By Jeanna Bryner, Editor-in-Chief, Live Science | July 2, 2019 03:53pm ET
A baby Arctic fox with a dark-bluish coat recently made an epic journey on its own, trekking 2,179 miles (3,506 kilometers) in 76 days, crossing stretches of dynamic sea ice and glaciers.
The young female left the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway on March 26, 2018, reaching Greenland 21 days later while searching for food, according to news reports on the case. Then, on June 6, the fox left Greenland, reaching Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, on June 10, completing one of the longest tracked journeys for an Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), according to a research paper describing the feat, published online June 24 in the journal Polar Research.
And the little one wasn't wasting any time, crossing the treacherous scape at a clip of 28.8 miles per day (46.3 km per day) on average and reaching a top speed of 96.3 miles per day (155 km per day) on the ice sheet in northern Greenland, according to the researchers. "This is the fastest movement rate recorded for this species," the scientists, Eva Fuglei, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, and Arnaud Tarroux, of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, wrote in the paper. [The 10 Most Incredible Animal Journeys]
"We couldn't believe our eyes at first. We thought perhaps it was dead or had been carried there on a boat, but there were no boats in the area. We were quite thunderstruck," Fuglei told NRK, the Norwegian government's public broadcasting company, as translated by BBC News.
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