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http://abcnews.go.com/wire/SciTech/reuters20040906_142.html
Kon-Tiki Replica to Sail, Study Pacific in 2005
Sept. 6, 2004 — By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - A replica of the Kon-Tiki balsa raft will sail the Pacific in 2005 to study mounting environmental threats to the oceans since Thor Heyerdahl made his daredevil 1947 voyage, organizers said on Monday.
One of Heyerdahl's grandsons will be among the six-strong crew for the trip from Peru aiming to reach Tahiti, about 310 miles west of the Raroia atoll where the Kon-Tiki ran aground after traveling 4,970 miles in 101 days.
Heyerdahl's original voyage defied many experts' predictions that the flimsy craft would break up and sink. He said it proved that ancient civilizations could have sailed the oceans with Stone Age technology.
"This time we want to highlight the environmental threats," expedition leader Torgeir Saeverud Higraff told a news conference of the trip sponsored in part by the U.N. Environment Program. "There have been many changes since the 1940s."
The forest in Ecuador where Norway's Heyerdahl found the balsa wood for the raft, for instance, has now been cut down by loggers. And global warming may be killing coral reefs and causing more frequent storms in the Pacific.
But not everything has got worse.
"We expect that oil pollution has been reduced because of tighter international laws," said biologist Dag Oppen-Berntsen. He would take water samples to study for traces of pesticides and other human chemicals that can damage marine life.
"People ask 'why don't you do this from a proper research ship?"' he said. "The reason is simply that we wouldn't get the same publicity for the research."
The new raft, called the Tangaroa after a Polynesian sea god, would be made of the same materials as the Kon-Tiki but include solar panels to help transmit pictures to the Internet. The Kon-Tiki was named after an Inca sun god.
The project would have a budget of 9,200 with the yet-to-be-built vessel due to leave the Peruvian port of Callao on April 28 -- the same day as Heyerdahl set out in 1947. Heyerdahl died in 2002 aged 87.
The original crew were five Norwegians and a Swede. So far, the new crew are just five, including a Swede. "We're one short. We still need a good navigator," Saeverud Higraff said.