Mitsuro Ohba, an adventurer known for his solo crossings of the Antarctic and Arctic Circles on foot, successfully completed the approximately three-month long adventure, “Global EdVenture 3rd Leg Canadian Arctic,” on June 2, 2008.

Global Adventure “Journey Across the Canadian Arctic Circle” involved trekking 1,570 kilometers of the Arctic Circle from Resolute to Ward Hunt Island. Ohba and his party started off on March 6. The purpose of this endeavor was to, while continuing on the journey, report on how conditions in the region, the ecosystem inhabited by animals and the lives of the people living in the Canadian Arctic Circle have changed or been otherwise affected by ongoing global warming, through actually walking the area and comparing conditions with the natural environment there of three years ago.

As a part of Canon’s activities to contribute to the environment and education, the company supported this Global Adventure by donating equipment (digital cameras, printers, camcorders, etc.) to record images in the field.

Ohba and the other team members who participated in this adventure dispatched information on the life-style and culture of the region through the team diary on their Web site and recorded images on camera of animals and the grandeur of the expansive natural environment.

Furthermore, this project strove to have a dialogue on environmental problems with a large number of children. They talked to elementary school children living not only in Japan, but also in countries such as Dubai, Costa Rica and Germany, on more than 30 occasions using a satellite telephone. They thereby conveyed to them the actual conditions encountered in the Canadian Arctic Circle.

Hereafter, the team members plan to take advantage of symposiums, speaking engagements and other similar occasions to convey to the public what they actually saw and felt, the data they obtained through taking snow samplings and the present state of the changing lives and culture of the Inuit people.

Canon’s Web site also plans to convey Ohba’s report of the current state and changes in the Arctic hereafter as well.