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Day: April 9, 2024

Transglobal Car Expedition Achieves Historic North Pole Traverse

Posted on by goodgear

On Saturday, April 6th, 2024, at approximately 23:00 Geneva time, the Transglobal Car Expedition successfully crossed the geographic North Pole at 90°N. This remarkable achievement follows four months of challenging cross-continent travel, showcasing the team’s dedication, resilience, and unwavering spirit.

The Transglobal Car Expedition is a trailblazing initiative that is redefining the boundaries of wheeled exploration. It departed northward from New York on January 10th, 2024, beginning an awe-inspiring journey to circumnavigate the Earth. The expedition sees the team traversing both the geographic and Magnetic North and South Poles, before returning back to New York from the south over 18 months later.

The team has now accomplished their most northern milestones of their journey. “Passage of the North Pole is the most difficult stage of our expedition,” says Vasily Shakhnovskiy, leader of the expedition. “Our final approach required all-day travel, traversing 43.6 km before we reached our parking spot at 90°N. Now that we’re here, it’s a little bit of euphoria. This achievement marks the culmination of years of planning and perseverance.”

Their arrival at the North Pole was not just a geographical conquest — but a scientific one. “Using the CosmicPi detector ‘Nansen,’ the Transglobal team recorded cosmic ray data at the North Pole” says James Devine, the CERN engineer who developed the CosmicPi detectors. Etam Noah, Cosmic Pi scientist said “These are the very first measurements of cosmic rays at this latitude and will help researchers understand these unique particles.” These measurements were captured on cosmic ray detectors built at CERN using an open hardware design, specifically adapted to endure the environmental extremes of the North Pole. The Transglobal team remains committed to measuring cosmic rays throughout their expedition, providing valuable insights into these particles at every latitude they encounter.

Cosmic Ray Flux data recorded by detector ‘Nansen” at 90 N.

During the journey, the expedition also took advantage of cutting-edge satellite technology. Several satellite systems, initially ESA’s Sentinel-1 and other commercial systems. Subsequently, at higher latitudes, only COSMO-SkyMed provided daily synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of the expedition’s route.

These images not only enabled the team to monitor ice conditions and navigate safely through this remote region but also yielded crucial data on ice thickness, contributing significantly to our understanding of polar dynamics and climate change. In addition, the team carried out in-situ measurements of the ice thickness. “This milestone recording of ice thickness at the North Pole underscores the critical need for in-situ measurements in understanding Arctic ice dynamics,” says Christian Haas. “While satellite monitoring offers valuable insights, the scarcity and uncertainties surrounding ice thickness data hinder the compilation of consistent datasets. The measurements taken by the Transglobal team remain the gold standard, providing invaluable validation for airborne and satellite observations.”

The journey to the North Pole represents the culmination of five years of perseverance and dedication. Despite navigating through a global pandemic and facing logistical challenges, the team’s unwavering determination, fueled by the exceptional quality of its members, led to this remarkable achievement. Shakhnovskiy expressed heartfelt gratitude to the team and supporters, stating, “The reason we’ve persevered through every obstacle is the exceptional quality of people on our team, both at the North Pole and across the globe providing support. Your dedication and support have been invaluable.”

As the team rests and regroups at the North Pole, preparations are already underway for the next leg of their journey. With timing becoming increasingly crucial, plans to expedite the delivery of essential supplies and navigate towards Greenland are swiftly in motion.

The Italian Space Agency (ASI), in collaboration with e-GEOS (Telespazio/ASI) is the sole concessioner for the commercial use of satellite data acquired by the COSMO-SkyMed constellation. ASI will continue providing images covering an area extending up to at 200×200 km, to help the expedition select the best route to leave the North Pole and reach Greenland.

Follow the Transglobal Car Expedition’s remarkable journey as they continue to push the boundaries of exploration and scientific discovery. Stay updated on their progress and groundbreaking research by visiting: https://transglobalcar.com/

Transglobal Citizen Science School Forum @ CERN

An Unforgettable Scientific Journey: From the North Pole to CERN

Exactly four months after the Transglobal Car Expedition reached the North Pole the expedition made its way to Geneva, Switzerland. The Transglobal Citizen Science School forum, hosted at CERN and sponsored by the Goodgear Around the World Association, PolarQuest, and the MW Shakhnovskiy Foundation, brought together three teams from Lebanon, Georgia, and Uganda, with a total of around 20 future scientists participating. The generous support of Olga and Vasily Shakhnovskiy, through their family foundation, made this event possible for students from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, covering all travel expenses to Switzerland and France.

The Citizen Science School Forum at CERN was organized to inspire the next generation of scientists by immersing them in the world of research and discovery. To this end, students were not merely visitors to CERN but active participants, having conducted their own scientific research prior to their arrival at CERN through various citizen science initiatives.

One of the key projects, CREDO, offered students the opportunity to explore one of the theories of Dark Matter. One idea is that it is made of “super-massive particles” born in the early Universe. If this theory proved to be true, while we cannot see such particles directly, we know that at the end of their life they would produce very high energy photons. Interacting with the atmosphere, such photons would create “super-preshowers” of low-energy particles. We are unable to see dark matter particles, but we can observe these super-preshowers – and that is exactly what our citizen scientists did. Equipped with smartphones, the student teams became particle hunters, contributing to the world’s largest cosmic radiation detector by capturing the remarkable number of 404,000 cosmic radiation particles.

Another project, Globe at Night, aimed to raise awareness about light pollution. The citizen scientists engaged in this initiative by measuring the brightness of the night sky, collecting extensive data that highlights the impact of artificial lighting on our environment. Their contributions added valuable data to a global effort to understand light pollution.

At CERN, our citizen scientists were able to engage directly with the scientific processes that power some of the world’s most advanced research. By building Cloud Chambers, analyzing cosmic ray data, and visiting pivotal CERN sites like the Synchrocyclotron, the CERN Control Center and the Antimatter Factory, they saw firsthand how theoretical concepts translate into real-world applications. The students showed remarkable curiosity, showing their deep understanding of the subject matter.

They interacted with not only CERN scientists but also the Transglobal Expedition crew. Among other things, the crew talked about their record of taking the northernmost measurement of cosmic rays. The students also learned about other aspects of the expedition, including the expedition’s use of satellite guidance to make their way in the melting polar ice shelf and the ice thickness in situ measurements, another first in polar science, that the crew has been carrying out while crossing the Canadian Arctic towards the North Pole and back via Greenland. They also got some information on the challenges the expedition crew had to overcome on their journey, travelling around 10,000 km in 4 months, and having had to adapt to extreme climate.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Geneva program was its potential to inspire. By interacting with scientists and the Transglobal crew, contributing to scientific research with their own citizen science projects, and exploring the inner workings of CERN and the Transglobal Car Expedition, the students were encouraged to further pursue science. 

At the end of the event Nakirijja Betty, supervisor for the Uganda team, expressed how much this experience meant to her and her students:

“Thank you for giving us the opportunity to travel here and see the different machines that physicists have made. In our country, we know about the theory part of it, but for the first time, my students and I were able to see the equipment that follows these theories. And I am sure, this experience is going to change a student’s life”.