On a mountain climbing expedition to northern Greenland in 1996, I was with a team called The American Top of the World Expedition, and we set out to walk across the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean to reach Oodaaq Island, a small island identified as the northernmost point of land on earth. We did not find Oodaaq, but instead discovered another small island somewhat farther north. This led to much discussion, but given the small nature of the island and the isolated location, the conversation slowed. We talked about it from time to time, but it became a strong topic of discussion again this year when a Swiss team, funded by a billionaire, visited the region in 2021 and 2022 and published their results in a book recently. They claim finding an island even farther north, but one of the scientists on the expedition measured the depth of the ocean there and found it too deep to support small islands. He determined that the islands were actually small piles of rocks and glacial debris floating on icebergs trapped in the fast ice hear the northern shore of Greenland. It is a topic that interests only a handful of people in the world, but having visited the region in 1996 and 2001, we were amazed to see this conversation resurface this year with the publication of the Swiss book. These small islands provided a few years of mystery for northern explorers, but with the scientific research conducted in 2022, the facts remove much of the mystery, and leave Kaffeklubben Island, a larger and more substantial island, as the northernmost point. An account of our search for these islands is included in the book Under The Midnight Sun in 2003. See a link about this book in the publications section of this website.
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Photo by John Jancik
AuthorDr. Steve Gardiner is the author of nine books and over 1,000 articles. |