History
On September 7, 1991, Polarstern, assisted by the Swedish arctic ice breaker Oden reached the North Pole as the first conventional powered vessels. Both scientific parties and crew took oceanographic and geological samples and had a common tug of war and a football game on an ice floe. Polarstern again reached the pole exactly 10 years later together with the USCGC Healy. It returned for a third time on August 22, 2011 at exactly 9.42 a.m. This time it reported the most frequently recurring ice thickness at 0.9m compared with 2m in 2001, which corresponds to the long-term average.
On March 2, 2008, one of the vessel's helicopters crashed on a routine flight to the Antarctic Neumayer II base. The German pilot and a Dutch researcher were killed, three other passengers injured.
On October 17, 2008, Polarstern, as the first research ship ever traveled through both the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage in one cruise and thus circumnavigated the North Pole.
| Captain | Start | End |
|---|---|---|
| Lothar Suhrmeyer | December 1982 | November 1992 |
| Dieter Zapf | June 1983 | May 1985 |
| Ernst-Peter Greve | July 1985 | August 1998 |
| Heinz Jonas | March 1987 | December 1995 |
| Heinz Allers | January 1994 | October 1995 |
| Uwe Pahl | March 1996 | unknown |
| Jürgen Keil | March 1996 | March 2003 |
| Dr. Martin Boche | July 2000 | July 2002 |
| Uwe Domke | October 2002 | October 2004 |
| Stefan Schwarze | January 2005 | unknown |
Read more about this topic: RV Polarstern
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)