Andrei Rozhkov was a professional hero. At 37, he was a team leader in the airborne division of a Russian civil defense troop. His job was to lead teams of parachutists to catastrophes all around the world, from wars to earthquakes. He cut such a dashing figure that the Russian edition of Reader's Digest did a profile of him titled "My Profession: Rescuer."
An experienced diver, Rozhkov had long dreamed of organizing the first civilian dive at the North Pole. Though there had been plenty of dives in the permanently ice-covered Arctic Ocean, only once had anyone dived at the northern axis of the planet, where all meridians meet and where the sun, during the year's single polar day, seems to neither dip nor rise but eerily circles the sky at the same height.
The previous polar dive had been made in August 1962, by three crew members of the USS Seadragon, the fourth nuclear submarine to reach the pole. But in August, after five months of continuous sunlight, phytoplankton was thick and visibility poor.
In the early 1990s, Russia's fledgling entrepreneurs started to recognize the market for Arctic adventure travel. By building runways and temporary base camps on the floating ice ?€” a "luxury" once reserved for military or scientific expeditions ?€” they could open the top of the world to tourists. These runways allowed planes and helicopters taking off from Khatanga and Murmansk to fly skiers, parachutists and balloonists to the pole during the month of April, when the temperature rises to an average of minus 20 degrees Celsius and the ice is still strong enough to support a 35-ton cargo jet.
Rozhkov saw the opportunity to realize his dream. He contacted the Moscow State University Diving Club, which had experience diving in the White Sea, and in April 1998, he led the first ice-diving team to ever fly to the North Pole.
"When we got there, the weather was good and we found open water," said Mikhail Safonov, the second-in-command of the five-man expedition. Safonov, 30, is vice president of the club and a lecturer in marine biology at Moscow State University.
Oleg Bozhok, another diver, went in first. "It was amazingly beautiful, with tunnels and caves and a magic sort of light," Bozhok said. He settled on an ice platform about seven meters deep and filmed Rozhkov going straight down to 40 meters. Rozhkov had planned to surface slowly from 56 meters, taking pictures along the way.
His shot finished, Bozhok followed Rozhkov down. Then he was startled by a powerful light coming from below. He had no idea what it was. He filmed it and kept going down. But at 36 meters, his regulator froze and he had to be pulled up.
While Bozhok was catching his breath, the man holding the other line realized Rozhkov had reached the end of the tether and he gave it a tug.
"There was no answer," Safonov recounted. "But we thought Andrei was simply using his hands for his picture-taking, so we gave another tug, and then a third. When we started pulling him up, he didn't react and we started to worry. Oleg went back down to meet him."
"By then my regulator had thawed," Bozhok continued. "When I saw Andrei being pulled up toward me, he was clearly unconscious. I knew there was no way he could survive ascending from 56 meters like that."
And he didn't. There was bloody foam coming out of his mouth and nose, the result of an embolism caused by his rapid ascent. The first civilian to dive at the pole had become the first person to die there.
"The autopsy," Safonov said, "concluded he died of a simple heart attack, but at the time we wondered if the mysterious light might not have been a nuclear submarine whose sonar could have killed Andrei. Oleg [Bozhok] could have been saved by the ridge."
I had been several kilometers away on my own expedition when Rozhkov died. The following year, 1999, I returned for the fifth time to try something new: parachuting over the North Pole. Safonov, too, was back, leading a team of eight Russian divers and three foreigners. "We felt we owed it to Andrei to complete the job and prove it could be done safely," he said. He invited me to come along and watch the second dive.
And so, I soon found myself squeezing into a helicopter and taking the 40-minute ride from our base camp to the North Pole, where we immediately found a lead for the divers. It was about 10 meters wide, looking just like a river zigzagging into the distance. The rupture was covered with a paper-thin layer of dark ice freckled with delicate ice crystals, indicating the pack had only cracked open a few hours before our arrival.
Using a generator to drive a very ordinary, beat-up looking vacuum cleaner, Safonov's crew inflated a tent within minutes, placing it three meters from the edge of the lead. Then Safonov ordered a small area, about 3 meters by 1.5 meters, to be cleared of packed snow to provide a hard, stable diving platform. We all pitched in with spades and shovels and when we were finished, the hard ice rose less than half a meter above the water's surface. I crouched on the edge and looked down; the ice was slightly greenish, with tiny bubbles trapped inside shining like Christmas lights. Finally, using a shovel, we removed the thin layer of ice from the surface, baring the blue-black water that, at the North Pole, is precisely 4,087 meters deep.
It was minus 30C outside and minus 1.8 C in the water, but inside the tent, heated by a kerosene stove, it was quite cozy. While Safonov and another diver were inside getting into their dry-suits I took a walk along the shore of the lead. About 30 meters away, I saw a seal's head peek out of the water. It was watching me, motionless, and when I moved forward, it disappeared. When it resurfaced, it was a little closer. This time, we both stood still, until it dove back under water. Seals are rare in the pole area in April because there is relatively little open water for them to breathe and resurface. As a result, there are also few polar bears, whose main diet consists of seals.
Sobered by Rozhkov's death, Safonov had radically modified the diving plan. No one would descend below 23 meters or cross more than two meters horizontally under the 3-meter-thick ice pack, a giant jigsaw that covers the entire Arctic Ocean.
Safonov went in first, followed by the second diver. We tracked their progress by the dark spots their bubbles created under the paper-thin ice that was beginning to form. A half hour later, they emerged, elated. Everything had gone well. Safonov reported seeing a jellyfish the size of an orange and put visibility at a remarkable 75 meters.
Safonov's return was followed by three other successful dives. Finally, it was Bob Wass' turn. Wass, a commercial diver from the United States, had brought with him a surface-supply air system connected to a tank along with a microphone that allowed the crew in the tent to hear what he was saying underwater. He also brought a remotely operated vehicle with a video camera. It was directed from a console in the tent and connected to a TV monitor.
"I've never seen anything like this in my life. It's like a chandelier under here. It's so beautiful," Wass said, his enthusiasm coming through the tinny loudspeaker. Looking at the images on the screen, I had to agree. The semi-transparent ice, with its myriad trapped bubbles, made for ghostly shapes that seemed as if they were from another world.
Suddenly, Wass' voice rose sharply. "Man, I can't believe this! I can see light coming up. This is really wild, man." We tried to get the ROV to point to the mysterious light, but we couldn't see it. It was the same light that Bozhok had seen during Rozhkov's last dive.
When Wass reemerged, holding a couple of shrimp he caught clinging from the ice, he said the light appeared to be coming up from underneath him, although he knew perfectly well that the sun was in the opposite direction.
The divers later showed the underwater videotape to scientists who might explain the phenomenon of the bright light that appeared to be ascending from below. They speculated that in the open waters of the North Pole, the light might play some unique trick of refraction. They were, at least, able to discredit the far-fetched theory of the light being emitted from a submarine.
As for Rozhkov's death, the seemingly indestructible rescuer had had a history of heart problems. That, connected with the stress of planning the first dive, could have led to his heart attack, his colleagues say. Upon reviewing the film that Bozhok, his diving partner, took of Rozhkov's descent, it appears that he was paddling with his feet as he went down, trying to slow his descent. That is when they believe he suffered the heart attack.
When Wass was back in Arctic clothing, we all gathered outside and offered a toast to Rozhkov. His fellow divers took out two plastic wreaths and placed them on the water. The wreaths sank slowly into the abyss as we took in the perfect Arctic silence and thought about Andrei.
After the helicopter had arrived and been loaded, Safonov called everyone back to the dive site for one last toast. Distributing glasses of vodka and pieces of black bread, Safonov placed one drink on the snow for Rozhkov. As we held up our glasses, he said, "Let us drink to Andrei's memory. We have realized his dream and shown that, ultimately, he was right." The shots were downed in silence.
For more information about North Pole diving, contact the Moscow State University Diving Club at 746-4813. Alternatively, you can e-mail them at [email protected].
http://www.dive.ru/english.htm Moscow State University Diving Club
An experienced diver, Rozhkov had long dreamed of organizing the first civilian dive at the North Pole. Though there had been plenty of dives in the permanently ice-covered Arctic Ocean, only once had anyone dived at the northern axis of the planet, where all meridians meet and where the sun, during the year's single polar day, seems to neither dip nor rise but eerily circles the sky at the same height.
The previous polar dive had been made in August 1962, by three crew members of the USS Seadragon, the fourth nuclear submarine to reach the pole. But in August, after five months of continuous sunlight, phytoplankton was thick and visibility poor.
In the early 1990s, Russia's fledgling entrepreneurs started to recognize the market for Arctic adventure travel. By building runways and temporary base camps on the floating ice ?€” a "luxury" once reserved for military or scientific expeditions ?€” they could open the top of the world to tourists. These runways allowed planes and helicopters taking off from Khatanga and Murmansk to fly skiers, parachutists and balloonists to the pole during the month of April, when the temperature rises to an average of minus 20 degrees Celsius and the ice is still strong enough to support a 35-ton cargo jet.
Rozhkov saw the opportunity to realize his dream. He contacted the Moscow State University Diving Club, which had experience diving in the White Sea, and in April 1998, he led the first ice-diving team to ever fly to the North Pole.
"When we got there, the weather was good and we found open water," said Mikhail Safonov, the second-in-command of the five-man expedition. Safonov, 30, is vice president of the club and a lecturer in marine biology at Moscow State University.
Oleg Bozhok, another diver, went in first. "It was amazingly beautiful, with tunnels and caves and a magic sort of light," Bozhok said. He settled on an ice platform about seven meters deep and filmed Rozhkov going straight down to 40 meters. Rozhkov had planned to surface slowly from 56 meters, taking pictures along the way.
His shot finished, Bozhok followed Rozhkov down. Then he was startled by a powerful light coming from below. He had no idea what it was. He filmed it and kept going down. But at 36 meters, his regulator froze and he had to be pulled up.
While Bozhok was catching his breath, the man holding the other line realized Rozhkov had reached the end of the tether and he gave it a tug.
"There was no answer," Safonov recounted. "But we thought Andrei was simply using his hands for his picture-taking, so we gave another tug, and then a third. When we started pulling him up, he didn't react and we started to worry. Oleg went back down to meet him."
"By then my regulator had thawed," Bozhok continued. "When I saw Andrei being pulled up toward me, he was clearly unconscious. I knew there was no way he could survive ascending from 56 meters like that."
And he didn't. There was bloody foam coming out of his mouth and nose, the result of an embolism caused by his rapid ascent. The first civilian to dive at the pole had become the first person to die there.
"The autopsy," Safonov said, "concluded he died of a simple heart attack, but at the time we wondered if the mysterious light might not have been a nuclear submarine whose sonar could have killed Andrei. Oleg [Bozhok] could have been saved by the ridge."
I had been several kilometers away on my own expedition when Rozhkov died. The following year, 1999, I returned for the fifth time to try something new: parachuting over the North Pole. Safonov, too, was back, leading a team of eight Russian divers and three foreigners. "We felt we owed it to Andrei to complete the job and prove it could be done safely," he said. He invited me to come along and watch the second dive.
And so, I soon found myself squeezing into a helicopter and taking the 40-minute ride from our base camp to the North Pole, where we immediately found a lead for the divers. It was about 10 meters wide, looking just like a river zigzagging into the distance. The rupture was covered with a paper-thin layer of dark ice freckled with delicate ice crystals, indicating the pack had only cracked open a few hours before our arrival.
Using a generator to drive a very ordinary, beat-up looking vacuum cleaner, Safonov's crew inflated a tent within minutes, placing it three meters from the edge of the lead. Then Safonov ordered a small area, about 3 meters by 1.5 meters, to be cleared of packed snow to provide a hard, stable diving platform. We all pitched in with spades and shovels and when we were finished, the hard ice rose less than half a meter above the water's surface. I crouched on the edge and looked down; the ice was slightly greenish, with tiny bubbles trapped inside shining like Christmas lights. Finally, using a shovel, we removed the thin layer of ice from the surface, baring the blue-black water that, at the North Pole, is precisely 4,087 meters deep.
It was minus 30C outside and minus 1.8 C in the water, but inside the tent, heated by a kerosene stove, it was quite cozy. While Safonov and another diver were inside getting into their dry-suits I took a walk along the shore of the lead. About 30 meters away, I saw a seal's head peek out of the water. It was watching me, motionless, and when I moved forward, it disappeared. When it resurfaced, it was a little closer. This time, we both stood still, until it dove back under water. Seals are rare in the pole area in April because there is relatively little open water for them to breathe and resurface. As a result, there are also few polar bears, whose main diet consists of seals.
Sobered by Rozhkov's death, Safonov had radically modified the diving plan. No one would descend below 23 meters or cross more than two meters horizontally under the 3-meter-thick ice pack, a giant jigsaw that covers the entire Arctic Ocean.
Safonov went in first, followed by the second diver. We tracked their progress by the dark spots their bubbles created under the paper-thin ice that was beginning to form. A half hour later, they emerged, elated. Everything had gone well. Safonov reported seeing a jellyfish the size of an orange and put visibility at a remarkable 75 meters.
Safonov's return was followed by three other successful dives. Finally, it was Bob Wass' turn. Wass, a commercial diver from the United States, had brought with him a surface-supply air system connected to a tank along with a microphone that allowed the crew in the tent to hear what he was saying underwater. He also brought a remotely operated vehicle with a video camera. It was directed from a console in the tent and connected to a TV monitor.
"I've never seen anything like this in my life. It's like a chandelier under here. It's so beautiful," Wass said, his enthusiasm coming through the tinny loudspeaker. Looking at the images on the screen, I had to agree. The semi-transparent ice, with its myriad trapped bubbles, made for ghostly shapes that seemed as if they were from another world.
Suddenly, Wass' voice rose sharply. "Man, I can't believe this! I can see light coming up. This is really wild, man." We tried to get the ROV to point to the mysterious light, but we couldn't see it. It was the same light that Bozhok had seen during Rozhkov's last dive.
When Wass reemerged, holding a couple of shrimp he caught clinging from the ice, he said the light appeared to be coming up from underneath him, although he knew perfectly well that the sun was in the opposite direction.
The divers later showed the underwater videotape to scientists who might explain the phenomenon of the bright light that appeared to be ascending from below. They speculated that in the open waters of the North Pole, the light might play some unique trick of refraction. They were, at least, able to discredit the far-fetched theory of the light being emitted from a submarine.
As for Rozhkov's death, the seemingly indestructible rescuer had had a history of heart problems. That, connected with the stress of planning the first dive, could have led to his heart attack, his colleagues say. Upon reviewing the film that Bozhok, his diving partner, took of Rozhkov's descent, it appears that he was paddling with his feet as he went down, trying to slow his descent. That is when they believe he suffered the heart attack.
When Wass was back in Arctic clothing, we all gathered outside and offered a toast to Rozhkov. His fellow divers took out two plastic wreaths and placed them on the water. The wreaths sank slowly into the abyss as we took in the perfect Arctic silence and thought about Andrei.
After the helicopter had arrived and been loaded, Safonov called everyone back to the dive site for one last toast. Distributing glasses of vodka and pieces of black bread, Safonov placed one drink on the snow for Rozhkov. As we held up our glasses, he said, "Let us drink to Andrei's memory. We have realized his dream and shown that, ultimately, he was right." The shots were downed in silence.
For more information about North Pole diving, contact the Moscow State University Diving Club at 746-4813. Alternatively, you can e-mail them at [email protected].
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