What’s a “Transect”?

Mille Porsild agrees that the life of an explorer can seem awfully selfish. “You think about it all the time, leaving your loved ones behind,” she says. Most of Porsild’s immediate family is halfway around the world in her native Denmark. But some of them are right here: Her husband Paul Pregont and, arguably the most important part of the team, their thirty sled dogs. Like most modern explorers, Porsild and Pregont wrestle all the time with balancing a spiritual love of wide open (empty) spaces with a professional calling to educate and interact. The trick, of course, is finding a way to make a living doing both. To that end, they founded an online adventure education program called NOMADS.

In the past, explorers simply found someone with deep pockets to sponsor their treks. But in the modern age, especially as sponsorships have dried up along with record-book opportunities, they often fund their projects through teaching, lecturing, writing, or some other form of motivational soapboxing. Many though, like Porsild, Pregont, and Steger, are actually teachers by training and temperament. Ironically, they go into the wild specifically to connect with students around the globe—the children at the other end of the satellite uplink.

In fact, the expedition itself may be the easy part, compared with the heavy burden of Transect’s educational mission. The expedition has an education director. He is Dr. Aaron Doering, a University of Minnesota expert on instructional systems. Doering is more educator than adventurer—this will be his first major expedition. But he lends real brainpower and technical skill to the team. He and Pregont will manage all the technical hardware and software that allows the team to connect, through Porsild’s curriculum, with millions of schoolchildren who will follow the expedition on the Web.

The team has two main missions—one educational, the other scientific. In addition to the extensive curriculum in social studies and geography, they’ll conduct some hard science designed to confirm the reality of global warming and climate change. “We’re actually working with NASA to ground-truth the information they have about snow depths and UV radiation,” says Dr. Doering. He explains that some recalcitrant politicians still claim global warming is speculative, because no one has taken measurements on the ground in these remote locations. This expedition will help put to rest this insidious form of denial.

There are two other members of the team. Hugh Dale-Harris is a Canadian explorer and educator with much experience in the Nunavut region. The youngest member of the team is Eric Dayton, a gifted young adventurer who has partnered with Steger many times in the past. Dayton’s father, Sen. Mark Dayton, has been a longtime friend, supporter, and tent-mate of Steger’s. The three have made numerous trips together, including a memorable trek in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The younger Dayton graduated this year from Williams College and has already shown signs of political mettle. Having spent a season working for the Natural Resources Defense Council, he recently made a few phone calls and secured the final round of funding for Transect—money the expedition desperately needed to make it back next spring. “It was the first time I’ve had a team member pick up the phone and get funding like that!” says Steger. “He’s an amazing young man.”