The Catlin Arctic Survey team have slept in beds and enjoyed hot baths for the first time since beginning their expedition in February.

Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley were collected from the ice at 6pm last night and taken to Resolute Bay, an Inuit hamlet in Canada.

Kenn Borek Air, which has a permanent base in Resolute Bay, decided to remove the team when they saw a good weather window on Wednesday, May 13.

The three explorers were due to end the expedition at the end of May but pilots were concerned breaking ice would make landing dangerous if they left it much longer to retrieve them.

The UK operations room were monitoring the state of the ice with high resolution satellite imagery which helped them identify potential ice runways with pinpoint accuracy.

They are expected to land on home soil on Monday.

“I’m very much looking forward to the plane arriving and taking us out now,” said lead navigator Ms Daniels in a broadcast before their departure.

Talking live from the landing strip, Mr Hadow described the end of the survey as a “relief.”

All previous Catlin Arctic Survey flights out of Resolute Bay have headed straight over the ocean, usually flying over the abandoned High Arctic weather station at Isachsen.

This time however, the pick-up flight travelled via Eureka, a manned, fully functioning weather station about 1,110km from the North Geographic Pole because the team were operating so far out to sea.

The gruelling expedition was designed to measure the thickness of sea ice and their data will help study the impacts of global warming in the region.

Valuable data, primarily collected via drilling methods after their mobile radar unit failed, has been handed over to scientists.

Throughout the survey, sea ice was recorded at an average thickness of 1.774m, much thinner than predicted.

"[The data] seems to suggest it was almost all first-year ice," said expedition leader Mr Hadow.

"Our science advisors had told us to expect thicker, older ice on at least part of the route, so it is something of a mystery where that older ice has gone. It'll be interesting to see what scientists think about this.”

Peter Wadhams, head of the polar ocean physics group at the University of Cambridge said the ice is now so thin, almost of all of it will disappear in about a decade.

According to his predictions, ice will only form during the winter, a forecast that the survey team’s data reinforces.

Green Guardian’s question and answer session with the team is still going ahead and the deadline for your questions is now May 25.

Email lwaters@london.newsquest.co.uk to put a question to the team.