 2024 has been a great new expedition, together with important research centers of several countries. We are now going to decrypt the scientific data we have collected during this exciting experience, and above all we must enlighten how we’ve been able to get them. Inuit WindSled is the first wind-powered vehicle in the World to cross Antarctica and the Arctic, and we have demonstrated again that a zero-impact scientific research expedition is possible. It is very hard, and nothing is easy to manage in places like the Greenlandic ice cap. But we have done it again, and Inuit WindSled - designed to be a premier mobile base for both national and international polar research efforts, including those conducted by universities across the globe - offers an eco-friendly solution for scientists and researchers to carry out their projects in the untouched territories of the polar regions. A milestone in the next future research expeditions”, Ramón Larramendi stated.

The expedition has been supported by several international entities such as Gruppo Sella, Sella SGR, Banca Patrimoni Sella & C., Istituto di Scienze Polari (Institute of Polar Sciences) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) - thanks to the Programma di Ricerca Artico (Arctic Research Program) - Tierra Polares, LCE - Life Cycle Engineering and MAS - Management Around Sports.

Ramón Hernando de Larramendi, born in Madrid in 1965, is an experienced polar explorer. He has traveled more than 40,000 km. in the polar territories, and was the protagonist of an unparalleled adventure such as the Circumpolar Expedition of 1990: for three years, from 12 February 1990 to 25 March 1993, Larramendi traveled 14,000 km, from Greenland to Alaska, through the Northwest Passage thanks to dog sleds and kayaks. In this circumpolar expedition he reached the Geomagnetic North Pole at the age of 25, thus becoming the youngest explorer to do so, of which SOS Arctic 2024 has been another milestone to be developed more and more in the future of Polar exploration and scientific global research about climate change and pollution.

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