The boats of Float Your Boat are now travelling with the ice!
After two weeks at sea, navigating sea ice and leads aboard KV Svalbard, the small wooden boats of the Float Your Boat project have made it all the way to the North Pole.
On the way there, the boats were sorted and registered, and the conscripts of KV Svalbard got the opportunity to decorate their own boats after an introduction to the project, the Arctic Ocean and how the sea ice moves by Marianna Anichini.
The small boats were deployed in two batches. Roughly one third of the boats started their journey on August 27, slightly east of the North Pole. Most likely, these boats will follow the Transpolar Drift across the North Pole at some point during this winter, following the path that Fridtjof Nansen envisioned in 1893. The remaining boats were deployed on August 29 at the North Pole itself. All the small boats were placed closely around ice buoys provided by the International Arctic Buoy Programme or other similar buoys with GPS trackers so that we can follow the movements of the boats into the winter. In both deployments, the boats that were placed as a sun each had rays made of boats from one specific school per ray. The heart and the circle on the North Pole were made of different schools all together.
Now we just have to wait as we follow the boats remotely. Where will they move during the winter? Will the sea ice around them melt next summer? Will they travel with the Transpolar Drift system or take a detour in another direction? And what the boat decorators themselves are maybe most curious about: Will any of them be found on an Arctic beach two or three, or maybe five, years from now? For now, we just have to be patient.
*Cover photo: Marianna Anichini (UiB).
Find out more about how HiAOOS and Float Your Boat work together to raise awareness of the Arctic:
