World of the Bizarre

Man plans to spend year living on an iceberg

By T.K. Randall
April 18, 2015 ·  24 comments

Bellini will spend twelve months watching his new home melt away. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5 Ansgar Walk Having previously completed journeys across the Sahara desert, the Pacific ocean and the snowy wastelands of Alaska, the veteran outdoorsman is no stranger to surviving for long periods of time in some of the most extreme environments on Earth.His latest endeavor however, which will see him spend a full twelve months residing inside a survival capsule on top of an iceberg in Greenland, may be his toughest yet.

Bellini's inspiration for the attempt was Umberto Nobile, an Italian thrill-seeker who was forced to survive for a month on the ice after crashing his zeppelin near Svalbard back in the 1920s.

Unlike his 20th century counterpart however Bellini will have much of what he needs available to him on-hand thanks to the special survival capsule he will be living in which, having been made from aircraft-grad aluminum, was originally designed to keep people alive during a tsunami.

During his time in the pod he will also be monitoring the iceberg that he is living on as it slowly melts away in an effort to gain awareness for global warming.

"I want to prove how the pace of ice-melting has dramatically accelerated over the last decades," he said. "We'll also play the symbolic card: the adventure of a man floating adrift on an iceberg will come to represent the condition of the whole humankind going adrift on an endangered planet."


Source: Smithsonian Magazine | Comments (24)

Tags: Greenland, Iceberg