Bermuda-based property-casualty insurer and reinsurer Catlin Group Limited announced today it is sponsoring a scientific expedition to the Arctic to take sophisticated samples and measurements to help the study of global warming on the ice cap.

The company said the project–to be known as the Catlin Arctic Survey–will be led by British explorer Pen Hadow.

Team members will be pulling their sledges and even swimming between ice floes from late February to the end of May 2009, the announcement said.

Catlin said the exploration group will take up to 20 million surface measurements of the sea ice using specially built, portable ground-penetrating radar as well as drilling into the ice.

The measurements will be taken, the company explained, as part of a pioneering surface survey over a 1,200-mile route from the Canadian coast to the North Geographic Pole.

Mr. Hadow's expedition has already secured support from UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) and WWF International (Worldwide Fund for Nature), as well as the patronage of the Prince of Wales.

The company quoted Mr. Hadow as explaining that, “Our scientific partners at NASA, the U.S. Navy's Department of Oceanography and the University of Cambridge want this data to assess more accurately the current state of the Arctic Ocean's rapidly disappearing sea ice and to predict more precisely when it will no longer be a perennial surface feature of our planet.”

Announcing the sponsorship, Stephen Catlin, chief executive of Catlin Group Limited, said, “As a specialty insurance/reinsurance company, the potential effects of global warming will have a direct impact on our business.”

He said Catlin “manages risk based on hard facts, so we believe that obtaining this information is vital. The Catlin Arctic Survey will help inform all those who must plan for the potential effects of global warming.”

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, a leading scientist in the study of Arctic sea ice based at the U.S. Navy's Department of Oceanography in Monterey, Calif., and a lead scientific partner of Catlin Arctic Survey, commented: “We'll be integrating the survey's actual observations with same-day weather data to obtain near real-time model estimates of sea ice conditions on a daily basis. In this way we can test the accuracy of our modeling of the ice's thickness and re-assess our projections as to how long the surviving thicker ice is likely to last as a perennial feature.”

Because the Arctic is so vulnerable to changes in the Earth's climate, it is a significant barometer, acting as an early warning for wider impacts across the globe such as temperature and the rise in sea levels, it was explained.

Since 2001 the permanent central region of the Arctic Ocean's ice cover has receded by an area the size of the United Kingdom.

Besides Mr. Hadow, the survey team includes polar explorer Ann Daniels and polar photographer Martin Hartley.

Mr. Hadow said the team must visit the ice cap because neither satellites nor submarines can differentiate between the ice and snow layers.

The Catlin Arctic Survey will be equipped with sophisticated communications systems transmitting data, video and audio progress reports and news to the widest global audience. These reports will be transmitted from the Arctic using technology specially developed by Mr. Hadow's team.

Special Reports /

Catlin Backs Arctic Global Warming Study

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