WWLXX: At the Prison of Ice

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Expedition Journal - Prologue

As it has been said, the expedition I have been assigned to was heading to regions of the far Arctic. I attended it on behalf of my good friend, sir Michael Bishop, who spent part of his company's earnings to fund projects such as this. This expedition has been a part of a research project organised by a group of people from several countries, aiming at large-scale ecological and climatological studies of a specific area between North Latitude 78°-86°. Our team consisted of several esteemed experts in the fields ranging widely from meteorology to polar biology, representing some high-ranking universities and institutes. Our plan in short was to leave at the end of the summer season from well-known arctic port in Barrow, Alaska and head west of the Chukchi Sea to collect meteorological and oceanographic data in the open sea. Then we will turn to the archipelagos of the Old World to make further observations of terrestrial flora and fauna, with a brief visit and exchange of information with the personnel of the Russian NP drifting ice station. By the middle of autumn we would reach Schmidt Island and deploy several buoys north of the Kara Sea to monitor and collect data, and at last we would head to one of the nearby polar stations to winter.

The start of the expedition was accompanied by several complications, as if something already marked its ill-omened course, or as if some other power wished to mercifully prevent us from attending it. Our very departure from Barrow was delayed by a week and three days due to an unexpected malfunction of the ship's engine, which was subsequently repaired, however after twenty days of sail we were forced once again to head for emergency docking in Dikson, Krasnoyarsk to perform another necessary repair. It was at this point when we started to worry about the fate of our expedition, as our aims were to avoid spending the peak of the winter season aboard the icebreaker. Our Russian colleagues have advised us to speed up our journey, and so it came that by autumn equinox we have managed to finish our observations in the Laptev Sea and at the beginning of November we found ourselves in waters close to 82°N 79°E, past Ushakov Island. The sea was already full of pack ice, yet our icebreaker moved smoothly enough for a long time until the unfortunate accident.

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