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By Gemma Simpson, 21 November 2007 16:16

NEWS

Ice caps

One of the biggest fears is global warming will increase the rate at which the polar ice caps melt.

But one thing that's not known is the thickness of the Arctic ice, so a team of high-tech polar explorers are planning to travel to the North Pole next year to survey the polar ice cap.

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The Vanco Arctic Survey expedition will take 120 days, cover 2,000km and take roughly 10 million measurements of the ice's thickness via a radar system used at 20cm intervals.

The ice cap is covered by a layer of snow and although indirect data is available on the snow and ice thickness, there has been no recent measurements of the ice breadth alone.

One of the polar explorers on the expedition, Pen Hadow, said: "If we can take away the snow and look at the ice we can find out how long the ice cap will be with us... The only way we can get this data is by directly observed measurements from walking across the ice cap."

Current estimates put the ice cap lifespan at between 16 and 100 years.

Click here to see photos of the tech behind the expedition.

The three-strong team tested the satellite and radar equipment which will be used to measure the thickness of the polar ice recently in Northern Canada.

The trials were a success with the world's most-northerly as-live video message transmitted back to the UK HQ using the satellite communications system.