Alison Rourke: Arctic fox: animal walks 3,500km from Norway to Canada

By Dilip -
An arctic fox has walked more than 3,500km (2,000 miles) from Norway to Canada in just 76 days, astonishing researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute. The animal, known as a coastal or blue fox, was fitted with a tracking device in July 2017. It left Spitsbergen in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago on 26 March 2018. After 21 days and 1,512 km out on the sea ice, it landed in Greenland on 16 April 2018. Its journey continued to Ellesmere Island in Canada, where it arrived on 1 July.
The arctic fox used sea ice to travel from Norway to Greenland to Canada.
Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
“We first did not believe it was true,” said researcher Eva Fuglei, who tracked the female fox. The institute said in a research paper titled “One female’s long run across sea ice” that the Arctic fox’s journey was among the longest ever recorded. It was so long, in fact, that researchers initially questioned whether the fox’s collar could have been removed and taken on board a boat.

“But no, there are no boats that go so far up in the ice. So we just had to keep up with what the fox did,” Fuglei said. The collar transmitted data each day for a three-hour period. Moving across sea ice and glaciers, the fox moved at an average of 46.3km per day and on one day travelled a whopping 155km, when it was on the ice sheet in northern Greenland... read more:

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