by Lynne Cox
Nansen asked Amundsen to take as many samples as he could from the polar current on the east coast of Greenland because he believed they would solve many of the riddles about the current.
Nansen also asked Amundsen to pay attention to the color of the ocean, whether it was green, blue, or deep blue-green. He believed that the deep blue color indicated that it was water from the Gulf Stream; greenish or brown water could indicate a mixture of coastal water and polar water, and these both contained a lot of plankton. Jellyfish were also very important. He believed that they came from coastal waters, and he was most interested to see if Amundsen observed any jellyfish in the polar streams. Nansen asked him not to forget to draw a map in his journal and on every watch note the color, size, and number of jellyfish. Nansen also noted that in the holes on ice floes were colonies of brown algae that he believed could help determine the origin of the sea ice. And he also asked Amundsen to take as many soundings—depth measurements—as possible during the journey. He told him how to use tubes to sample water and plankton. And he asked Amundsen to see if he noticed a strange phenomenon that Nansen observed in 1893 when he was on the Fram in the Nordenskiöld Archipelago. Nansen had observed “dead water,” which a Swedish scientist, V. Walfrid Ekman, described as a lighter layer of water resting on top of a denser, more salty layer of water. It had a strange effect on ships, reducing their speed and maneuverability, and sometimes made it extremely difficult to steer. Amundsen realized that taking these observations for Nansen would help Amundsen discover more about the oceans and navigate the Northwest Passage.
The following year, 1902–1903, Amundsen was exhausted from fund-raising from scientific societies and private sources. He interviewed and handpicked his crew: Godfred Hansen, first officer; Helmer Hanssen, second officer; Anton Lund, a former sealer; Peder Ristvedt, engineer; Gustav Wiik, second engineer, and Adolf Lindström, cook.
Amundsen worked frantically to prepare the Gjøa for the expedition, and a day before they were to sail, he faced the largest crisis of his career. One of his creditors was pressuring him to pay for the supplies for the expedition, and he threatened to have Amundsen arrested. Amundsen urgently called his crew together and explained the situation. They needed to take desperate action, and the crew supported his decision.
To avoid the creditors and an end to the expedition, at midnight on June 16, 1903, under the cover of a heavy rainstorm, Amundsen and his crew sneaked out of Norway. He wrote,
When dawn arose on our truculent creditor, we were safely out on the open main, seven as light-hearted pirates as ever flew the black flag, disappearing upon a quest that should take us three years and on which we were destined to succeed in an enterprise that had baffled our predecessors for four centuries. (My Life as an Explorer, 36)
The Gjøa sailed across the North Atlantic through mostly smooth seas with little ice, and on July 24 reached Godhavn on Disko Island, halfway up the west coast of Greenland. The Gjøa’s first stop was to load on board twenty Greenlandic sled dogs and supplies. Reaching Greenland was like finally taking flight or completing the first mile in a long swim. Amundsen knew that he was really on his way toward his goal. He had entered waters he had never explored.
CHAPTER 8
Greenland Shark
I had read about Amundsen as a teenager; I decided I would follow in his wake. When I first started considering Greenland as a place I would one day visit, I hadn’t read yet about his Northwest Passage journey. I never realized how closely I would follow his path. I would go to Antarctica first, like Amundsen, then follow him to Greenland.
Now as we flew over Greenland, I pressed my forehead against the cool window.
In June 1972, on my way to swim across the English Channel, I flew on a 747 with my mother bound for London. It was one of the most exciting times in my life. I was fifteen years old, and I was on my first flight across the North Atlantic. The sky was clear and the water far below bright sapphire and darker shades of blue where the currents changed. All at once, the edge of Greenland, the world’s largest island, most of it within the Arctic Circle, was rising up out of the ocean.
White glacial domes shimmered in the robin’s-egg-blue sky; ribbons of fractured ice and snow clung to black rocky pinnacles; rivers of ice and snow, pushed by the force of gravity, creped and tumbled in wide S-shaped bands into the sea. I had never seen anything like this world before. I wanted to stop and explore. I had never felt so strongly about going anywhere as I did about Greenland. Something was drawing me there.
I looked thirty-five thousand feet straight down and held my breath. There was something oval and white floating on the dark blue water. It was an iceberg! It was the first time I had ever seen an iceberg, and it was as awe inspiring as seeing the North Star for the first time.
We continued our flight across the North Atlantic and landed at Heathrow, and I went on to swim the English Channel. I flew over again the following year when I returned to swim the Channel a second time. My dream of going to Greenland was even stronger, but I was only sixteen years old, and I had no idea of how anyone could swim with icebergs. I swam across various waterways, and eventually swam in colder waters. Finally I began to think about how to get to Greenland and swim there. No one I knew had ever been to Greenland but Robert Ballard, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who, like me, had attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, had. Robert Ballard was famous for discovering the RMS Titanic, the Olympic-class British passenger liner that had sunk in 1912 when the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Heart pounding, I called Ballard at Woods Hole in the late 1970s and told him everything in one breath—my background, that we both had attended UCSB, that because of his experience with the Titanic in the North Atlantic, he might know what I needed to learn to swim off Greenland: information about tides, current speeds, water temperatures, weather patterns, wind speed and direction during the summer months. Ballard knew of my background and was helpful and put me in touch with other people in his group who provided me with more details. The information, though, was not all that promising. The water temperature off Greenland in summer was, at the most, 38 degrees Fahrenheit and could be a lot colder.
I kept working at it, swimming in colder waterways, and just when I thought that I was ready to attempt a swim in Greenland, I heard about the Greenland shark. I was in Vancouver for a Canadian television program, and while waiting for the show, I watched a program called Discovery Canada. There was a shark expert answering question about polar sharks. I watched a huge fifteen-foot-long Greenland shark swim slowly across the television screen as the expert explained that the Greenland shark was very dangerous. It was known for being sluggish and for being cannibalistic, immune to the poison in other Greenland sharks’ flesh. The Greenland shark ate salmon, crabs, flesh from dead whales, polar bears, and seals. Even the remains of reindeer were found in their stomachs.
Being smaller than most of those animals, I had second thoughts about swimming in Greenland’s waters. But I needed to confirm with my shark expert friends how dangerous the Greenland shark really was to me; I didn’t want to be scared off and, at the same time, was trying to figure out how to swim there safely. Friends suggested I swim in a net. The problem with that was there was drag, and I would be pulled along in the wake of the net, not making the swim under my own powers.
No one swam voluntarily in Greenland’s waters, and I wasn’t sure if there was a Danish coast guard that patrolled the waters, or a dive team. I just couldn’t figure it out, and I was scared of the Greenland shark. Instead I decided to go south and swim in the cold waters off Antarctica. Without knowing it at that time, I was following Amundsen’s path. He went south to go north, and I would be doing the same. What I didn’t realize was that one of the biggest clues to figuring out if a Greenland swim would be possible would occur on the Quark expedition ship on my way to Antarctica in 2002.
Within the fi
rst few hours on board, I met Adam Ravtech, a documentary filmmaker who was working for 60 Minutes. Adam looked familiar. He was of medium height, lean, nimble, with broad shoulders, and had dark brown wavy hair and a big smile. I thought I recognized his voice, and I remembered we had met at California State University, Long Beach, at the shark research lab.
It had been at least twenty years since I’d seen him. Adam had been doing research with Don Nelson, my shark expert friend, on little lemon sharks and small horn sharks. Adam had studied how sharks hunt and navigate by using the one hundred to fifteen hundred tiny black pores on their heads and snouts called ampullae of Lorenzini. He explained that the black pores are filled with electrically conductive jelly, and the bottoms of the pores are lined with hairlike cells called cilia. When fish or swimmers move past, they emit a weak electrical current, and this electrical current is detected by the shark’s ampullae of Lorenzini. The cilia triggers at the base of the pores release neurotransmitters in the shark’s brain, and the shark becomes aware of possible food in the water.
Adam explained that sharks are probably more sensitive to electric fields than any other animal. They can easily detect swimmers by their muscle contractions and perhaps the beating of their hearts, because humans and animals produce electrical fields when their muscles contract. But a shark can also detect weak electrochemical fields when its prey is paralyzed. Sharks are so good at using their ampullae of Lorenzini that they can even tell where prey is hiding in the sand.
Sharks may also use their ampullae of Lorenzini to detect the electrical fields that are produced by ocean currents that move in the earth’s magnetic field and use these to orient themselves underwater and to navigate. And because their muscles contract when they swim, they can sense the electrical field in their own bodies. They may be able to use that to feel the earth’s magnetic field and know which direction they are going.
The gel-like substance in the ampullae of Lorenzini has electrical properties that allow changes in temperature to be transmitted into electrical information that a shark can use to detect temperature gradients—temperature changes in different areas of the ocean.
What Adam told me made me think that the Greenland shark could probably detect the beats, the electrical impulses, of the human heart. This didn’t make me feel more confident. But Adam assured me that the Greenland shark wouldn’t be a problem.
Since he’d left the world of research, he had been working on documentaries about polar bears and walrus, and for twenty years he had been filming how climate change was affecting their survival.
When Adam mentioned that he had done a lot of underwater camera work, I asked him if he had ever encountered the Greenland shark. Not only had he filmed them, he had footage of one with him. We immediately went down to his cabin, and he pulled out a video and a small television screen and played the footage for me.
The shark Adam filmed was maybe sixteen feet long, with a massive head and stunningly sharp teeth. It was coffee-colored with a small dorsal fin. Adam swam close to the shark so that he could capture its head and face and then one of its eyes. I was squirming inside. I couldn’t imagine ever getting that close to such a large shark. Adam must have been within a foot of it.
Adam pointed out the black pores, the ampullae of Lorenzini, on the Greenland shark’s face. He captured a close-up of its jaw and large white serrated teeth. He explained that the Greenland shark’s diet didn’t include humans, and they wouldn’t be interested in me.
Adam was somewhat reassuring, but it was hard to suddenly go from being scared of the immense shark to accepting what Adam told me. I had to weigh this with what Don Nelson, my longtime shark-expert friend and Adam’s mentor, told me. He warned that sharks were unpredictable, and once when he had been out on a dive studying gray reef sharks, one of the sharks suddenly attacked him, even though it hadn’t shown any sign of aggression.
Adam had spent at least twenty summers filming in Arctic waters, and he had been very close to the Greenland shark and had never had a problem. I was convinced. He smiled and said, “It’s not the Greenland sharks you have to worry about, it’s the walrus. They can be aggressive. One grabbed ahold of my diving partner when we were filming a documentary, and I had to grab the diver and pull him out of the water. But you should be okay, as long as you stay away from where the walrus haul out”—the places where walrus pull themselves out of the water onto the rocks or beach.
Adam offered to help me with contacts in Greenland, and I realized that my reason for going to Antarctica wasn’t only to swim there, but was also to make this connection with him and take him up on his offer to help with a swim in Greenland. I verified the information I had been given twenty years before, about the water temperatures. Adam explained that in summer, on the warmer west coast of Greenland, water temperatures would be around 36 degrees Fahrenheit, but the water was warming up there, and it could be as high as 38 degrees Fahrenheit. In the spring, the water would be a lot cooler, in the high twenties.
Like Amundsen’s first trip to Antarctica, mine would be to explore, learn, and work with my crew. I was also going to push myself further than I ever had before. If it worked, then I could go for Greenland. With amazing support from my crew, I swam 1.22 miles in twenty-five minutes in 32-degree-Fahrenheit water and completed the first Antarctic swim.
There were things that needed to be improved upon. We’d set up the swim with three Zodiacs (hard-shelled inflatable motorboats), three physicians, and three crew members who could pull me out of the water if there was a problem. Bob Griffith was in the lead boat out in front with a rope, Dan Cohen was in the Zodiac beside me in a dry suit, and Barry Binder was in the same Zodiac. If something went wrong and I couldn’t get myself out of the water, Dan would jump in and swim over to me and pull me over to Barry’s boat. If we needed more assistance, Bob would throw a lasso toward me, and Dan would loop it over my shoulders and arms, and Bob would pull me into his boat. As a backup, we also looped a small piece of rope through the back of my swimsuit and tied it, so that it could be grabbed if I needed to be pulled out. It was a good backup plan, but it needed to be improved on in case there were problems off Greenland.
Friends of mine were rock climbers, and I knew they wore harnesses when they climbed. Other friends were in the U.S. Coast Guard, and they showed me the harnesses coast guard rescue swimmers wore when they jumped into the ocean to rescue people. Their harnesses were elaborate. What we needed was someone who could create a hybrid. June McKenna could design just about anything, and Kyle, her son, was an avid rock climber. Together they created a simple, easily visible, cross-the-heart-and-back bright orange harness that I could wear with a carabiner, a clamp, looped through the harness, a place where another carabiner could be attached that was connected to a rope.
We didn’t know where to place the carabiner, on the front or the back of the harness. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but we wondered if it was easier to pull someone out more quickly one way or the other. I got in touch with Richard Galdish of the U.S. Coast Guard about doing a test swim with the harness in the Hudson River. Henry Hudson had discovered the river in his attempt to find the Northwest Passage, and it seemed like a great way to remember him, and a good place to gather with my crew to test out the harness. Rich told me that U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmers wore swimming harnesses with a ring on the back to which a retrieving line could be fastened. Before the swimmer jumped into the water to make a rescue, the boat crew attached a long rope with a carabiner to the ring on the back of the rescue swimmer’s harness. The rescue swimmer swam over to the victim, held on to him, and when the crew pulled them to the boat, the rescue swimmer and victim remained on their backs with their faces out of the water so they were able to breathe throughout the rescue. The harness did not provide any type of flotation; it only enabled the crew to pull them to the boat quickly and get them out of the water.
We decided to go with the U.S. Coast Guard model, and we needed to figure out how to use th
e harness-and-rope combination effectively. Friends with the swift-water rescue team with Long Beach Fire and Lifeguard Department in California invited Bob Griffith, one of my crew members, and me to join them in Long Beach and train with them.
The lifeguards had me jump into the water off the dive platform at the back of their rescue boat. They leaned over and clamped the rope to the carabineer on the harness and then looped the rope back and forth onto itself; each lifeguard grabbed an end, pushed the rope down and then up three times, gaining momentum each time; and on the third time they popped me out of the water. Bob Griffith learned the technique from them, and then we met with Bill Lee. When Bill and I were teenagers we swam for different swim teams and we competed against each other. He had played water polo at UCSB, and I had been the assistant coach for the men’s water polo and swim teams. He had been a Newport Beach lifeguard and later became a director for Smith Barney.
When Bill heard that I planned to swim in Greenland, he immediately offered to be one of the support crew. Bill introduced me to his friend Gretchen Goodall from Citigroup. When Gretchen discovered that I was going to swim in Greenland, she offered to help by taking care of the logistics and whatever else might be needed for the trip.
We were from all different parts of the United States, and we decided to meet in New York City to test out the harness and have Bob Griffith teach Bill how to pop a swimmer out of the water. The water would be too cold in Greenland to do any kind of test there. My plan didn’t work out. Because of the security concerns around Manhattan post-9/11, I couldn’t get clearance to conduct a test in the Hudson or neighboring waterways.
