A Giant Ball Will Help This Man Survive a Year on an Iceberg

Summary

While rowing across the Pacific in 2008, wind pushing him and waves battering him, Italian explorer Alex Bellini felt an unsettling lack of control. Playing in his mind was the story of another Italian explorer, Umberto Nobile, who crashed his zeppelin north of Svalbard after a 1928 polar expedition. Seven men died. The survivors, including Nobile, spent a month wandering the free-floating pack ice, at one point shooting and eating a polar bear, until their rescue. How people react to unpredictable situations fascinates Bellini, a dedicated student of psychology. In the Arctic Ocean, unpredictable situations are a way of life. “All adventure is based on hypothesis, which can be very different to reality,” says Bellini. “An adventurer must adapt himself to the environment he faces.” Bellini’s newest adventure highlights and relishes that lack of control. Sometime next winter, he plans to travel to Greenland’s west coast, pick an iceberg, and live on it for a year as it melts out in the Atlantic. Sometime next winter, Alex Bellini plans to travel to Greenland’s west coast, pick an iceberg, and live on it for a year as it melts out in the Atlantic. (Courtesy of Alex Bellini) This is a precarious idea. Bellini will be completely isolated, and his adopted dwelling is liable to roll or fall apart at any moment, thrusting him into the icy sea or crushing him under hundreds of tons of ice. His task: experience the uncontrollable nature of an iceberg at sea without getting himself killed. The solution: an indestructible survival capsule built by an aeronautics company that specializes in tsunami-proof escape pods. “This adventure is about waiting for something to happen,” says Bellini. “But I knew since the beginning I needed to minimize the risk. An iceberg can flip over, and those events can be catastrophic.” Icebergs tend to get top-heavy as they melt from their submerged bottoms, so flips can be immediate and unpredictable. And, of course, so is the weather. Bellini spen...