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When the crew and passengers of the nuclear-powered icebreaker ship 50 Years of Victory reached the north pole in 2018, they placed a time capsule on the ice floe.
The metal cylinder contained letters, poems, photographs, badges, beer coasters, a menu, wine corks, ephemeral material from the early 21st century for future discoveries.
The future came pretty fast. The cylinder was found this week in the far northwest of Ireland after floating about 2,300 miles from the Arctic Circle, where global warming is melting a record amount of ice.
Conor McClory and Sophie Curran, surfers from the county Donegal town of Gweedore, were checking sea conditions when they spotted the tube off the coast of Bloody Foreland, a beautiful place named for the red hue of the rocks at sunset.
“When I saw it, first I thought it was a steel tube from a ship, then I picked it up and saw that it was engraved on it. So I thought it was a bomb, ”McClory told the Donegal Daily. “When I saw the date, I thought it might be someone’s ashes, so I didn’t open it.”
A Russian friend of a friend translated the engraving and told McClory it was a time capsule, so he opened it and discovered messages in Russian and English from the 50-year victory polar expedition.
A letter in English, dated August 4, 2018, read: “Everything around is covered in ice. We believe that by the time this letter is found, there will be sadly no more ice in the Arctic. “
McClory located one of the authors of the letter, a Russian Instagram blogger in St. Petersburg known as Sveta. In a Zoom call, Sveta said crew and passengers had thought the cylinder could be discovered in 30 to 50 years and expressed shock that it was found so quickly, McClory said.
In the last decade, Arctic temperatures have risen by almost 1 ° C. Arctic sea ice has reached its second lowest extent in a satellite record of 41 years.
Last year, the Greenland ice sheet lost a record amount of ice, equivalent to 1 million tons per minute. Since annual snowfall is no longer enough to replenish snow and ice lost during the summer melt, scientists fear the point of no return has passed.
A Nature Climate Change study predicts that summer sea ice that floats on the surface of the Arctic Ocean could completely disappear by 2035.
For € 29,600 (£ 26,740), the Russian-owned 50 Years of Victory takes passengers on 14-day expeditions to the North Pole, calling it a “magical destination.”
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