The make-up of the latest expedition is rather unusual. Each participant had to go through a stringent multi-round selection process at regional and then federal level. The final team includes seven teenagers: Ksenia German, Nikolai Zaitsev, Alyona Karpenko, Karina Kausova, Akhuramazd Mumindzhanov, Nikita Nekrasov, and Alexander Petrov, who all come from orphanages or correctional schools, and two of whom are partially deaf.
The children were accompanied by explorers Matvei Shparo and Boris Smolin and by the Presidential Children’s Rights Commissioner Pavel Astakhov.
The expedition lasted 12 days: they set out for the North Pole on April 10 from the Russian Geographical Society’s drifting polar station Barneo to cover 180 kilometres of ice drifts in extreme cold temperature conditions.