UP geologist part of India's first Arctic expedition

Lucknow, Aug 1: India's first scientific expedition team to the Arictic will have a young city-based geologist.

Dhruv Sen Singh from the Lucknow University will be part of the five-member team to be flagged off from the National capital on August Friday.

Singh received the official communique about the expedition by the Central government on Monday. Other members of the team are Rasik Ravindra and SN Singh from National Centre for Antarctica and Oceanology Research (NCAOR), Goa, S Shivaji from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad and CG Deshpande of Indian Institute of Tropical Management (IITM), Pune.

The reader of the department of geology of the Lucknow University has already left for New Delhi.

An Indian delegation has already reached Antarctica in 1981 with 12 scientists. Now in the International Polar Year, the Indian government has decided to send a delegation to Arctic.

The expedition will start from Goa in the first week of August and will return to Goa in the first week of September. It will hoist the Tricolour there on Independence Day.

The delegation will stay at Svalbard in Arctic for a month.

Svalbard is an archipelago located midway between Norway and the North Pole.

The rocks and sediments of all the geological ages are found in Svalbard, hence is known as mecca of Geology.

The delegation will be visiting Norwegian Polar Research Institute, Ny-Alesund, situated on the west coast of Spitsbergen, the largest island of Svalbard.

Arctic has many extensive glaciers, which not only produce a wide range of land forms but also contribute to global sea-level fluctuations. The Greenland ice sheet is the largest ice mass in the Arctic. If this ice mass melts, it would raise the sea-level globally by six to seven metres.

UNI