Jarvis conducted his first major
expedition in 1996, walking 500
kilometres across the ice sheet of
Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic,
unsupported. The early 1990s was in
the infancy of the GPS, so he navigated
with paper maps and compasses.
“Polar bears were stalking us, so
I had to learn to use a gun, and
navigate very accurately. There’s not
much margin for error,” he shares.
Three years later, he was joined
by fellow adventurer Peter Treseder,
completing the fastest unsupported
journey to the South Pole, covering
1,580 kilometres in 47 days.
He then completed an unsupported
crossing of the Great Victoria Desert
in 2001, walking 1,100 kilometres.
The next year he set off for the North
Pole, crossing 400 kilometres of frozen
Arctic ocean.In 2007, he recreated Australian
explorer Sir Douglas Mawson’s journey,
covering hundreds of kilometres across
the Antarctic. In 2013, he reconstructed
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s iconic Antarctic
survival journey of 1916, sailing 1,200
kilometres across the Southern Ocean
in a tiny boat, using a chronometer for
navigation and wearing rudimentary
clothing similar to what Shackleton
wore a century ago.
His current project, 25zero, involves
climbing all 25 glacier mountains at
the equator, with the aim of raising
awareness of the urgent action needed
to mitigate climate change. “The sheer
size of the polar regions is too vast to
show the extent of climate change.
Tropical glaciers are far easier to
show,” he explains.
That's not to say Jarvis hasn't seen
huge change in the polar regions.“The journey to the North Pole is
across the frozen skin of ice on the
surface of the Arctic ocean. You can’t
do that in the summer anymore,
because it’s not there. The science
tells us that by 2037, we will be ice-free
in the Arctic in the summer. I have seen
the changes to support that,” he says.
Jarvis explains that the reductions
in greenhouse gas emissions pledged
by the signatories to the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change (INDCs)
don’t get us to 1.5oC, let alone 2oC;
they get us to around 3oC of additional
warming: “This is a step in the right
direction, but it’s not enough.”
Still, Jarvis doesn’t harbour a
defeatist attitude. “It’s up to all of us
to step up and make our contribution.
Change – when we want to make it –
can come very quickly.”
http://www.timjarvis.org and http://www.25zero.com“It’s up to all of us to step up and make
our contribution. Change – when we
want to make it – can come very quickly”
Tim JarvisIMAGE COURTESY OF TIM JARVISclimate change heroes