After 91 days, Colin O’Brady has arrived at the South Pole. Though he provides no detail on the state of his supplies, he has announced that he will continue with his crossing.
Antarctica Logistics & Expeditions usually wind down their Antarctic operations at the end of January, but O’Brady has paid to extend the season.
“There’s now a 12-person skeleton crew, including two ski aircraft 500 miles away from me, that I’ve arranged to stay in Antarctica for an extra month so I can continue to push farther,” he wrote on Instagram.
O’Brady started his journey from the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf in November, aiming to cross Antarctica via the South Pole, before finishing at the tip of Berkner Island on the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf.
O’Brady’s proposed route. Berkner Island is at the top of the red line, and the Ross Ice Shelf is at the bottom. The blue line shows O’Brady’s 2018-19 truncated ‘crossing’ that avoided the ice shelves. Map: Netflix
Can he finish?
O’Brady recently admitted that he was behind schedule. “One issue I’m encountering is that I thought I’d be long off the polar plateau by now. I planned to be back down towards the other ice shelves, but I got so delayed early on in this project,” he wrote on February 5.
When he left, he billed the journey as “110 days alone,” and told NBC that his sled weighed “around 500lbs [227kg].” However, on his own social media, he has remained tight-lipped about how much food and fuel he is carrying, or has remaining.
O’Brady’s sled before departure, with 20 liters of fuel: enough to melt water and heat dinners for about 110 days. Photo: Colin O’Brady
O’Brady has a little under half of his planned 2,800km journey remaining. If we assume he took a couple of extra weeks of food as a buffer beyond his stated 110 days, he would still need to average roughly 45km per day to finish before running out of calories. To put that into perspective, French adventurer Vincent Colliard averaged around 50km per day while setting the speed record between Hercules Inlet and the South Pole.
Though that sort of pace seems extremely unlikely, O’Brady should speed up after the Pole. He will be descending from the polar plateau rather than grinding up it, and his sled will be significantly lighter after three months on the ice.
