THE EXPEDITION WILL BE COMPOSED OF 4 PEOPLE AND 50 DOGS
The Challenge returns to the Arctic.
In this ninth edition, Manuel Calvo will once again lead the expedition, which this year will include extreme travel influencer Rubén Díez (‘Lethal Crysis’) and Manu Calvo (Manuel’s son), who was recognized as the youngest Spaniard to explore the Arctic. They will be accompanied by the director of photography Ricardo Fernández, who will be in charge of recording the documentary of this trip. The group, accompanied by 50 dogs, will travel more than 400 kilometers over the frozen sea of Greenland to raise awareness of the effects of climate change and the risk posed by the melting ice for the Greenlandic dog breed.
Manuel Calvo says that, in addition to the 50 dogs, during the expedition they will have the “essential” support of four Inuit natives from the town of Qaanaaq, formerly known as Thule, to travel through a place with extreme cold where “maximum precautions” must be taken.
One of the objectives of this expedition -‘Desafío Ártico: Operación perros del hielo’- is to warn of the situation in which the Greenland dog finds itself, since this is the only place on the planet where humans and dogs need each other to survive, but the melting ice is making the dogs less and less necessary.
“We want to tell what we owe to dogs, because human history would have been written differently without their help. Greenlandic dogs are one of the oldest breeds in the world and it has been proven that without them man could not have survived in such an extreme environment,” said Manuel Calvo.
To do this they will take a current census of the number of Greenlandic dogs and compare it with the one they conducted on an expedition in 2017.
They will also interview the Inuit hunters themselves to tell them firsthand how global warming is affecting their traditional life based on hunting and fishing.
The other main mission of ‘Desafío Ártico’ in 2024 is to find the future location of the Spanish Research Base in the Arctic for the Spanish Polar Foundation.
According to Manuel Calvo, in this way they will collaborate to achieve a greater presence of Spain in that territory and improve its position as an observer country in the Arctic Council.