Yeva, Tukked

Both Ella Hibbert and Tamara Klink have completed the approximately 230-mile journey from Summer Harbor on Booth Island, around the Bathurst Peninsula, and on to the Inuit village of Tuktoyaktuk along the Beaufort Sea. It's not a race, but the Yeva arrived there about an hour or so before the Sardinha 2.  

Tuk is located near the base of an elongated peninsula extending from the Canadian mainland to the west and between the Beaufort Sea to the north the Eskimo Lakes complex to the south. During the Pleistocene, glaciers left a thick layers of sediments and permafrost in the area. The glaciers are responsible for the irregular topography of the area, including the many remnant lakes, marshy hollows, and small hummocks. The peninsula is particularly noted for having the greatest concentration (nearly 1,350) of pingos, conical ice-cored hills, on Earth.  

Near the end of the Pleistocene, glacial ice advanced over most of the area. The long, finger-like ridges that divide the Eskimo Lakes into four separate water bodies likely formed as tunnels beneath the ice. A large glacial lake formed at the ice front in the region, leaving an extensive layer of fine-grained lake-bottom sediments across the area. The numerous pingos were formed by ground ice trapped in the sediments as the glaciers retreated. 

The melting glaciers also caused global sea levels to rise, drowning the valleys that had been carved into the mainland and filling them with thick deposits of fine-grained sediment. The Mackenzie Delta to the west of Tuk formed during this time. 

Global warming is causing Arctic temperatures to rapidly rise, allowing ships like the Yeva and the Sardinha 2 to sail through water that less than a generation ago could only be crossed by ice-breakers. The warming is also causing the permafrost to thaw. Around Tuk, land subsidence due to melting permafrost is causing the disappearance of permafrost islands and the rapid erosion of the coastline. Pingos are particularly vulnerable, as abrupt permafrost thaw can cause the ice within the pingos to melt, resulting in increased pingo collapse and the formation of remnant lakes.

From Tuk, it is about 90 miles to the Yukon border as the crow flies (125 miles along the coastline around the Mackenzie Delta), and less than 200 straight-line miles to the Alaska border, less than the distance just completed from Summer Harbor.  The current sea-ice charts generally show open ice-free water across the Alaskan coast, other than some minor congestion around Prudhoe Bay. 

For Ella, now with about 4,300 or so nautical miles under her belt, completing her circumnavigation of the Arctic requires sailing "only" about another 5,000 or so miles from Alaska across the north of Russia and Scandinavia to the finish line in the Norwegian Sea.