A cousin of the Queen once described as “a cross between Tinkerbell and the Terminator” is set to brave toxic dust storms and searing temperatures in an attempt to become the first person to trek across the world’s youngest desert.
Rosie Stancer, 61, a polar explorer who once amputated her frostbitten toes with a penknife, will lead a two-woman team walking nearly 400 miles across an arid wilderness that once held the Aral Sea in central Asia.
Spanning Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral was once the world’s fourth largest lake. It began shrinking in the 1960s after its tributary rivers were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects to provide water for cotton and other crops. It is now a tenth of its former size and the completely dry eastern basin has become the Aralkum Desert.
“It caught my eye because I thought it was a very modern sort of challenge — the Aralkum is now recognised as the world’s worst man-made environmental disaster,” Stancer said.
“This will be a fact-finding expedition, drawing attention to the impact of human consumption — specifically, the draining of the Aral Sea to feed the cotton industry.”
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She will be travelling with her friend Pom Oliver, also a polar explorer. They will haul their supplies in specially designed carts, each weighing around 100kg, from west to east in temperatures that will approach 40C. The crossing is expected to take between four and six weeks.
“This doesn’t have the same sense of derring-do as a polar expedition — it’s not a rollercoaster of terror on the Arctic ice. It’s very modern in respect to its challenges, which are insidious,” she said.
The women will take special masks to guard against dust storms on a route that will pass Vozrozhdeniya — a former secret testing ground for Soviet biological weapons. “We will be on a course of antibiotics to help protect us, as well, because there’s a whole cocktail of nasties out there,” she added.
Stancer, whose mother Lady Mary Clayton was a first cousin of the Queen and died in February 2014 aged 96, was given the nickname Tinkerbell because she stands just 5ft 3in tall. The Terminator part is a nod to past exploits. In 2007 she walked alone for 84 days before melting ice meant she had to be airlifted to safety just 89 nautical miles short of the North Pole.
Early during the expedition she suffered frostbite in several toes. “I had to amputate them myself because I was on my own,” she said. She chose the sharpest blade on her penknife, chopped off the big toe and the one next to it — and walked on for another 83 days, covering more than 400 miles.
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Next week, after she arrives in central Asia, she expects to cover terrain that has not been trodden on since the Aral Sea was depleted. The expedition will collect information on the impact of a World Bank project that has sought to revive parts of the region by building a new dam. Stancer will also collect information on the health of the former fishing communities left marooned on the original shorelines. Soil samples will be taken to measure the level of pollution.
To prepare, she has resumed the training regime she used for her polar projects — hauling Land Rover tyres over the countryside, near her home in the village of Cossington, northeast of Bridgwater, Somerset. Her grandfather-in-law, James Wordie, was chief geologist on Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-17 transantarctic expedition. Her grandfather, the Earl Granville, was originally selected for Captain Scott’s fateful 1910-12 South Pole expedition. Only weeks before departure he was told that he was too tall, at 6ft 4in, to fit in the tent and that his large frame would require extra rations, which would be bad for morale. Stancer said that exploration has “grown up” since then.
“This might be a first — no one’s ever crossed this desert by foot before. But there’s nothing heroic in that — it’s only because it was previously all underwater,” she said.
“It’s not about bagging first, it’s not about planting flags all over the place. It’s about what you learn as you go and what you bring back with you.”
Crop irrigation dried up sea
• The Aral Sea once covered 26,000 square miles and was fed by the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers. In the 1960s these were diverted by a Soviet scheme to irrigate cotton and other crops.
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• Water levels dropped and by 1990 the Aral Sea was divided into northern and southern parts. By 1996, its volume had been reduced by three quarters.
• As the waters receded, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with agricultural chemicals and salty contaminated dust from the lake bed settled on to fields, degrading the quality of the soil.
• In 2014 Nasa satellite images showed that the eastern part of the South Aral Sea had been entirely transformed into desert.
• The loss of such a large body of water made winters colder and summers hotter and drier.
• In 2005 the World Bank helped build the eight-mile Kok-Aral Dam, with the aim of saving the Northern Aral Sea. Water levels have risen, salinity has dropped and some fishing is again possible — however, the Aral Sea is still only a fraction of its former size.