March 24, 2022
Resolute Bay, Nunavut, Canada
The Transglobal Car Expedition by GoodGear.org has successfully completed its 2200km overland expedition from Yellowknife, NWT to Resolute Bay, Nunavut. This represents the first-ever overland wheeled journey from the continental shelf of North America to the High Arctic.
Sixteen members of the expedition used seven vehicles to complete the journey – three 2021 Ford F-150 trucks prepared by Arctic Trucks of Iceland, and four Yemelya amphibious vehicles prepared by Vasily Elagin, an expedition member, in Russia. The sixteen overland team members hailed from Canada, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Iceland. Support came from scientists in Germany and Great Britain, and an ice expert from Iceland sent continuous updates from Edmonton. The team also picked up a trusted local guide in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, for Polar Bear and ice advice.
“I’m incredibly pleased with the execution of the plan and the expertise of the whole team is working through many challenges on the route. This is a major achievement on a very difficult route that has never been done with wheeled vehicles before” said Elagin, a Russian mountaineer and explorer
Andrew Comrie-Picard, a Canadian professional driver and expedition member, added “we’ve been overwhelmed with interest and support from so many people along the route, from the Indigenous communities to the residents of Yellowknife, Cambridge Bay, and Resolute. The people of the North are exceptionally passionate and imaginative, and they seem to intuitively understand the thing that drives our passion in this expedition.”
This 2022 Canadian Test of the Transglobal Car Expedition is a pre-run of a very difficult section of the 2023-2024 complete circumnavigation of the planet on the surface through both poles. On that expedition, team members will retrace the route pioneered this year and go on to connect to routes that they have completed on previous occasions, including from Resolute over the geographic North Pole, down the length of Greenland, and across the continent of Antarctica.
In the process of returning the vehicles to Cambridge Bay, one vehicle was unfortunately lost through the surface in an area of rapidly shifting ice under a heavy current. No one was injured. The authorities have been advised and the team has initiated a recovery program. This incident will inform the safety measures needed for the main expedition and represents important data on the viability of travel on the ice in the context of global warming, which is making traveling over the ice more dangerous for indigenous communities and other ice travelers.
The parent organization of the Transglobal Car Expedition is the Swiss non-profit GoodGear, which seeks to bring innovative technologies to locations around the world for the betterment of local communities and the advancement of scientific research. On this Canada Test expedition, the team has continuously logged ice thickness data with a Ground Conductivity Meter (GCM) system and has given this to researchers using non-terrestrial imaging technology to triangulate and refine the predictions of ice thickness for the safety of all users. A new relationship with Siku.org, the Indigenous ice database, may see the data integrated into Siku.
More info is available at www.transglobalcar.com