Swimmer plans record North Pole swim

A British adventurer is planning to highlight the effects of global warming by becoming the first person to swim at the North Pole and break his own record for the coldest swim.

Sporting just a cap, trunks and goggles, Lewis Gordon Pugh will swim 1 km (0.6 miles) in water at a temperature of minus 1.8 degrees Celsius on July 15, a dip he expects to last 21 minutes.

Such a swim would have been impossible as little as 10 years ago because the water would have been frozen, Pugh says.



"Most people have no idea that you can find patches of open sea at the North Pole in summer," said Pugh, who set the record for the coldest human swim off Antarctica at 0 degrees Celsius.

"I can't think of a better way to show that climate change is a reality than by swimming in a place that should be totally frozen over. I hope it will ... put pressure on the leaders of the G8 summit to cut carbon emissions dramatically," he said in a statement.

Last year Pugh broke his own world record for the longest ice water swim by covering 1.2 km in a fjord in the Norwegian mountains, staying in the water for 23 minutes 50 seconds.