Documentary examining the history of Antarctica - the frozen continent, finding out why the most inhospitable place on the planet has exerted such a powerful hold on the imagination of explorers, scientists, writers, and photographers.
Antarctica is the coldest, driest, and windiest place on the globe. Only a handful of people have experienced its desolate beauty, with the first explorers setting foot here barely a hundred years ago.
From the logbooks of Captain Cook to the diaries of Scott and Shackleton, from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to HP Lovecraft, it is a film about real and imaginary tales of adventure, romance, and tragedy that have played out against a stark white backdrop.
We relive the race to the South Pole and the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, and find out what it takes to survive the cold and the perils of polar madness. We see how Herbert Ponting's photographs of the Scott expedition helped define our image of the continent and find out why the continent witnessed a remarkable thaw in Russian and American relations at the height of the Cold War.
We also look at the intriguing story of who actually owns Antarctica and how science is helping us reimagine a frozen wasteland as something far more precious.
Includes interviews with Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Francis Spufford, Huw Lewis-Jones, Sara Wheeler, Henry Worsley, Prof David Walton, and Martin Hartley.
Antarctica is the coldest, driest, and windiest place on the globe. Only a handful of people have experienced its desolate beauty, with the first explorers setting foot here barely a hundred years ago.
From the logbooks of Captain Cook to the diaries of Scott and Shackleton, from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to HP Lovecraft, it is a film about real and imaginary tales of adventure, romance, and tragedy that have played out against a stark white backdrop.
We relive the race to the South Pole and the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, and find out what it takes to survive the cold and the perils of polar madness. We see how Herbert Ponting's photographs of the Scott expedition helped define our image of the continent and find out why the continent witnessed a remarkable thaw in Russian and American relations at the height of the Cold War.
We also look at the intriguing story of who actually owns Antarctica and how science is helping us reimagine a frozen wasteland as something far more precious.
Includes interviews with Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Francis Spufford, Huw Lewis-Jones, Sara Wheeler, Henry Worsley, Prof David Walton, and Martin Hartley.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Antarctica, five and a half million square miles of land, almost completely covered in
00:29ice. It is the coldest, driest and windiest place on earth. Its desolate beauty has been
00:50seen by just a handful of people. The first explorers set foot here little more than a
00:56hundred years ago. Antarctica is like the surface of the moon. Large tracts of the moon
01:02are better known than Antarctica. Polar explorers were, you know, the astronauts of their day,
01:09literally stepping off the edge of the map into the unknown. Making sense of the unknown is at
01:16the heart of the story of Antarctica. Ever since Captain Cook watched it loom out of the mist,
01:21we have been driven to describe it, define it, name it and mythologize it. Antarctica really is
01:30a blank page from that point of view. There's a need to inscribe meaning on a land that doesn't
01:36naturally have one. The search for meaning amongst the snow and ice can be read in the
01:44logbooks and diaries of explorers and scientists, but it has also captured the imagination of poets,
01:51artists, writers and composers. You've got something which is very wild and pervious to
02:00human meanings. In terms of the imagination though, it's a much more promising prospect
02:05altogether. The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around. It cracked and growled
02:12and roared and howled like noises in a swell. Antarctica is big and blank and white and the
02:18urge to scribble on it is just immense. This is a film about the real and imaginary tales of
02:25adventure, romance and tragedy that have played out against a stark white backdrop and why the
02:32most inhospitable place on the planet continues to exert an enduring hold on our imagination.
02:38There is one sentiment about Antarctica that has united everyone from the earliest
02:53explorers to modern adventurers. You get to feel something which ought to have a word other than
03:11cold but doesn't. The coldest I experienced was minus 115 with windchill and when I threw a mug
03:18of boiling water in the air it froze before it hit the ground. Yes, the cold is really born by
03:25the wind. I mean the wind is, it's hard to describe, you know, a constant 50 mile an hour headwind
03:30which of course plummets the temperatures. So that is the sort of the ground base from which
03:36all other sort of difficulties sort of arise really. The noise, you certainly can't hear even
03:42your heartbeat and your balaclava. All you hear is the huge black roar of the wind. It's just like
03:53you're in a vortex. Your brain starts being befuddled by the power of the wind and the noise
04:00of it and I've never met it anywhere else in the world. It's just awesome. A plunge into the writhing
04:09storm whirl stamps upon the senses an indelible and awful impression seldom equaled in the whole
04:15gamut of natural experience. The world a void, grisly, fierce and appalling. The merciless blast,
04:23an incubus of vengeance, stabs, buffets and freezes. The stinging drift, blinds and chokes.
04:30We have found an accursed country.
04:43The cold hard truth about Antarctica only really became apparent in the 20th century.
04:49The first civilizations to imagine it had something far more enticing in mind. Greeks
04:57kind of sensed that Antarctica was there and it was they who named it. They knew about the North,
05:01which they called Arctos, the bear, after the constellation the star. So they called it the
05:05Anti-Arctos because they thought there must be something balancing out what was there at the
05:10top. People used to think that there was a land of great riches down there, you know, land flowing
05:16with milk and honey and tall blonde-haired people. The earliest maps of Antarctica drew more in the
05:22imagination of the cartographer than geographical fact. These are maps of the southern continent
05:29published in 1597 and 1598 and they show this idea of a gigantic landmass around the South Pole. It's
05:40actually indicating mountains and rivers and all sorts of things that, in fact, we know they had
05:48no idea could possibly have existed.
05:59The promise of wealth and undiscovered lands prompted 18th century explorers to venture ever
06:05closer to the fabled continent and in 1773 Captain James Cook sailed into history. At about a quarter
06:16past 11 o'clock we crossed the Antarctic Circle, undoubtedly the first and only ship that ever
06:22crossed that line. Soon after saw an appearance of land to the east and southeast. Hauled up for it,
06:30presently after, it disappeared in the haze. Captain Cook would actually have effectively
06:37followed the currents in the Antarctic vortex. They would have swept him right around the continent,
06:44all the way up this coast and then, in fact, just as he would potentially have been hitting the
06:50peninsula, it actually sweeps him off northward again. So it's actually very difficult for him
06:56really to have got any idea of where the continent lay within this mass of ice and he actually says,
07:06you know, he can't be certain that there is a continent there. He thinks it's very likely that
07:12there is but he's never actually going to hit land. Cook might not have made landfall but his
07:23voyage helped solidify the idea of a vast ice-bound continent. I think for Cook himself it was about
07:32filling in blanks on the map. He sailed around it and saw there was a lot of ice and a lot of
07:36cliffs and glaciers, though there was no 18th century word for a glacier, not for Cook, so he
07:41just said rivers of ice. Lands doomed by nature to perpetual frigidness, never to feel the warmth
07:50of the sun's rays, whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe. What then
07:56may we expect those to be which lie still further to the south? He wrote a very despondent journal
08:05entry about it. He says that he thought nobody would ever envy him the honour of the discovery.
08:20Although Cook had dismissed Antarctica as a worthless endeavour, his account of the
08:26voyage inspired a young poet to immortalise the place in verse. And now there came both
08:33mist and snow, and it grew wondrous cold, and ice, mast high, came floating by as green as emerald,
08:41and through the drifts the snowy cliffs did send a dismal sheen, nor shapes of men nor beasts we
08:48ken, ice was all between. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the first great Antarctic
08:55cultural artefacts and like many of those it was written by somebody who never laid eyes on the
09:00place. Coleridge called himself a library cormorant. He flew his way from book to book.
09:06One of the books he flew to were Cook's accounts of his voyages. But a wonderful transmogrification
09:16takes place between the sensible 18th century sea captain and the visionary romantic poet.
09:22The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around, it cracked and growled and roared and
09:32howled like noises in a swell. It's about phantasmagoric landscapes, strange effects, you
09:41know, the ice, it's emerald green, there were these sea snakes, there were the figures of death. If you
09:47think about the experience of being in Antarctica and seeing mirages, fantasies, all kinds of
09:54extraordinary polar effects, and I think it's that feeling of somebody psychologically
10:00confronting the utterly strange, the alien, something that could not be less hospitable,
10:06that's never had a human presence, I think you find that in Coleridge's poem. At length did
10:12cross an albatross. Through the fog it came, as if it had been a Christian soul, we hailed it in
10:20God's name. It's focused on the figure of the albatross itself, which in the poem is this
10:28spectral motif of doom. Because they kill the albatross, they get carried into polar waters
10:35where the ice, mast high, went floating by as green as emerald, a kind of dream Antarctica of
10:42death and desolation, all as a punishment. But the original of that moment is a very practical journal
10:51entry by Cook, where he announces that they've shot an albatross, they've eaten the albatross, it was
10:56really quite tasty. Cook's voyage whetted the appetite of the men involved in one of the most
11:06lucrative businesses of the age, the trade in seals and whales. Their desire for profits would
11:17bring them closer than anyone had yet been to Antarctica itself. Captain Cook returned home
11:24after his grand oceanographic voyage. He tells a story of a southern ocean rich in seal life and
11:32marine mammal life that captures the imagination of merchant adventurers and maritime men in search
11:39of these bountiful oceans. They move in bulk, both sort of European and American sealers and
11:48whalers in the 1820s, 30s, 40s. And there is an extractive industry based down there, a really
11:57big one, 19th century equivalent of Texaco. London is being partly street lit by whale oil.
12:18The long-abandoned whaling stations that dot the islands around Antarctica show just how
12:31close humans were getting to the continent itself. By the end of the 19th century, drawing rooms and
12:42gentlemen's clubs from New York to London were alive with the idea of making one last great leap
12:48into the unknown. It promises to be the fiercest of all human engagements. Science demands it,
12:56modern progress calls for it, for in this age a blank upon our chart is a blur upon our prided
13:03enlightenment. I think the driving force was Sir Clements Markham, who was then the president of
13:11the Royal Geographical Society. And at the 1896 International Geographical Congress in London,
13:16he made an enormous and very effective plea to everybody that the Antarctic was the last great
13:23frontier and that all nations should actually have it on their agenda for exploration and discovery.
13:28At the turn of the 20th century, a handful of intrepid explorers began to make the arduous
13:37journey to Antarctica. Belgian, British, German, Swedish, French and even Japanese expeditions braved
13:45perilous seas, frostbite and starvation to plant their flags in the ice. This would become the
13:53heroic age of Antarctic exploration. On the face of it, it's a mystery why the heroic age
14:02happens when it happens, why there is this kind of urgency about opening up Antarctica all of a
14:09sudden. It's not as if it is a very desirable place. On the other hand, most of the desirable
14:16parts of the planet have been have been claimed by them. The scramble for Africa is over. They
14:21are running out of blank bits of the map. So one way to look at it is to see this as kind of
14:27imperialism reaching its its absurd limit. It's the equivalent of an Edwardian space race. It was
14:37a race with a clearly defined finishing line, the South Pole. The only problem was finding it. This
14:44actually shows an understanding that there is much still to be learned. This is truly terra incognita.
14:52There is this huge space on the map there. They know that there is something there. They don't
14:57know whether it's islands or whether it's a continent. But they've simply left the space
15:02on the map blank. And it's that infuriating blank on the map, which I think actually drives much of
15:09the later exploration of the continent. Those blank spaces began to be filled in as the world's
15:23explorers plunged deeper into Antarctica. There's a really important difference between Arctic and
15:30Antarctic geography in that Antarctica has never had human inhabitants. There are no local native
15:40place names. There is no local knowledge of the place. So all Antarctic place names are the place
15:46names of discovery. Each of them memorializes some incident in the relatively recent past.
15:54Because you have to remember that although Antarctica as a geological proposition is
15:59hundreds of millions of years old, as a piece of human history Antarctica is little more than 150
16:06years old. So there are an awful lot of things named after pre-First World War monarchs. There
16:12are lots of things named after ship's captains. Each expedition inched closer towards the Holy
16:21Grail and in 1909 an Irish-born explorer called Ernest Shackleton drove a Union Jack into the
16:27ice at the farthest point south yet reached by man. An achievement that secured his lasting fame.
16:35Exploration is a creative activity as much as it's an activity of losing your toes and struggling
16:42across the ice. The success of an expedition, the way in which it's remembered, depends upon
16:48an explorer's ability to tell people about his achievements. One of the key things for Shackleton
16:55then is lecturing. He sings for his supper so he attends dinners. He commits his voice to record.
17:01All of a sudden we heard a shout of help from the man behind. We looked round and saw him supporting
17:11himself by his elbows on the edge of a chasm but nothing but a black drought lay below.
17:17He packs out lecture halls up and down the country in an effort to enhance his profile
17:24as the first or at least the very latest polar celebrity. While Shackleton regaled audiences
17:33with tales of his trek to within a hundred miles of the South Pole, his mentor Captain Robert Falcon
17:38Scott was preparing to go one better. In December 1910 Scott set sail for Antarctica on an ambitious
17:46mission to research the continent and conquer the pole. Scott was very much a product of his time
17:54and was very much caught up in this tremendous desire to get to the South Pole which was the
17:59biggest geographical prize of the day. He was a Navy man through and through. He joined the Navy
18:05at 13. He was very ambitious. His vocation as an explorer began because it was a way to distinguish
18:14himself in what felt like the permanent peacetime world of the Navy. You know if there are no wars
18:20then you need to discover something to get yourself known at the Admiralty. Conscious of
18:28the publicity value that a visual record of the expedition might provide, Scott invited the
18:34foremost photographer of the day to accompany him, Herbert Ponting. As it was my privilege to have
18:40charged the photographic side of the enterprise, I have endeavoured to arrange this film in such a
18:45manner that when you have seen it I hope you will personally feel that you have taken part in a great adventure.
18:58Cinema had just been invented and there it was to be capitalised on, moving pictures of the
19:03Antarctic. What could be better? What could give people a stronger virtual experience of Antarctica?
19:11I was anxious to secure a moving picture film showing the Terra Nova splitting and rending the
19:16broken ice. Some planks were rigged from the focsal to the end of which I fixed my cinematograph.
19:21I hung on as best I could. Ponting still stands out head and shoulders above the rest in terms of
19:28the lengths that he went to go to to secure his shot but also the quality of his photography.
19:34Out of all the animals within the Arctic Circle, penguins stand first and foremost. No creature has
19:41so endeared itself to me and this feeling deepened to real affection as I got to know more of them.
19:53He shot thousands of photographs under tough conditions and he returned with a haul of
20:01of photographs that really defined the way we think of Antarctica but also the way we imagine
20:07and remember this heroic age of explorers. To ensure that his photos had the desired impact,
20:12Ponting would doctor his images, even painting in tiny figures to create a sense of scale.
20:20There's two pictures blended into one here. What he wants to do in this image here is give an idea
20:25of how insignificant human beings are in this massive landscape and at the time, don't forget,
20:33nobody would have seen, very few people would have seen images of anything from Antarctica.
20:38Some of the things he would have set up the shot of the guy in the sledge and he would have taken
20:44the background as a landscape and blend, possibly blend them together in the darkroom. That's one
20:48way of doing it. He could have painted the figure on on the glass plate, that's another way of doing
20:53it. Either way, it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things what he's done.
20:58He's created an image here that everyone can relate to. Oh my god, that's massive. That poor
21:04guy there, if that all falls down, he's going to be dead. So it's, in effect, it's an action shot.
21:09Ponting's iconic images established a visual style that continues to this day.
21:22So
21:34even today, everybody wants the shot looking like a Victorian explorer, the frozen beard and the
21:42frosted eyelashes and eyebrows. Ponting's taken himself here as the explorers want to be seen and
21:49perceived and that's the image that they're all projecting. And of course, any modern day
21:53adventurer, they want to look like a Victorian explorer. They want to look like they've had
21:58a hell of a time. One thing you can't photograph is the cold because it's invisible. But what you
22:03can photograph is the effect of cold on people. And the effect the cold has on people's body
22:10language and their faces and their behaviour, it generates automatically lots of interesting
22:16scenarios for a photographer. What was intended to be a visual record of a triumphant expedition
22:28would be transformed into something more sombre by the fate awaiting Scott and his men
22:33as they set out on their doomed journey to the South Pole.
22:47Scott had not expected to have to race for the South Pole. His predecessor and rival,
22:53Shackleton, had narrowly failed to get there a couple of years earlier. So Scott had thought
22:59of the way as being clear. He was using exactly the same polar technologies as Shackleton, which
23:04was essentially human brawn. And he was extremely surprised and put out of countenance when a party
23:15of swift, lean, mean, very well-equipped Norwegians turned up in Antarctica as well and announced
23:23their plans to make a move as well. On the 17th of January 1912, Scott and his men reached the
23:30South Pole, only to discover that their Norwegian rivals, led by Roald Amundsen, had got there more
23:37than a month before them. The worst has happened. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first
23:45at the Pole. It is a terrible disappointment and I'm very sorry for my companions.
23:53The Pole, great God, this is an awful place. We put up our slighted Union Jack and photographed
24:00ourselves. Mighty cold work. The arduous 800-mile trek back to base would prove a journey too far.
24:08One by one, Scott's party succumbed to injury, fatigue, hunger and a relentless cold.
24:16Scott's diary is crucial here. It provides, it's still an extraordinary experience reading it now,
24:23it provides an immersive, real-time experience of the slow death of a party of human beings
24:33struggling with an environment. Titus Oates is very near the end one feels.
24:39His last words were, I'm just going outside and maybe sometime.
24:46We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit and assuredly the end will not be far.
24:51It seems a pity but I don't think I can write more. Last entry, for God's sake, look after our people.
25:04Scott's death ushered in the last days of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration
25:14but his story would live on in the imagination. Very soon after that, the First World War broke
25:22out and any story which could help the hundreds of thousands of soldiers dying in the trenches
25:30that could show, you know, dying bravely for a cause was something which was encouraged and
25:36helped people to face up to what they were going to have to do the next night.
25:40Some of Ponting's film footage is shown, you know, on the Western Front to rally the troops.
25:44It has a clear message of sacrifice and duty and it wasn't so much Scott's failure
25:51that was glorified, of course, it was the manner in which he met death.
26:01Scott's endeavour had a lasting resonance but the human and material cost of the First World War
26:08diminished the desire for epic expeditions to ice-bound wastelands.
26:13Antarctica goes quiet after the First World War. The impetus of the heroic age is expended. People
26:19are no longer buying the grand pre-war narratives of heroic discovery and, to a great extent, the
26:29big geographical trophy-seeking work is done, so it's not clear why people are going to go back.
26:37With the practical business of epic exploration on hold, Antarctica became a tantalising prospect
26:43for science fiction writers such as H.P. Lovecraft,
26:47intrigued by the idea of what might lurk deep under the ice.
27:0710.15pm, important discovery. Orendorff and Watkins, working underground with light,
27:13found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature. Tissue evidently preserved by
27:20mineral salts, tough as leather. Astonishing flexibility retained in places. Arrangement
27:27reminds one of certain monsters' primal myth. Lost pillared temples, crashed flying saucers,
27:37terrible alien lifeforms which, as in The Thing, will eat you if you're foolish enough to warm
27:44them up again. Antarctica between the wars is the place where the absence of real expeditions
27:50allows for a sort of pulp Antarctica to come along. Antarctica is an annex of the unconscious.
27:58It's a place you can park all the stuff which the rest of the world is too crowded for.
28:04Realism kind of jostles us with its elbows on the settled parts of the planet but Antarctica
28:09is big and blank and white and the urge to scribble on it is just immense.
28:16The sheer scale of that blank canvas had been revealed to the world when American explorer
28:21Admiral Richard Byrd made the first flight to the South Pole in 1929.
28:27Ahead and below us a great glacier descends a pass in a series of ice falls and terraces.
28:33More beautiful than any precipitous stream I have ever seen.
28:37Ahead stretches a great plateau in white immensity to the south,
28:40in which our predecessors parted on foot a few miles a day with hunger stalking them every step
28:45of the way. And now over the spot where Amundsen first stood in 1911, where Scott followed 34 days
28:53later, we fly to and fro. There's nothing now to mark that scene, only white desolation and solitude.
29:05A craving for the solitude that he had observed from the cockpit of his plane
29:09would lead Byrd to undertake an extraordinary solo expedition a decade later.
29:15Admiral Byrd is one of the most significant American
29:19explorers of the Antarctic and he wrote the most fantastic book. It's a book called Alone
29:25and it's about some months he spent through his own choice
29:31on his own at a weather station buried in the Antarctic ice.
29:37Harmony, that was it. That was what came out of the silence. A gentle rhythm,
29:44the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres.
29:48This is the way the world will look to the last man when he dies.
29:54He's playing with what happens if you peel away layers of socialization, I think. At the beginning
30:00he's careful about using cutlery and plates and setting a table and he's sitting there nicely
30:06and reads while he's eating to slow himself down because otherwise he feels like an animal.
30:10So there's a fear of becoming an animal if you remove yourself from society,
30:15a testing of what you have to keep doing to remain human for which, of course,
30:20Antarctica is the perfect setting because you can strip everything right back.
30:25This morning I had to admit to myself that I was lonely.
30:29Try as I may, I find I can't take my loneliness casually.
30:33It is too big but I must not dwell on it otherwise I am undone.
30:39I like Bird because he writes about how he feels and he writes about breaking down and
30:45about being afraid of breaking down and at one point writes about lying on the floor sobbing.
30:50I mean, you know, catch Scott doing that. I'm sure he did lie on the floor and sob but
30:54we'll never know about it. Although he overwinters alone, to give himself a kind of consciously
31:01Scott-like experience, he's getting the baseball scores and the ever-tumbling
31:07depression era Wall Street stock prices coming over the radio every night. He's connected to
31:13the world in a way that the heroic age explorers never were and that connection
31:23is where the future is going to come from.
31:32Advances in technology and communications meant that it would soon be possible
31:36to maintain a permanent human presence on Antarctica.
31:41The huts have to be built on large wooden rafts in place of ordinary foundations
31:45as they're built on the snow. The whole of the huts themselves are prefabricated.
31:50All the timbers are pre-cut and carefully labelled so that anyone, whatever his job,
31:54can take part in this building. But who owned it? Every nation that had taken the trouble to
32:00plant its flag in the ice felt it had a justifiable claim and there were symbolic ways to emphasise it.
32:07When there were territorial claims from the 1940s onwards, various countries were issuing stamps.
32:13Once one started, and that was the Falkland Islands Dependencies in 1943, they nearly
32:19all started. Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Argentina and Chile all produced various issues
32:26and nearly all the early stamps have maps on them purely to show the territories they
32:32were claiming actually existed because in truth hardly anybody else knew where they were.
32:37Here we have Pochte SSSR 40 Corpex, a stamp showing the voyages of the ships to establish
32:45their station. This one you have the entire map of the Antarctic and you can see the three flags
32:51with the three stations Pochte SSSR. Here you have General San MartÃn station being established,
32:59the sea ice, a rock from the peninsula in the background and a sledge even with a sledge wheel
33:05on it. Nicely done. The first hint that Antarctica might be a continent to be fought over
33:20came as early as 1939 when the Nazis sprinkled the snow with metal swastikas in a bid to stake
33:26their claim. By the 1950s the world was convulsed by a conflict with grim Antarctic connotations.
33:35Cold War. There's a period in the 1950s when it looks as if Antarctica is going to be the setting
33:42for some really serious superpower competition. A kind of again an earthly analogue to the space
33:51race. The United States has taken over Antarctic logistics. They built their enormous base at
33:57McMurdo and they are flying Hercules transport planes all over the continent and the Soviet
34:03Union is setting up a rival Antarctic infrastructure which runs on converted artillery
34:11caterpillar tractors. With Antarctica poised ominously on the brink, salvation arrived
34:28from an unlikely source. In 1957 an initiative called the International Geophysical Year
34:34united the world's scientists in a quest for discovery. As the summer sun rose over the
34:39Antarctic this year, 12 nations are setting up a total of 22 observatories. Each year the snow
34:46produces its own layer like the rings in the trunk of a tree. By studying these layers we can trace
34:52back important happenings in the climate of the earth. If the superpowers could collaborate on
34:58research into Antarctic weather and geography, might they find a way to share control of the
35:03continent as well? Antarctica is unique as the only venue for the Cold War which the sides step
35:13back from. They agree to put it beyond competitive use and they sign this extraordinary document,
35:22the Antarctic Treaty which comes into force in 1961 which reserves it for science. It's the
35:29only bit of the planet which is reserved for science. This is the Antarctic Treaty in operation.
35:38This is the only large truly international territory on earth.
35:42I'm sorry I don't understand. It insisted that all activities in the Antarctic were open to inspection.
35:52This was absolutely crucial to the Americans because they were convinced that the Russians
35:56would cheat otherwise. Anybody who's interested now in seeing the scientific activities will make
36:02a little tour around. And it's the only part of the world where any nation that's a member of the
36:10treaty can actually turn up at any other nation's station and demand to be shown anything on the
36:15station and ask anybody there any questions. So it's completely open regime. Where else in the
36:22world could a group of Americans land at a Russian base and be greeted first and last as fellow
36:27scientists and human beings? Where else do these two flags fly from the same pole? And indeed you
36:33could say it was the the first non-nuclear treaty because it banned all nuclear activities from the
36:39Antarctic. As scientists and military men moved in in numbers, for the first time in its history
36:46Antarctica could be said to have had a human population. After the romance and tragedy of
36:52the heroic age, what new kind of culture would emerge?
37:09When I went to the Antarctic in the 1960s, it was a place for men to go because only men went in those days.
37:20It was a place especially for hairy men. It was a very adventurous place to go.
37:32The American bases in the Antarctic were built by navy guys in the 50s. It certainly was a hardship
37:38post then and little regard for health and safety and certainly no regard for the environment. I'm
37:44afraid they did unspeakable things to penguins. I used to think of it as like the gold rush towns.
37:52A flourishing game of dice for the regular inhabitants.
37:55What made you come? I don't know. Money.
38:00Oh I guess I came down for the experience and advancement and now I'm beginning to think that I
38:06cracked in the head a little bit. So you know I won't be back.
38:11And it was a very macho culture and to a certain extent that's persisted on the bases.
38:16It was one wonderful camp I went to in the dry valleys in the trans-Antarctic mountains
38:20where they had a blow-up sheep which they called a love you, get it ewe, which represented some of
38:27the deprivations that they experienced. Each of the stations in the Antarctic is a wonderful
38:34microcosm of the culture of the country that established it and runs it. And what could be more
38:39like home than a typically British pub serving I'm delighted to say typically British people.
38:49Home comforts might provide a distraction but being confined at close quarters in a
38:53hostile environment poses unexpected challenges. One of the interesting things about the Antarctic
39:01is that it's quite hard to be alone. You're almost always with other people so if you want to go
39:09to the most underpopulated part of the world and think you're going to be alone all the time
39:12you're not. Breathing space at least indoors is at a premium. The men live four to a room
39:18sleeping in bunks in crowded conditions. The biggest problem in any Antarctic base
39:23is getting on with your colleagues when the base is snowbound.
39:26Yeah, I was up at the pole when they locked up the first guy they ever locked up in the Antarctic.
39:31We built a brig, shoved his ass in it. Seemed like a real nice fella during the summer.
39:36Well, the day the last plane left you did a one-ante,
39:39got hold of some booze, some medicine, you just went in snaky.
39:50To a certain extent the most compelling challenges of the Antarctic I think are
39:55emotional or mental.
40:00And there's many stories about people going sort of plain old-fashioned bonkers.
40:04For example, on a Soviet station one fellow killed another fellow with an ice axe during
40:12a game of chess, over the game of chess, and to stop it happening again the Soviets banned chess.
40:19Some people are more suited to the Antarctic experience than others.
40:25We don't take doer people who are inclined not to forgive and forget, so we don't take Yorkshire
40:33people. We very rarely take people with spectacles because they can't see once it gets misted up and
40:42they're manholing. A large amount of humanity when they're under stress or physically under
40:47stress or physically pained get almost malicious, get nasty and sort of sarcastic and so on.
40:56So what you're looking for is people who are good-natured, who don't get too excited when
41:03things are going very well or too dismal when they're going badly. So you need placid,
41:08docile people who aren't malevolent in any way. It's living with other people
41:16who you can't get away from, whose idiosyncrasies you have to put up with, and they have to put up
41:22with yours. It's an exercise in tolerance that very few people actually have to undergo, but if
41:28you can survive it then you've learned a great many lessons which are useful in the rest of your life.
41:39The presence of established bases created an infrastructure that allowed Antarctica to be
41:44experienced by a whole new circle of people, lured by the majesty of the ice and the charm
41:49of the wildlife. Not a likely spot Antarctica for a package holiday and yet for the first time 40
41:57British tourists led by Peter Scott recently embarked on a white safari. Nearly 50 years
42:04after Captain Scott's death his son Peter was escorting a party of tourists on the holiday
42:10of a lifetime. Red windproof uniforms provided by the travel agent, ships life belts, special
42:17underwear, layers of woolies, fancy headgear, mittens, half-grown beards, climbing boots,
42:24sunglasses, binoculars, cameras, even a walkie-talkie. It's a trip of a lifetime, it is expensive.
42:31I made somewhat of a snap decision. When I get to the Antarctic I'm hoping to see really big things,
42:37towering icebergs and the pack ice. The Antarctic wildlife is what appeals to me quite enormously
42:44in all its ramifications. Mrs June Smith of Hereford is helped ashore by a Chilean scientist
42:51to become the first ever British tourist to set foot on the mainland of Antarctica.
42:57It's difficult not to feel some sense of regret that the last great frontier has fallen to the
43:02tourist but it's a selfish thought. It's right that at least some parts of the Antarctic should
43:09be open to those who choose to come. Those curious tourists who realized their Antarctic dreams in
43:191968 were testimony to the continuing mystique of the frozen continent and it began to entice
43:26a new breed of private adventurers eager to achieve ever greater feats of endurance.
43:33There's something deep within the human spirit that finds places like these appealing, intractable,
43:40impossible to escape from. Something within the human spirit that reaches out to a challenge
43:45like the South Pole that still appeals to many men who are willing to risk their lives and their
43:51reputations to walk there, to fly there, to ski there, to race there. It's a crucible of ambition,
43:57it's a holy grail, it's a stage, it's a blank canvas.
44:03In the 1970s a young Ranulph Fiennes sought to write his name into the record books by staging
44:11the first expedition to circumnavigate the world on its polar axis. My late wife and I had been
44:19trying to make a living out of expeditions so she basically sent me to a library and I discovered
44:25there was a big white bit at the bottom called Antarctica and I found that to go from one side
44:30to the other hadn't been done by the world's experts. A brief notice in an obscure journal
44:37announced the expedition's goals and a call for volunteers. No polar experience necessary,
44:44it declared. Hard work, great danger and no pay. No guarantee of success or glory.
44:53Presented in such stark realistic terms, could the crossing of the forbidding South and North
44:59Poles attract even the most restless of romantics? Was the British tradition for
45:05this kind of bold adventure still alive?
45:11After seven years of fundraising, preparation and rigorous training, the trans-globe expedition
45:18finally got underway in 1979. We eventually got down to Antarctica, we got dropped off by the
45:24ship that said goodbye for 18 months. They'll see us on the other side, the Pacific, and we
45:30spent eight months waiting for the dark cold period to end. We lived under the snow, four of us.
45:39Morale is given an extra boost by a call from Prince Charles. At this time the public is far
45:45more aware of the eligible bachelor's social life and his interest in trans-globe.
45:52Thank you very much indeed sir, we also send you our best wishes and hope you keep well and don't
45:58hurt yourself at all at polo or any other rough games. So best wishes from everyone here sir.
46:04It's splendid what you're doing, I still think it's mad but it's marvellous.
46:09The ultimate success of the trans-globe expedition would depend upon the team's
46:16ability to pass the target that had thwarted Shackleton and killed Scott, the South Pole.
46:26When the day came I thought, am I going to do it or am I going to get lost somewhere out there
46:32in this enormous nothingness. The means of transport had improved but the perils remained the same.
46:42In Antarctica as navigator what we were looking for was a total whiteness, not a view of any sort.
46:51Any sort of view could spell trouble because it would mean there was rocks or mountaintops or
46:57something. Because Antarctica, if you take it like a sort of cake with liquid icing on top of
47:04it because that's what it's like, all that icing from the top middle of the cape is eventually
47:10going to seep out to to the outside. So because of this movement it's causing cracks which are
47:15called crevasses. The hidden dangers they encountered were recreated for the camera.
47:23I walked only a meter from the sledge and I just plummeted down through an unseen crevasse.
47:39But the panic and the adrenaline must have made me so frightened that I pulled myself out using
47:49legs and arms like a sort of, you know, a cat that's scratching to try and get out of your hand.
47:57Cool. Teach one where not to put one's weight. Yeah sorry about that. So we want no view whatsoever,
48:05we don't want beauty or prettiness, we just want to get to A to B because we're about
48:10sort of trying to break world records which you don't do if you don't go fast.
48:19At the geographical bottom of the world,
48:26Graham, Ollie and Charlie could justifiably revel in their achievement.
48:37We ended up being the only human beings before or since who have ever been around the surface
48:43of earth through the poles. Today more people have been walking on the moon than have ever
48:48been around earth's surface. Antarctica remains the ultimate challenge for those keen to test
48:56themselves against the most extreme conditions. Adventurer Henry Worsley invoked the spirit of
49:02Shackleton in his 2009 trek to the pole, but he discovered the continent is not quite the blank
49:08canvas it once was. Yes I found intrusions into the sort of intensity of the sort of isolation of
49:18the place quite difficult to get over. We occasionally came across sort of meteorological
49:23masts stuck in the middle of absolute nowhere with an anemometer on the top, a couple of
49:28solar panels and a sort of thermometer and I remember one occasion a little sign at the bottom
49:33saying this is the property of the University of Wisconsin. Now that really annoyed me but I
49:38wasn't prepared really for the for what we saw at the pole in terms of the size and quite
49:42extraordinarily saw a car just as we were pulling up sort of in starting to come through the sort of
49:48administrative area you know a car pulled out for a site that can't be more than sort of a
49:53kilometer square at its largest. So what's supposed to be the sort of most remote part
49:59of the globe was a bit of a shock.
50:07For Scott and Shackleton it was an imaginary symbol. For today's adventurers it's a stripy pole
50:13and even the chance of a flight home should you want it. I don't want to knock the achievements
50:18of those who explore Antarctica now in the sense of challenging themselves to cross it in
50:26various ways. That's very significant for them and we clearly still have an appetite for
50:34reading about it but it no longer has the connection to science and it no longer has
50:40that sense of being something that's charged with the urgent imaginative business of the
50:47culture that sent them. It's extreme sports and why not? Why shouldn't there be icy versions of
50:54extreme sports? But I don't feel that it's carrying the weight of the Antarctic story
50:59in the way that it used to.
51:11In an attempt to reconnect with that imaginative world in the 1990s Antarctica's governing bodies
51:17began to invite a host of writers, artists, poets and composers to immerse themselves in the
51:23continent and evoke its sights and sounds in their work.
51:38The first attempt was a joint commission with the Philharmonia Orchestra for Peter
51:44Maxwell Davis to visit the Antarctic and write a new piece of music.
51:48And it filled the Royal Festival Hall at its premiere and we realised that there were a lot
51:53of people out there who were interested in the Antarctic but from an emotional and cultural
51:58point of view rather than a scientific point of view.
52:03Author Sarah Wheeler was one of those people and in 1996 she set out to convey a personal
52:09passion for the continent in the first travel book about Antarctica.
52:13I spent seven months in the Antarctic. I lived in my tent most of the time in field camps with
52:18the American government's painter in residence. It was much harder for her than it was for me
52:23because all her paints froze and then there'd be a whiteout for 10 days and then she had to
52:28paint me. It's pretty tough living under those circumstances even if you're living a cushy life
52:32as a writer as I was. I think the worst thing was sleeping. I was sleeping for a long time
52:39as a writer as I was. I think the worst thing was sleeping because you have to have in the
52:44sleeping bag with you when you're camping in the Antarctic any equipment that might freeze,
52:49cameras, recording equipment, your water bottle for the next day, a pair of socks if you want
52:54to have a pair of socks that aren't frozen. So it's like sleeping in a cutlery drawer.
53:08So
53:23writers and artists might grapple with the blank immensity of Antarctica but it is the scientists
53:29who have been working methodically on the ice since the 1940s who have come to transform the
53:34way we view the continent. Because we've been there a long time and because we've collected
53:39data systematically we are able to show very clearly how global change is affecting the
53:46Antarctic. You could say the Antarctic is like the white canary in the mine.
53:51It's telling us there's something wrong and we need to do something to fix it.
53:55The Antarctic science has become more and more obviously urgent. The ice cores dug out of
54:06Antarctica tell us about past climate and about the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
54:11It was in Antarctica that CFCs proved to be gouging a hole in the ozone layer and
54:17threatening the southern hemisphere with skin cancers. Antarctic knowledge is suddenly urgent
54:24knowledge. Yet the more we learn about Antarctica the more its potential as a source of great oil
54:33and mineral wealth becomes apparent. The mining companies have been kept at bay by the continent's
54:38scientific value but only so far. Perhaps it does make sense to think of it as a knowledge resource
54:46to the planet. It may well be that the science which can be pumped out of Antarctica
54:53is actually more valuable than any amount of petroleum. The secrets that lurk beneath the ice
55:01once charged the imaginations of science fiction writers but the reality might prove even more
55:07astounding. There's some really cutting-edge research implausible even for scientists of
55:14today to get their heads around. It reaches to the heavens that you know the science that's
55:19been done there will perhaps hold the clues to dark matter to the to the the possibility of
55:25extraterrestrial life to life on the moons of the moon of Jupiter you know really cutting-edge
55:32science that leaps from the page leaps from the continent.
55:42What once seemed a desolate place a little more than symbolic value
55:45has been reimagined as something far more precious. Antarctica is now seen as a place that
55:52needs protection rather than conquest a place actually that is cherished rather than feared
55:58a place that is fragile. Some say it's the front line rather like the arctic of global warming
56:06it's here that the the effects of climate change are most keenly felt. Now clearly the way that we
56:13act in Antarctica matters now.
56:26In the two centuries since Captain Cook thought he spied land through the mist
56:30we've begun to make sense of this strange continent. We've mapped it named it and claimed it.
56:43We have lived there and died there and left behind frozen relics memorials to a vanished age.
56:54We have agreed to share it and we have colonized it.
57:00We have been inspired by it and we have begun to decode a fraction of its secrets.
57:06But we have only just begun to scratch the surface of a place that can seem to defy understanding.
57:22I've never been anywhere which is so obviously not made out of words not made out of human
57:30it's not made out of human perceptions and understandings it's it's itself it stands apart
57:38from from human culture it it overshadows human culture and there is something
57:45transporting and rather good for us in getting to a place so indifferent a place which which
57:53we really cannot plausibly claim is is just a subdivision of our own concerns.
58:00I stepped into an avalanche it covered up my soul
58:30so