Polar publicity stunt?

I took this photo during a visit to the Arctic research station in Ny Alesund, Svalbard, during a visit in 2007.
Picture Gallery on Polar Research on Svalbard
I had a kind of deja vu feeling when I saw the place on a tv programme the other night about polar explorers, still very much in action today. This was the mast where Roald Amundsen’s airship was tethered before he set out to make the first flight over the North Pole in 1926. The latest of his successors in the line of polar explorers also set off from Svalbard (a different spot)to cross the North Pole in a balloon last week and made it at the weekend. The French explorer Jean-Louis Etienne had to land in eastern Siberia instead of Alaska as planned, because a snowstorm near the North Pole made it impossible for him to recharge
the balloon’s batteries, run from solar panels.
It’s quite an achievement to cross the Arctic, five days on your own in a balloon. The technology available these days has advanced somewhat from Amundsen’s days. Still, the Arctic conditions are pretty extreme and can still thwart the “best laid plans of mice and men” (Robert Burns). But Monsieur Etienne wasn’t just in it for the thrills. He was also measuring CO2 levels for some French scientific institutions. I wonder what he found out.