Death-Defying Journey That Become The Greatest Publicity Stunts of All Time

The Ice Block Expedition of 1959 originated from a radio station’s challenge, Radio Luxembourg, far from a scientific inquiry or government mandate, which in 1958 proposed the seemingly absurd task of transporting three tons of ice from the Arctic Circle to the equator. The idea was floated as a publicity stunt, a spectacle designed to capture public imagination and, presumably, radio listenership. The prize for success? One hundred thousand francs per kilo of ice that reached the destination, theoretically amounting to three hundred million francs if the entire block arrived intact. This incentive, while grand in theory, was quietly withdrawn before the expedition even began, a fact that would only become clear much later. The organizers of the radio challenge admitted they had been joking, that they never truly expected anyone to attempt such a feat. Yet someone did.

The task was taken up by a Norwegian insulation company, rather than a government agency or a polar explorer. Their motivation was clear: to demonstrate the effectiveness of their product. The company, Glassvatt, today known as Glava AS, was a manufacturer of glass wool insulation, a fibreglass-based material designed to resist heat transfer. The managing director, Birger Natvik, viewed the radio challenge as an opportunity instead of a joke. He calculated that if even half the ice survived the journey, the prize money would amount to several million francs, a windfall that would more than cover the costs of the expedition and flood the company with global attention. It was a bold marketing strategy, one that combined engineering, endurance, and spectacle into a single, rolling advertisement.

The ice itself was sourced from Svartisen, one of Norway’s largest glaciers, located near Mo i Rana just below the Arctic Circle. The extraction was no casual affair. Landowner Anton Svartisdal granted permission for the operation, and a team of workers, guided by a glaciologist, set out to carve a block massive enough to make the journey meaningful. But nature, even frozen, resists neat logistics. The glacier’s brittle structure made it impossible to extract a single three-ton block in one piece. Instead, the team used chainsaws to cut 200-kilo sections from the ice face, a method both precise and efficient, avoiding the brute force of hammers or the impracticality of spoons. Each block was then dragged on sleds to a nearby clearing, where a helicopter ferried them down to the town centre of Mo i Rana. There, the pieces were carefully melted together in a controlled environment, refrozen, and shaped into a single, solid mass weighing 3,050 kilos, just over three tons. This consolidated block was then placed inside a container made of iron, a material chosen for its durability and structural integrity. The iron casing acted as both a protective shell and a mounting point for the transport mechanism.

The container was not just a box; it was an engineered micro-environment. Its walls were lined with layers of wood and, crucially, thick slabs of Glassvatt’s own glass wool insulation, fibreglass spun into a fluffy, heat-resistant mat. This was the heart of the experiment: could a material developed for Norwegian attics and factory walls withstand the cumulative assault of Arctic thaw, Mediterranean humidity, and Saharan furnace winds? The answer would be written in the weight of the ice upon arrival. The entire apparatus was mounted onto a truck, specially modified to carry the load. It was a Scania-Vabis, a robust Scandinavian model selected after a quiet diplomatic tussle between Norwegian engineers and French sponsors. The French, including Glassvatt’s parent company Saint-Gobain, had hoped for a French truck, better suited to African terrain. But the Norwegians insisted on a familiar chassis, one they could maintain and trust. In hindsight, the expedition leader Sivert Klevan, an engineer with a sharp eye for public relations, would admit that a French vehicle might have been wiser, especially once the wheels sank into the Sahara.

Accompanying the ice were a film crew documenting the journey, essential for publicity, and 300 kilos of medicines destined for Libreville, Gabon, near the equator. The medicines required refrigeration, and the ice block served a dual purpose: it was both the star of the expedition and a functional coolant. This practical application added a layer of legitimacy to what might otherwise have been dismissed as pure theatrics. The ice was not merely being moved for show; it was actively preserving life-saving pharmaceuticals during transit. The gesture also aligned the expedition with a broader narrative of postwar humanitarianism, where even corporate ventures could cloak themselves in altruism.

The journey began on 22 February 1959 at 9:15 am in Mo i Rana, under grey Nordic skies. The convoy moved first to Oslo, where the truck was ceremonially welcomed in Studenterlunden, the park in front of the University. Crowds gathered, officials gave speeches, and the medicines, valued at 50,000 Norwegian kroner, were loaded aboard with solemn fanfare. From Oslo, the convoy moved southward, crossing into Sweden and then Denmark, where more medical supplies were added. The route was carefully planned for maximum visibility: Hamburg, Cologne, The Hague, Brussels, each city a media opportunity, each mayor or city council eager to host the rolling marvel of frozen water on its streets. The film crew, ever present, captured the awe of onlookers, the curious children peering into the insulated container, the journalists scribbling notes as if witnessing a scientific breakthrough.

It was in Belgium that the expedition encountered its first major bureaucratic obstacle. The team had failed to file a customs declaration for the ice. While the substance was clearly visible, tons of frozen water being hauled through a European country, customs officials required paperwork. There was no established protocol for declaring a block of ice as cargo, no category for “frozen water” on import forms. The absence of documentation threatened to halt the entire mission. For a moment, the absurdity of the situation threatened to undo it: a truck full of ice, frozen in place, thanks to bureaucracy rather than the cold.

Rather than melt the ice or disguise it as part of a circus, as one might jokingly suggest, the solution was more elegant. A customs official was assigned to accompany the convoy for the duration of its passage through Belgium. By never officially allowing the truck to enter the country, by keeping the official presence continuous, the ice was treated as being in transit rather than imported. This legal workaround allowed the expedition to proceed without violating customs regulations. The image of a government official riding shotgun on a refrigerated truck, ensuring that illegal ice did not enter the national territory, remains one of the more surreal moments in the history of logistical problem-solving. Sivert Klevan later received a personal apology for the inconvenience, relayed through Norway’s foreign minister Halvard Lange from his Belgian counterpart, a rare diplomatic footnote in a story of insulation and ice.

From Belgium, the convoy moved into France. In Paris, the crew was invited to dine with the mayor, a gesture of civic hospitality that underscored the public interest the journey had generated. (Though technically, Paris had no mayor at the time, the city was administered directly by the French government from 1871 to 1977, the invitation likely came from a senior municipal official, effectively functioning as a symbolic mayor.) The crew, likely exhausted and covered in the residue of long travel, accepted. After Paris, they continued to Marseilles, where the ice block was transferred onto the freighter *Sidi Mabrouk*, bound for Algiers. The sea leg of the journey was less fraught than the overland portion, though the constant warmth of the Mediterranean climate posed a continuous threat to the integrity of the ice. In Algiers, a special crane had to be brought in to lift the sixteen-ton rig, truck, container, and ice, onto dry land. It was there, for the first time since departure, that the container was drained and inspected. The result stunned even the most optimistic engineers: only four litres of water had melted away. In the face of unusually warm European weather, the glass wool had performed flawlessly.

By the time the freighter reached the African coast and the overland journey resumed, the convoy was entering one of the most hostile environments on Earth: the Sahara Desert. The instructions given to the drivers as they crossed the desert were simple: go west, do not stop, and drive for your lives. The region was not merely hot and arid; it was also dangerous. The Algerian War of Independence was raging, and guerilla fighters lurked in the Hoggar Mountains. The medicines on board would have been valuable loot, and the convoy was seen as a potential target. For the first stretch, the French Foreign Legion provided escort, their presence a silent warning to any who might consider ambush. The advice was not metaphorical. If a tire blew, they were to keep driving. Stopping could mean death.

The desert itself was a relentless adversary. There were no roads, only shifting dunes and hidden basins of soft sand. The truck, heavily laden and ill-suited to the terrain, sank repeatedly. The crew spent hours digging, laying steel plates under the wheels for traction, their bodies coated in dust, their water supply dwindling in temperatures that climbed toward 50°C. On average, 15 litres of ice melted each day, far more than in Europe, yet still astonishingly little considering the conditions. By the time the convoy emerged from the Sahara’s 7,500-kilometre stretch, 177 litres had been lost. The comparison to a camel’s water capacity, also around 96 litres, was made with dry Norwegian humour, a reminder that even in the face of extreme engineering, the human mind reaches for the familiar to measure the extraordinary.

During the crossing, the convoy encountered a local tribe of Tuaregs. The interaction was peaceful. The expedition team offered water from the melting ice to the camels, a gesture of goodwill and practicality. The water was drawn from a small spigot installed at the base of the container, allowing controlled drainage without exposing the main block to warm air. Given that the insulation was made of fibreglass and sealed with tar paper, there was a question about contamination, whether strands of glass wool had leached into the water. The documentary commentary claimed the camels had never tasted anything so delicious as Norwegian glacier water. The truth, as later admitted, was less poetic: the water was slightly tainted, barely drinkable, though the camels drank it without apparent ill effect. It was a moment of myth-making in real time, the kind of anecdote that sticks in public memory more firmly than facts.

Earlier in the journey, during the Arctic leg, the expedition had lost a more significant amount of ice, 96 litres in total. This loss occurred during handling and transport in the initial stages, rather than from heat. The conditions in the far north, while cold, involved mechanical stress: loading, chainsawing, and assembly. Some melting was inevitable during these processes. Ninety-six litres was roughly equivalent to the water content of a camel, a fact noted with dry humor by observers. The comparison underscored both the scale of the operation and the precision with which losses were measured.

At some point during the African leg, the convoy met Albert Schweitzer, the renowned French-German theologian, organist, philosopher, and physician. Schweitzer had established a hospital in Lambaréné, just inland from Libreville, and was known for his humanitarian work in the region. Klevan later described the meeting as the greatest moment of the entire expedition. The medicines were handed over with solemnity, and the crew was welcomed as emissaries of goodwill. Norway, in a gesture that seemed both generous and baffling, also sent half a ton of klippfisk, dried and salted cod, to Schweitzer’s hospital. The choice of gift was peculiar. Klippfisk is a traditional Norwegian food preserved through salting and drying. Sending such a product to a hot, arid region where fresh food was already scarce, however, seemed counterintuitive. The fish, already dehydrated, could last without spoiling; however, its strong odor and high salt content made it an unusual choice for the local diet. One can imagine the reaction upon opening the crate in 50-degree heat: a wave of pungent air, the confusion of medical staff, the muttered disbelief. “What is wrong with them?” The gesture, while well-intentioned, highlighted the cultural disconnect between donor and recipient. It was also, in its own way, a mirror of the ice expedition itself, well-meaning, ambitious, and slightly absurd.

The final destination was Libreville, Gabon, located just north of the equator. The convoy arrived on 21 March, after twenty-seven days of travel. Upon opening the container, the ice block was found to weigh 2,714 kilograms, meaning it had lost only 336 kilograms, or about 11 percent of its original mass. This was an extraordinary achievement. The insulation had performed exactly as intended. The film crew had captured the entire journey. The medicines had remained cold. The publicity value was immense. The insulation company had proven its product in the most dramatic way possible.

A representative of the company met the crew in Libreville. He had not accompanied them on the journey, having taken a faster route, likely by air. His arrival was not just a formality. He came with an offer: if the crew was willing to drive the remaining ice back to Paris, President Charles de Gaulle himself would receive them under the Arc de Triomphe. The honour was significant. The Arc de Triomphe was not a place where ordinary citizens were welcomed by the president. To be received there was a mark of national importance. The crew declined. They were exhausted. They had spent weeks on the road, through snow, cities, deserts, and danger. They had achieved what they set out to do. They had no desire to retrace their path, especially not for ceremonial recognition. They flew home, leaving the ice in Libreville, where it was distributed to the local population. The sight of a massive block of Arctic ice in equatorial Africa must have been surreal, a piece of the far north, slowly melting in the tropical heat, shared among people who had never seen snow.

Klevan, ever the showman, brought a small portion of the ice back with him. It was used in drinks at the premiere of the expedition’s documentary in Oslo, a final flourish of spectacle. The event was later commemorated as “the world’s greatest publicity stunt,” a title that stuck. In 2009, on the fiftieth anniversary, Glava AS released the original documentary and a new interview with Klevan, then 84 years old, his voice still tinged with pride. The expedition did not change the world; however, it demonstrated that with the right material, even the impossible could be preserved, briefly, dramatically, and with a great deal of style.