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Because the seawater is 29°F, condensation can Defense parachutists to all manner of catastrophes ranging from wars to earthquakes. He cut such a dashing figure that the Russian edition of Reader's Digest published a profile of him entitled "My Profession: Rescuer." An experienced diver, Rozhkov had long dreamed of organizing the first civilian dive at the North Pole, where all meridians meet and the world alternates between six months of complete sunlight and six months oftotal darkness. When the sun is up it circles the sky in a spiral, but the daily increments of less than a degree are not perceptible by the human eye. In April, the sun is about a fifth of the way between the horizon and the vertical. It never rises more than a quarter. Though there had been occasional military -based scuba diving expeditions in the Arctic Ocean, the only dive at the exact northern axis of the planet took place in August 1962, when the crew members of the nuclear submarine USS Seadragon descended there. But in August, after five months of continuous sunlight, phytoplankton was thick and visibility poor. The divers could make out little of their surroundings. In the early 1990s, Russians started to make available to thrill-seeking travelers their unique know-how in building economical and safe runways and temporary bases on the floating ice, something they had previously reserved for their own military and scientific expeditions. These runways allowed planes and helicopters taking off from Russia to fly cross-country skiers, parachutists and balloonists to the pole during April, the one-month polar season when the temperature is higher than average. Earlier in the year, it's too cold and dark, and later, the ice breaks up too often. Rozhkov saw the opportunity to realize his dream of taking the first underwater pictures of the pole. He contacted the Moscow State University Diving Club, which had extensive experience in diving off the shores of the White Sea in winter. The club jumped at the challenge of freeze inside a regulator-even one designed for ice diving. If the equipment is not perfectly dry, moisture can freeze and disable valves in the dry suit and flotation device, making ascent or descent difficult. Any mistakes in preparation that elsewhere could be fixed by simply getting out of the water become a major problem in the Arctic: as soon as the equipment meets the -4°F to -22°F air, the water that clings to it freezes, and the gear can't be used until it has been thoroughly dried in a warm tent. Finally, unlike lake ice, sea ice is inherently unstable and can crack or move at any moment. In April 1998, Roshkov and four members of the diving club staged the first non-military dive at the pole. "When we got there, the weather was good and we found open water," recounted Mikhail Safonov, the second-in- command of the expedition, in an interview the following year. Safonov, 30, is a lecturer in marine biology at the Moscow State University and the vice-president of its diving club. Oleg Bozhok, another diver on the team, went in first. "It was amazingly beautiful, with tunnels and caves and a magic sort of light," he said. He settled on an ice platform 20 feet deep and filmed Rozhkov going straight down to 120 feet. Rozhkov had planned to drop straight to 170 feet and then surface slowly, taking pictures along the way. Both men were roped to a partner standing at the edge of the ice. After he finished filming, Bozhok followed Rozhkov down and was startled by a powerful light coming from below. He had no idea what it was. He filmed it and kept going down. But at 110 feet, his regulator froze and he had to be pulled up. While Bozhok was catching his breath on the surface, the man holding Rozhkov's line realized Rozhkov had reached the end of the tether and he gave it a tug. "There was no answer," Safonov recounted. "We thought Andrei was simply using his hands for his picture-taking, so we gave another tug-and then a third. When we started pulling him up, he didn't react and we started to worry. Bozhok went back down to meet him." "By then my regulator had thawed," Bozhok continued. "When I saw Andrei coming up toward me, I saw he was unconscious. I knew there was no way he could have survived . - V ------ - -- _. ---- ----------- - -- ~ -- - ---------~