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Navy embarks upon adventure trek to South Pole
New Delhi: After scaling Mount Everest two years ago, the Indian Navy is now on the verge of scripting another episode in adventure history as it prepares for its first-ever polar quest later this year. The Navy is contemplating undertaking an adventurous journey to the South Pole later this year. Chief of the Naval Staff (CNS), Admiral Arun Prakash announced this on Thursday, a day which also marks an important image- building campaign by the sea-faring force. "I wish them good luck and success in an endeavour that they are about to undertake. We are very proud of them not only because they are Indian Navy personnel, but they represent a microcosm of this nation," said Admiral Prakash. A 10-member naval crew, chosen from the best and most experienced ranks, has just completed training in the Greenland Ice Cap Arctic Circle region and has evolved strategies for the upcoming expedition.
The crew under the leadership of Commodore Satyabrata Dam, a Joint Director in the Navy's Directorate of Adventure and Sports, will face blinding blizzards and temperatures up to minus 100 degrees. "We are looking for the most remote, farthest and difficult terrain in the world. It was natural for us to select South Pole as our target where we will take the national flag and Naval emblem. The weather conditions that we will face over a sustained period of roughly three weeks would be warmest at around minus ten, with an average temperature at around minus thirty five. It will dip down towards minus fifty," said Commodore Satyabrata Dam, leader of Indian Naval expedition to the South Pole. He further said: "We will be constantly facing what can be literally termed as catabolic winds, which means that all through the journey we will be heading into the wind, averaging about fifty to sixty kilometres per hour, which might even reach 100 kms/hour". Though the Indian Navy has its own public relations (PR) wing like the Army and the Indian Air Force (IAF), it has nevertheless assigned a leading PR firm to publicise the mega-event. To prepare the crew-members for polar challenges, Commodore Dam has just led them to scale the highest peak in Iceland, a trek through Europe's biggest glacier - Vatnajokull and traversed over 600 kilometres in the Arctic region on skis. "The pre-polar mission has helped tone up endurance levels and more importantly - confidence, as the crew members endured terrains riddled with deadly crevasses deep enough to swallow sky-scrappers, negotiated wind-sculpted "sastrugi" (surface irregularities on snow) and furious ice-melt streams," Commodore Dam said.
According
to Avinash Khajuria, one of the members of the expedition team, the expedition
will be tough, also because of the type of food, the members will have
to take during the entire trip. "The food that we are going to eat in
this expedition has already been decided. We will be preparing tea from
the frozen water, then for the lunch, we will be having chocolates or
such other stuff," he said. Incidentally, a Royal Navy team is also training
for a trek to the South Pole in November 2006, after having conquered
the North Pole earlier.
-Sept
7, 2006
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