Benz backs super eco ketch Pangaea

Explore -- Learn -- Act: Adventurer Mike Horn has found a remarkable way to show youngsters the wonders of the natural world and teach them how to help preserve it. For the youngsters around whom the project revolves, it's Outward Bound meets Big Brother.

For exponents of sustainability, it's a valuable ally, firing influential young imaginations and sending them forth with a litany of practical ways to deliver the sustainability message into the day to day lives of their peers worldwide.

For the man behind it, it's a labour of love propelled by a sense of now-or-never urgency.

Over the next several years, South African adventurer Mike Horn's Pangaea expedition will host more than 200 youngsters from around the world on a journey over land and sea that doesn't merely circumnavigate the globe but covers it. The trip will take in the North and South Poles and all the continents in between, covering terrain from pack ice to deserts, from the canyons of the Colorado River to the Himalayas.

Horn will tell you that the young explorers are the stars of his show. But they would no doubt give equal billing to Pangaea, the remarkable 35-metre, aluminium-hulled icebreaker ketch on which much of Horn's four-year, 100,000km global mission takes place.

The 30-berth Pangaea -- it's Greek for 'whole Earth' -- is the largest expeditionary sailing ship ever built. From the hull, fashioned from 83 tonnes of aluminium, through the low-emission Mercedes-Benz diesel engines to the rubbish compactor in the stern, it's purpose-built as an oceangoing showcase for sustainability technologies.

Along the way, its young constituents will learn about cleaning up our oceans, monitoring and preserving biodiversity, and improving hygiene and sanitary conditions for villages in the developing countries they visit.

Aluminium was the obvious choice for the hull, says Horn. "It's light, it performs well in extremes of climate and it's recyclable." Aluminium can be recycled many times over, and each recycle consumes only five per cent of the energy it takes to produce new.

At the bow, the aluminium is 20mm thick, giving it the mass to break its way though pack ice -- a function aided by its two six-cylinder Mercedes-Benz BlueTec diesels.

The yacht's modular design allows for quick and relatively simple overhauls of hull components and engines, by crew members when necessary. It also helps the boat evolve with the improvement of existing technologies and the introduction of new ones.

For example the batteries gain part of their charge from a still-growing bank of solar panels mounted on the roof. By the time it's finished, the photovoltaic area will be sufficient to charge the batteries standalone.

To make up for the system's shortcomings in long-term energy storage, they're supplementing it with a hydrogen fuel cell recharge system, using the solar system to power the electrolyser that breaks up water molecules to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen molecules.

The boat provides an invaluable durability testing platform for a raft of sustainability technologies. Later this year, after a trip to the Solomon Islands, it will return to Cairns for an engine replacement, taking its emissions standards compliance from Euro IV to Euro V.

And it's a year or two away yet, but before the mission is over, Horn and Benz will have replaced the diesel engines with hydrogen fuel cell and solar powered electric motors. In effect, the process began with the installation of the solar panels.

Once they're installed, they will undergo extensive performance testing and tweaking before the fuel cells and motors go in.

The boat uses large nets to trawl for rubbish, which it pulls aboard and separates for recycling. Whatever it recovers of the estimated 20,000 PET bottles littering every square kilometre of the world's oceans is compressed and, eventually, turned into products like fleece clothing.

Inside, the 16-seat circular stateroom serves as part of a state-of-the-art multimedia production centre able to generate live worldwide broadcast. No doubt they'll find plenty to broadcast with an itinerary like this...

Oct 2008: Antarctica
May 2009: New Zealand's South Island fiordland
Oct 2009: Indonesian archipelago
Dec 2009: India
May 2010: Nepal/Himalayas trek
July 2010: Gobi Desert, China
Jan 2011: Siberia and the beginnings of the Arctic
Apr 2011: North Pole
Aug 2011: Nunavut, Canada -- Inuit country
Dec 2011: Colorado River, USA
May 2012: Amazon River Basin, Brazil
Nov 2012: East Africa