AN hour or so up ahead, at the higher elevations along the
trail that leads over Siyeh Pass, huckleberries were ripening. Even a dawdling
day hiker like me knows that huckleberries can quickly mean grizzlies in Glacier
National Park. I indulged a nervous tic and patted around for the loud red
aerosol can on my belt, whose label reads Counter Assault. It’s effective as a
bear repellent, but even more reliable at making an urbanite feel faintly
ridiculous.
I was in northwest Montana for the hikes and the huckleberries, but most of all
to experience the namesake glaciers, which, I had recently learned, might be
around for only another decade or so. Given that a century and a half ago there
were 150 and now there are 25, the trip makes me an enlistee in the practice
known by a somewhat prickly term: last-chance tourism.
For now, though, there are still glaciers to be seen. The park’s skein of
well-maintained trails traverses every section of its million-plus acres and can
accommodate any level of ability, from backpackers to the sheets-and-coverlets
crowd. Even visitors who prefer to commune with nature through a car window can
be awed by the views of the Jackson and Blackfoot Glaciers from Going-to-the-Sun
Road, the often car-choked highway that more or less bisects the park west to
east.
And for those who want to get closer, some serious legwork over steep terrain
can put you right next to both the Grinnell and Sperry Glaciers, respectively a
day and an overnight’s hike away. There are other glaciers to be glimpsed in the
distance during a hike, but they can’t be reached by trails. These are
excursions that require ice ax, ropes or crampons: the well-sequestered Pumpelly
Glacier, for example, at 8,420 feet, and its close neighbor, the Pumpkin
Glacier.
Other glaciers are nearer a trail, but still display their remote and frigid
glory at some distance, and in a way the craggy surroundings make them even more
vivid. I chose the Siyeh Pass Trail because it affords a prolonged, spectacular
view of the Sexton Glacier from below.
Alpine glaciers like Sexton don’t look like peaks or cubes. A couple of miles
into the hike, as the trail opened into a valley, it came into view: a massive,
ragged smear of snow-laden ice, perched just under the sawtooth granite skyline.
My audio track, meanwhile, was the cascading water of Baring Creek, which runs
parallel to much of the trail. Descending from the glacier, it charges over a
series of red-rock ledges and then makes its way down into the azure St. Mary
Lake far below.
As the trail continued, the bottom edge of Sexton became visible — a violent
crumble, broken loose by gravity and temperature. Glaciers are forceful,
slow-flowing rivers of ice. With binoculars, I could see Sexton’s thickness and
true magnitude. The perspective also offers, if you’re up for it, a rather
stunning view into the future. As I pushed ahead, a graying volunteer ranger
approached me at a nimble gait. No bears sighted, he reported. (O.K.!) He was a
veteran of decades here, it turned out. We craned our necks up at the
still-formidable Sexton, and he said that it had once looked far larger to him.
I read later that it has, in fact, lost at least 30 percent of its surface area
since the mid-’60s.
There are several measures of what qualifies as a glacier. One generally
accepted rule of thumb is that they are a minimum of 25 acres in size. The most
recent report has Sexton at 68.
I moved on, ascending the switchbacks that pull the Siyeh trail up toward the
8,000-foot pass. I was well above tree line by now, and only a few peaks away
from the Canadian border. Not far off, out on the moraines, a quartet of
mountain goats appeared, munching and then settling.
A good idea. I was tired, too. According to Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted
Courage,” which follows the cross-country trek of Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark, Lewis was able to bushwhack 30 miles in a day. I was going to do 11, and
without the whacking. (The Lewis and Clark expedition came within sight of these
mountains in 1806.)
As I rested I heard women’s voices come from up the trail, sounding like an
exuberant traveling book group. They seemed delighted to find a sprawled,
worn-out guy to greet in passing. “How do you like it? This is our backyard!”
the leader announced, adding that they were from Kalispell, Mont., just
southwest of the park. I responded in superlatives, and asked whether folks here
talk much about what’s happening with the glaciers.
There was a pause and the temperature seemed to decline a degree or two. “God
will take care of everything we need,” one said.
“I don’t think man has anything to do with that,” her friend put in.
(A bartender at one of the lodges,
not-authorized-to-speak-publicly-on-the-matter, confided that not all locals
share these views.)
After a bit, they warmed enough to point out some huckleberry bushes nearby.
(This is a popular shrub around here, and not just for bears; after a few days
in the area, I can attest to the virtues of locally marketed huckleberry beer,
jam, pie, syrup, Riesling, lip balm, French toast, soda, cobbler, lemonade, ice
cream, daiquiris, tea and milkshakes.)
Retracing my steps back down to the trailhead, I was alone again — not a wise
practice, according to park brochures. Lewis recounted that one grizzly, already
shot four times through the lungs, charged and dispersed a six-man hunting party
while its stalwarts were still firing. Still, over the past hundred years, and
despite tens of millions of visitors, only 10 fatal grizzly attacks have been
recorded here. They do, however, take up a fair portion of mind space.
The Siyeh Pass Trail can either be an extended loop or a somewhat shorter out
and back of about 11 miles — the option I chose. As I headed back down into the
valley it wasn’t much of a stretch to think of the looming Sexton as alive. The
pressure of the glaciers’ weight causes the ice to flow forward over the
landscape; colder temperatures allow for a buildup of ice, which speeds up the
flow. Heat — a warmer day, season or era — is the competing force, and the
glaciers ebb. That movement is a defining feature, part of what makes glaciers
distinct from your more prosaic all-year patches of snow.
The day before, I had spoken with Daniel Fagre, who coordinates climate change
and glacial geology studies here for the United States Geological Survey. He is
a 20-year veteran of research at the park. The retreat of the glaciers began
around 1850, he said, as part of a slow, natural climatic variation, but the
disappearing act has accelerated during the last hundred years. Until recently,
his research projected that, as global warming hit its stride, the park’s
glaciers would all be gone by the year 2030. Now he thinks it may be as soon as
2020.
Outsize snows this past winter, which kept many park roads and trails closed
well into July, could briefly forestall the meltdown, but the longer warming
trend is inexorable, he said.
No reprieve? “No, I think we are continuing on that path,” he said.
The science is preliminary, but it’s clear that this loss will be more than
aesthetic for the park’s ecosystem, he said. Those glacial reservoirs provide a
steady supply of cool meltwater through hot summers and dry spells, helping to
sustain a constellation of plants and animals, some rare — big-horned sheep, elk
and mountain goats among them.
Passing again under the glacier as daylight faded, the trail neared its end.
Those prospective losses weighed heavily — nostalgia, of a sort, laced with
dread.
MORE pleasantly, the park celebrates nostalgia of a different sort — from the
Art Deco typography on the official signage to the fleet of low-slung, roll-top
tour buses known as “red jammers,” which date from the ’30s. These ply the roads
between robber-baron-era hotels, offering full- and half-day tours to various
sections of the park ($30 and up).
There’s a wealth of accommodations along the eastern and western boundaries of
the park, especially in the towns of East Glacier Park and West Glacier. Despite
their names, these towns, with populations of only a few hundred each, are more
like distant cousins than identical twins. West Glacier, half an hour from the
Kalispell airport, is generally newer, and sprawls.
East Glacier Park, two and a half hours north of the Great Falls, Mont.,
airport, is a charming, tumbleweedy throwback with a string of weathered
eateries and motor-court lodgings that are only slightly post-World War II.
There’s also the Backpacker’s Inn, a combination hostel and super-cheap motel
with a mostly youthful clientele who like the clean, spare single rooms for $30
a night. I’ve stayed in each of these places a time or two, but this night —
after a fiery, pepper-laden dinner of enchiladas pasillas at Serrano’s Mexican
restaurant among a crowd of other glacier-gawkers and local ranchers — I opted
for the Mountain Pine Motel. It has endured, with appearance and ambience
intact, since 1947. The owners are descendants of the pioneer Sherburne family
that helped settle the park area in the 1890s.
Nearby is the century-old Glacier Park Lodge, a grandly creaky log cabin writ
very large. There are three such concessioner-run legacy hotels at the park,
erected by the Great Northern Railroad to lure tourism. My favorite is the Many
Glacier Hotel, a darkly comical but generally comfortable old wooden monstrosity
with a Swiss theme (the bellhops wear lederhosen). Its broad verandas face a
transfixing view of a horizon of pinnacles that surround Swiftcurrent Lake — one
of 131 named lakes in the park (631 others are as yet unnamed; feel free to
follow my example and name a few after your friends).
When my wonderful clawfoot tub leaked onto the occupants of the room below, the
two repair-crew guys who showed up grinned and shrugged after some futile work:
that’s kind of the way this place is, they said. The only other available room
was infested with bats, and smelled like it, I was told. It was a great stay,
just the same. Half of the hotel is being renovated all this season and is
closed, along with one of the dining rooms.
The Many Glacier Hotel is also the start of one of the park’s most popular
hikes, to Grinnell Glacier. The 8- or 10-mile hike is strenuous, though less so
than the Siyeh Pass Trail, and the payoff is that you can get within a stone’s
toss of the glacier itself, the surface area of which is more than twice
Sexton’s.
I embarked with a ranger-guided group on Chief Two Guns — a trim 45-footer,
built locally and hauled up here somehow 50 years ago — for a quick trip over
Swiftcurrent Lake. Then a short walk to another boat, the even older Morning
Eagle, across Lake Josephine to the trailhead. The boats moved past a shifting
panorama of jagged rock faces, slender waterfalls, and high above, the
destination glacier. The trail is often crowded, but that scarcely registers in
these surroundings. Hikers stop to catch a breath and find it taken again by the
view out over the string of lakes, far below, fed by Grinnell’s meltwater.
Connected by cascades, each lake is a deeper blue than the one above.
After three hours of steady ascent and a final quarter-mile of hard climbing,
the trail ends at the foot of the glacier and an iceberg-studded, expanding
lake. The lake does not appear on old maps, according to the ranger. It is a
byproduct of the fact that Grinnell’s surface is 40 percent smaller than a
half-century ago.
Above the lake, the glacier is a wide, tilted skirt of ice whose hem you can
almost touch, brilliant under the sun even when it’s dirty with wind-blown grit
by the end of the season. It seems immense, too big to disappear, and nearly
crowds everything else from consciousness. The ranger said that until a few
seasons back you could walk out onto the lower edge of it, which is too thin now
to bear human weight safely.
Seaweed-like stromatolite fossils embossed in the cracked rocks along the trail
supply a Precambrian perspective of perhaps a couple of billion years. But it is
the view out over this lake of meltwater that grabs the imagination far more
urgently.
A question hangs up there with the remnant glacier, which may soon be converted
to a few patches of ice: what comes next?
Hikes and Huckleberries
GETTING THERE AND AROUND
You can reach Glacier by flying into Kalispell, Mont., and driving half an hour
to the west side of the park, or flying into Great Falls and driving two and a
half hours to reach the eastern entry point. You can also take Amtrak’s Empire
Builder from Chicago, Seattle or Tacoma, and disembark at either East Glacier
Park, Essex or West Glacier. The Going-to-the-Sun Road has been under repair
since last year, which means that traffic is often rerouted to a single lane.
This results in stops that can add 30 or 40 minutes to the usual one- or
two-hour trip.
The Logan Pass parking lot and visitor center is usually posted “Full” by
midmorning all summer, according to park staff members. A shuttle bus system
along the Going-to-the-Sun Road ferries hikers and sightseers to and from Logan
Pass and a series of trailheads.
WHERE TO STAY AND EAT
At East Glacier Park:
Both the Glacier Park Lodge and, to the north, Many Glacier Hotel (for both
406-892-2525; glacierparkinc.com/reservations.php; both from $140 a night for
two in high season) are concessioner “legacy” railroad hotels — gracious dowager
empresses that can’t help but show their age.
The Backpacker’s Inn, right behind Serrano’s Mexican Restaurant (29 Dawson
Avenue; 406-226-9392; serranosmexican.com) and under the same ownership, is $30
a night for a single room, $12 a night for the gender-segregated hostel. Clean,
quiet, spartan. Serrano’s has benches on the porch for its surplus of patrons —
a mix of locals, tourists and backpackers who line up for the chimichangas and
carne Tampico. The super-smoky habanero sauce is sold at the cash register.
At West Glacier:
The Silver Wolf Log Chalets (406-387-4448; silverwolfchalets.com; from $176) are
cabins with interior décor that is almost exclusively logs, twigs and sticks,
quiet and nicely appointed, 10 minutes from the park.
The Belton Chalet (406-888-5000; beltonchalet.com; from $155) is a lovely old
hotel with predictable advantages and limitations. Keep in mind that a railroad
line is close at hand. The restaurant is one of the best at this edge of the
park.
In the park:
There are 13 national park campgrounds, many with views of lakes and peaks,
including those at Apgar Lake, Medicine Lake or Swiftcurrent Lake. Cook a
porterhouse or two over the iron grill, bring in a bottle of malbec and observe
all bear precautions.
A NOTE ABOUT WATER
East Glacier Park, Mont., is a small tourist town whose water system is not
reliably safe, according to state and federal authorities. Motels connected to
that system are required to post a “boil order” warning, but some don’t, which
could mean trouble if you’re unaware and brush your teeth or drink water from
the tap in your room. (Boiling kills giardia, E. coli, cryptosporidium and other
potentially illness-producing microorganisms not reliably filtered out by the
current water operation, said Shelley Nolan of the Montana Department of
Environmental Quality.)
A few places, including the big Glacier Park Lodge, have their own wells or
water filtration, so the water is safe to use without boiling. Restaurants
should use bottled water. So ask.
A new water treatment plant is set to begin operation soon, according to the
federal Environmental Protection Agency, but as of this writing, it’s not
certain that will occur in 2011.
The tropical belt that girdles the Earth is expanding north and south, which
could have dire consequences for large regions of the world where the climate is
likely to become more arid or more stormy, scientists have warned in a seminal
study published today.
Climate change is having a dramatic impact on the tropics by pushing their
boundaries towards the poles at an unprecedented rate not foreseen by computer
models, which had predicted this sort of poleward movement only by the end of
the century.
The report comes as representatives from 191 countries around the world assemble
on the island of Bali in Indonesia, to negotiate a new international treaty to
cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists have found that, during the
past 25 years the equatorial region classified as climatologically tropical has
expanded polewards by about 172 miles which has meant that a further 8.5 million
sq miles of the Earth are now experiencing a tropical climate, compared to 1980.
The scientists warned there are grave implications for the many millions of
people living in dry, subtropical regions bordering the tropics, which are at
risk of becoming even more arid because of changes to rainfall patterns and wind
directions.
"Several lines of evidence show that, during the past few decades, the tropical
belt has expanded. This expansion has potentially important implications for
subtropical societies and may lead to profound changes to the global climate
system," the scientists say in their study published online in the journal
Nature Geoscience.
"Most importantly, poleward movement of large-scale atmospheric circulation
systems, such as jet streams and storm tracks, could result in shifts in
precipitation patterns affecting natural ecosystems, agriculture and water
resources," they say.
They are particularly concerned about the poleward movement of subtropical dry
belts that could affect water supplies and agriculture over vast areas of the
Mediterranean, the south-western United States, northern Mexico, southern
Australia, southern Africa and parts of South America.
"A poleward expansion of the tropics is likely to bring even drier conditions to
these heavily populated regions but may bring increased moisture to other
areas," the scientists warn.
"An increase in the width of the tropics could bring an increase in the area
affected by tropical storms, or could change climatologically tropical cyclone
development regions and tracks," they say.
They also point out that the expansion of the tropical band could exacerbate
global warming by increasing the rate at which water vapour – an important
greenhouse gas – is being pumped naturally into the upper atmosphere. They warn
that could lead to irreversible climate change.
The study was carried out by Dian Seidel of the US National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration in Washington, her colleagues from the National
Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and the universities of
Washington in Seattle and Utah in Salt Lake City.
They found that, during the past quarter-century, the area defined as tropical,
based on a list of five recognised climatological criteria, has moved further
north and south by about 2.5 degrees of latitude, or about 172 miles in total in
both directions. That is greater than the predicted shift of 2 degrees by 2100
predicted under the "extreme scenario" envisaged by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change.
"We looked at how certain aspects of the structure and circulation of the
atmosphere have been altered over the past few decades and how models predict
they may change as the climate changes in the future," Dr Seidel said. "We are
seeing indications that a warming climate is associated with expansion of the
tropical region towards the poles, and the rate of expansion that has occurred
in recent decades is greater than projected by climate models to occur in the
21st century," she said.
Climatologists have long suspected that a warmer world will lead to an expansion
of the tropics, which are defined by patterns of wind circulation, ozone
concentrations and the height of the troposphere, but few had predicted that the
dramatic shift observed by Dr Seidel and her colleagues would have occurred
already.
Computer models of the global climate, for instance, had suggested a polewards
shift of the tropics by as much as 2 degrees of latitude by the end of the 21st
century. "Remarkably, the tropics appear to have already expanded – during only
the last few decades of the 20th century – by at least the same margins as
models predict for this century," Dr Seidel said.
"The edges of the tropical belt are the outer boundaries of the subtropical dry
zones and their poleward shift could lead to fundamental shifts in ecosystems
and in human settlements.
"Shifts in precipitation patterns would have obvious implications for
agriculture and water resources and could present serious hardships in marginal
areas," she said.
Australia is one of the countries likely to be worst affected by the shifting
tropics because westerly winds bringing much-needed rain to the continent's arid
south coast are likely to be pushed further south, dumping their water over open
ocean rather than on land, scientists said.
"An expansion of tropical pathogens and their insect vectors is almost certainly
sure to follow the expansion of tropical zones," said Professor Barry Brook of
the University of Adelaide.
"The global implication is the unexpectedly rapid expansion of the tropical belt
constitutes yet another signal that climate change is occurring sooner than
expected," Professor Brook said.
"The case for rapid action on greenhouse gas emissions becomes that much more
compelling," he said.
A defining feature of our climate system
The tropics are one of the defining features of the Earth's climate system.
Their existence is due to the fact that the region receives the greatest amount
of the Sun's energy per unit of surface area. Map makers define the boundaries
as the Tropic of Cancer, about 23.5 degrees north of the equator, and the Tropic
of Capricorn in the south. These are the points where the Sun is directly
overhead during the summer and winter solstices. However, climatologists define
the tropical boundaries in a more complicated manner, based on five different
sets of criteria, which are mostly connected to the way the air and oceans
circulate around the hot equatorial region. Directly over the equator, the hot
air rises, bringing with it moisture that accounts for tropical storms. Further
away from the equator, the air descends, which tends to make these subtropical
regions drier. Scientists have found that the boundaries of the tropics are
shifting polewards.
July 19, 2007
Filed at 6:31 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON (AP) -- One of Earth's largest-ever floods broke apart a strip of land
connecting what is now Britain and France, permanently separating them,
researchers say.
The flood unleashed about 35 million cubic feet of water per second, 100 times
greater than the water discharge of the Mississippi River.
The natural disaster, which occurred about 400,000 years ago during a glacial
period, was later followed by rising sea levels that created what is now the
English Channel, the study says.
It is not known if humans died during the disaster, but the study says the
flooding may have ended migration by early humans and mammals such as horses
across the land, which was at least 28 miles wide.
The theory that Britain became an island during a catastrophic flood -- rather
than through the course of normal erosion -- was first proposed in the 1980s.
The new study, outlined in the journal Nature, used high-resolution sonar data
that were previously unavailable to produce three-dimensional, high-quality
imagery of the region.
In a commentary in the journal, Philip Gibbard, a University of Cambridge
geologist who was not involved in the study, praised the research. ''It is no
exaggeration to say that this Channel flood was probably ... one of the largest
ever identified ... (and) it had profound long-term geographical consequences,''
he wrote.
Another outside expert, Chris Stringer, a paleontologist at the Natural History
Museum, also welcomed the report.
''The timing and method of formation of the Channel have been a long-running
argument -- after all it really makes Britain what is today, geographically --
and the evidence presented in this paper is spectacular,'' Stringer said.
He said it explains and reinforces the picture his museum's ''Ancient Human
Occupation of Britain'' project is putting together about the increasing
isolation of Britain from Europe after 400,000 years ago.
The study -- by three scientists at Imperial College London and an official at
the UK Hydrographic Office -- says the megaflood occurred during the first major
extension of a continental ice sheet into lowland central Europe and Britain.
The ice advanced across the emergent North Sea floor from southern Scandinavia,
blocking rivers flowing northward into the Atlantic and causing a gigantic
glacial lake to develop in front of it, dammed by higher ground to the south and
fed by the drainage of much of Western Europe.
When this dam overflowed, it produced a huge deluge that quickly broke apart the
land mass connecting what is now England and France.
The glacier eventually withdrew from the area, but about 160,000 years ago,
during a second significant glaciation, another ice sheet reached central
Netherlands and again dammed a lake in the southern Northern Sea, the study
says.
When this barrier broke it produced a vast volume of water that surged through
the land gap, dramatically deepening it to about its current level and sealing
Britain's fate as an island.
The study also says the two almost instantaneous releases of huge volumes of
fresh water into the Atlantic may have triggered changes in ocean circulation
that in turn may have affected the climate of the entire North Atlantic region.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- If it weren't for the hot rocks down below Earth's
crust, most of North America would be below sea level, report researchers who
say the significance of Earth's internal heat has been overlooked.
Without it, mile-high Denver would be 727 feet below sea level, the scientists
calculate, and New York City, more than a quarter-mile below. Los Angeles would
be almost three-quarters of a mile beneath the Pacific.
In fact most of the United States would disappear, except for some major Western
mountain ranges, according to research at the University of Utah.
''Researchers have failed to appreciate how heat makes rock in the continental
crust and upper mantle expand to become less dense and more buoyant,'' said
Derrick Hasterok, a graduate student in geology and geophysics.
Hasterok and his professor, David Chapman, published their findings in the June
online issue of Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth.
In what they said was the first calculation of its kind, the researchers said
heat inside the planet accounts for half the reason land rises above sea level
or higher to form mountains.
Scientists previously gave other factors greater weight in explaining elevation
differences, such as the density and makeup of rocks and tectonic forces.
The Utah team calculated how much of North America would sink if the engine of
heat was taken away, leaving regions as relatively cold as the bottom of the
vast Canadian shield -- bedrock that hasn't changed for billions of years.
They did it by estimating temperatures under the North American plate based on
previous experiments that bounced seismic waves deep underground. The waves
travel faster through colder, denser rock. That data allowed the researchers to
calculate how much of an area's elevation is due to the thickness and
composition of its rock and how much is due to the heating and expansion of
rock.
Their measurements showed that among coastal cities, New York would drop to
1,427 feet below the Atlantic ocean, Boston and Miami even deeper. Los Angeles
would rest 3,756 feet below the surface of the Pacific ocean.
New Orleans, still recovering from Hurricane Katrina's 2005 storm surges,
wouldn't have a chance without planetary heat. No levee could protect the city,
which would sit 2,426 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico.
The country's midsection wouldn't be spared, either. Chicago would sink 2,229
feet below sea level. Most of the country, in fact, would disappear, leaving
only ridges of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra-Nevada Range and the the area
west of the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest.
The Colorado plateau, a major uplift of land driven by 1,200-degree underground
heat, consists of much the same layers of rock found deep under the Great
Plains, where the base of the Earth's crust is relatively cooler, 930 degrees,
the researchers estimated.
Their scenario actually lifts Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. The region sits
on a cold slab of oceanic crust that is diving under the continent, insulating
the land mass from the Earth's heat. It would rise if the crust was warmed to a
temperature equal to the warmer bottom of the Canadian shield.
The Seattle scenario is puzzling but emphasizes a region that's on a different
tectonic plate than the rest of the West Coast, said Barbara EchoHawk of
Geological Society of America.
The researchers used the Canadian shield -- ''a special, stable and cool area of
rock'' -- as their statistical baseline for the effect of removing heat from
under the continent. The slab under Seattle, however, is colder than the
Canadian shield, so it would be the only U.S. region to rise under this
analysis, she said.
Hasterok said heat from Earth's deep interior and from radioactive decay of
uranium, thorium and potassium in Earth's crust will stay around for a long time
to come.
Even if the planet's interior cooled, it would take billions of years for
continents to sink. Coastal areas face a more immediate threat from global
warming, which could raise sea levels and flood cities, he said.
LONDON (AP) -- Sir Wally Herbert, the first man to cross the entire frozen
surface of the Arctic Ocean on foot, has died at the age of 72, a friend of the
polar explorer said Wednesday.
The cause of death was not immediately clear, but family friend Geoff Renner
said Herbert had been suffering from diabetes. He died at a hospital in
Inverness, Scotland.
Herbert's grueling trip across the ice earned him a knighthood in 2000. The data
collected by his expedition during his 1968-69 trip across the Arctic are still
used by scientists seeking to measure the melting of the North Pole's ice cap
and the effects of climate change.
Herbert was born in York, England, on Oct. 24, 1934 into a family with a strong
tradition of military service. He served with the Royal Engineers in the Middle
East from 1951-54, where picked up his surveying skills.
''He had a quite strong wanderlust, but the military did not give that any
satisfaction,'' said Lewis McNaught, who is writing his biography.
Herbert later joined the Falklands Islands Dependencies Survey -- the forerunner
to the British Antarctic Survey. While in the Antarctic, Herbert mapped some
45,000 square miles of new country, according to his Web site.
His attention then turned to the North Pole. Taking a route from Alaska to
Spitsbergen, a remote Norwegian island, he covered the 3,720 miles in 16 months,
reaching the North Pole on April 6, 1969. He spent the winter on the frozen ice
cap, camping through three months of total darkness in temperatures dipping as
low as 58 degrees below zero.
Roy Koerner, a glaciologist accompanying Herbert, drilled more than 250 ice core
samples during the journey. Those samples now help scientists measure the impact
of climate change on the pole.
''Today all the measurements of ice melt can all be compared against the first
benchmarks taken by Roy Koerner,'' McNaught said. ''At the time, the scientific
importance of that was lost, but in the coverage now given to the impact of
global warming of the polar ice cap, these measurements are extraordinarily
important.''
An author and artist, Herbert wrote nine books and held one-man shows in London,
Sydney, Australia, and New York, his Web site said.
Herbert is survived by his wife, Marie, and a daughter, Kari. He will be buried
Monday in a private ceremony.
