Larry Mayer had a flight to catch that he did not want to miss. It was the first in a series of airplane rides that would transport him all the way from New Hampshire to a previously unexplored part of the Arctic circle called Victoria Fjord. “No ship has ever been there before,” said Mayer, 72, a professor and director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, speaking by phone a half hour before his departure.
To get there, he first had to fly from Boston to Copenhagen, then catch a connecting flight to Stockholm, where a Swedish military plane would transport Mayer to a US Air Force Base in northern Greenland. Finally, from there, Mayer would catch the Oden — a 354-foot icebreaker ship, capable of cutting through about 6 feet of ice. Advertisement He is one of 40 researchers from six countries joining a research expedition that departed in early August and is scheduled to return in mid-September.
Since the 1970s, Mayer estimates that he’s been to the Arctic about 17 times — and a handful of those he was aboard this same vessel. This time, he’s carrying a flag from The Explorer’s Club with him, a symbol of the contribution to exploration and science. Once aboard the icebreaker, Mayer said the journey could get tricky near the top of Greenland in the Lincoln Sea due to some of the last remaining vestiges of the thickest sea ice in the Arctic — up to 20 feet thick.
Mayer said a team monitors ice conditions from a satellite.