Click here to see pictures of the wolves up close

British explorers on a polar expedition described their terror yesterday after coming face to face with a pack of bloodstained wolves.

Pen Hadow, Anne Daniels and Martin Hartley were testing equipment in the Arctic at night when the 17-strong pack encircled them.

As a huge, yellow-eyed male crept within 10 metres of the team the rest of the pack split up to surround the three vulnerable humans.

“There were so many of them,” said Mr Hadow, the veteran explorer. “They were watching us intently. We felt like mice being watched by cats.

“It was like a child’s nightmare. The images in your head of wolves are so deeply embedded from bedtime stories like Little Red Riding Hood. It’s very hard to get past that.

“We’d been told they wouldn’t attack but to have a pack of 17 wolves is worrying however much you may try to rationalise and tell yourself the number of wolf attacks on humans can be counted on one hand.

“I could see blood on their fur. It was nerve-wracking – but at the same time it was an incredible experience.”

The three explorers had seen one of the wolves approaching from some distance away but it was only when it was within 200 metres that they realised it was part of a pack.

Mr Hadow said the lead wolf had “the most striking pure bright yellow eyes” and that it lowered its head just as he’d imagined as a child that a hungry wolf would do.

After a 15-minute stand-off the pack of wolves “evaporated into the Arctic night” leaving the explorers with racing hearts but exhilarated at having witnessed such a sight.

The team had been testing a miniaturised ground radar that had been redesigned to be small enough to be hauled across the Arctic ice to the North Pole so that the most detailed data yet achieved on ice thickness can be provided to scientists.

Technicians spent two years reducing the weight of the radar system from 100kg to a more manageable 4kg for the Polar expedition.

The experiments, which included taking ice cores to make sure the data provided by the radar system was accurate, were carried out at Eureka, northern Canada, in the sub-zero conditions of the Arctic.

In February the three-strong team will set out across the ice to take more than 5 million individual readings of the ice thickness.

Readings will be detailed enough to allow accurate measurements not just of the total thickness but of what proportion is formed of snow and how much is solid ice. It should also help determine the age of sections of the ice.

They will be more detailed than anything yet achieved by readings taken by either satellites or submarines and should offer invaluable data on the effects of global warming on the Arctic ice.

The radar will be dragged behind a sledge during the Vanco Arctic Survey to take readings during the 1,200-mile expedition.

A series of scientific studies have been conducted to establish when over the next 100 years it can be expected that the region will be free of ice by the end of each summer.

Some have suggested it could vanish within 30 years but others put the likely date much closer to 100 years. Detailed measurements of the ice thickness should help researchers reach a consensus.

This year saw the ice cap melting to 39 per cent of its average minimum - leading some experts to predict the Artic Ocean would be ice free during the summer within 25 years.

While the Antarctic ice cap has an average thickness of 1.2 miles, ice at the North Pole is thought to be only around 10 feet thick.

Mr Hadow added: “The place that we know and love the best is the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole ice cap. It’s one of our planet’s defining features from deep space but within a lifetime it will no longer be present in the summer time.

“What’s extraordinary is no one knows precisely how thick the ice cap is. By determining it more accurately and showing how much is ice and how much is snow we hope to provide critical information that’s missing to tell how much longer it has left.”

In 2003 Mr Hadow completed what was described the last of the great Polar challenges - the solo, unsupported trek to the geographic North Pole. It was his third attempt at the feat. A year later he became the only Briton to trek unsupported to both Poles when he reached the South Pole.

Ms Daniels, a former bank manager, was a member of an all-female team that reached the South Pole in 2000 in a 61 day, 600 mile trek. In 2002 she reached the North Pole in an 82 day trek - becoming the first women to reach to both North and South Poles.

Mr Hartley, is an experienced Arctic photographer and will operate communications equipment to transmit data and images, including the first videos broadcast live from the North Pole, to the project’s headquarters, in Oxfordshire, UK.

The team will retrace the steps of Sir Wally Herbert, who in 1969 became the first man to indisputably reach the North Pole on foot. He took ice core measurements during his journey and the new readings will be compared to them to assess the changes that have taken place in the last four decades.

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