Storming Antarctica (Full Episode) — Continent 7: Antarctica

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Antarctica. It's the least explored. Least understood continent on Earth. In winter, the sun never rises. In summer, it never sets. 5.4 million square miles of frozen desert, home to the driest place on Earth. Average winter temperature, 20 to 90 below. Barely anything can survive here. No native people or land mammals, not even a single tree. But in spite of the worst conditions on Earth, humanity is working to scratch out a presence. [00:01:22] Speaker 2: Oh, look at that. Wow, that is one number of a bloody crevice. Now we advance onwards into nothing. It's just ice-shelping horizon now. [00:01:34] Speaker 3: About to hit some ice. Race for shot. [00:01:40] Speaker 1: The world's top scientists. They're really cryptic, totally designed for living in this sea ice. And the men and women who keep them alive. [00:01:49] Speaker 4: Oh, we're just about to enter into the shears right here. [00:01:53] Speaker 1: Join forces to battle conditions that threaten human life. Visibility's down to 20 meters. The coldest temperature ever recorded, 135.8 degrees below zero. And the strongest ever sustained wind, 199 miles per hour. All in the name of research that could change the world. [00:02:33] Speaker 5: Winds are pretty thick ice here. I can't see anymore. [00:02:37] Speaker 6: Hey, what just happened? Something that just hit something. We've got the locks of somebody to investigate it. Go ahead, put the propulsion over here, too. God, look at me. Stay. [00:02:50] Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Really? Antarctica is the last great mystery on Earth. In this frozen wasteland, at the bottom of the planet, it takes a massive effort just to survive. There are over 70 bases, built by 30 countries, and spread across the continent. At the mouth of McMurdo Sound, in the heart of the Ross Sea region, is Scott Base, New Zealand's permanent research outpost. [00:03:42] Speaker ?: Hey, guys. Welcome to Scott Base. [00:03:45] Speaker 7: Get your gear off. Get comfortable. [00:03:47] Speaker 1: Here, scientists are housed, fed, and protected from the elements by a network of green buildings linked by weatherproof tunnels. And it's all coordinated by Scott Base leadership. [00:04:02] Speaker 7: Right now, at Scott Base, this is the busy season. And it starts in October, and it goes right all the way through to February. So that's five months that we're pretty much peaking. In total, we have about 330 people going south. So it's pretty crazy. It takes, you know, over 200 people to support, you know, 90 scientists. [00:04:21] Speaker 8: Get that one over up on top. I can help you pile that stuff down. [00:04:26] Speaker 1: Today, the Ross Ice Shelf team is leading on one of the most ambitious expeditions in the history of Scott Base. We're packing up. [00:04:34] Speaker 9: All of our science cargo is ready to go. [00:04:37] Speaker 1: Ten scientists and two survival experts are going 220 miles south to a floating mass of ice attached to the continent, where no one has likely ever set foot. [00:04:49] Speaker 10: The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest lump of floating ice in the world. It's the size of France. And actually, we've got one measurement that's ever been made in the 1970s. That's it. And the rest of it's a mystery. So little is known. The surface of Pluto has much better imagery than what's beneath the Ross Ice Shelf. It's a lot of new stuff that we're going to discover. [00:05:10] Speaker 1: Dr. Christian Ownizer and his team are hoping to learn how the ice shelf reacted to climate shifts in the distant past so they can try to predict how fast it might melt as the climate changes in the future. [00:05:23] Speaker 10: The Ross Ice Shelf holds back a piece of ice sheet that's threatened. If it falls apart, and it melts. Even though it's far away, the impact would be somewhere in the order of six, seven metres of sea level. But I'd be worried about 10 centimetres. That's already enough to impact low-lying areas, like where I come from, South Dunedin. You can write off whole neighbourhoods there. Six metres, of course, you're wiping out everything. We've got fire extinguishers in all vehicles. [00:05:56] Speaker 8: I'll just go and double-check that they're in there. [00:05:59] Speaker 1: Tom is in charge of team safety. And he has to lead them south across over 200 miles of rough ice, including a known area of deadly cracks called the Shear Zone. [00:06:11] Speaker 4: The Shear Zone, massive crevassing out there. They are huge, pretty humbling sights. Nobody has to leave a vehicle during that time we go through that area. Some of the crevasses in the Shear Zone can be five, six, seven metres wide and probably 30, 40 metres deep. So it really gives you that perspective that we're quite a small fish in the grand scheme of things and Mother Nature really has control here. Three in the back, one in the front. You're good to go. Knowing that it's my responsibility to make sure that everybody can get back to Scott Bay safely is a huge, huge deal. Let's roll. [00:06:59] Speaker 1: To survive the journey, the team is relying on specialised vehicles called Haglins. [00:07:05] Speaker 2: These Haglins are pretty tough. They're tracked vehicles. They share similarities with tanks. They're really well suited for what we need them to do. I'm looking at this wide expanse of nothing and it's a bit creepy. [00:07:20] Speaker 10: We've spent so much energy and time. Months of planning and building a piece of equipment. But now what happens? No one's ever done this before. It's exploration. It's going to be interesting. From this point on, we've got four hours before we get to the Shear Zone. We can very gingerly make our way through what's essentially a minefield of Karasses. We're here. [00:07:40] Speaker ?: We have arrived. [00:07:41] Speaker 1: Scott Bayes can only house 85 people at a time, so projects are constantly cycling through. There are more than 90 missions scheduled this season, none of them more challenging than this one. [00:08:09] Speaker 11: Hey, Graham. Danny. Do we have everything we need? All the cables and coils and skis? They're all out there. Good. [00:08:17] Speaker 1: The Mount Erebus team is studying Antarctica's most active volcano, choppering to 132 different sites to plant instruments that'll create a composite image of its inner workings. [00:08:28] Speaker 3: Oh, those are stinky. [00:08:30] Speaker 1: Today, they're gearing up to fly near its summit. [00:08:33] Speaker 11: Getting dressed to go about 11,000 feet, so it could be minus 20 up there. And it's a rule that we always have to wear this big puffy jacket in the helicopter in case it crashes. Another day, double air for comfort and extra warmth. [00:08:51] Speaker 1: Dr. Graham Hill is a lead scientist for the project. [00:08:54] Speaker 3: We're measuring the electric field and the magnetic field of the volcano at a series of points, which we then combine and do effectively a CAT scan of the subsurface. So if we can get a good understanding of what the structure is, we have a better understanding of what signals they might generate when they're going to erupt. We'll be heading out, and we can apply what we learn about how this volcano works to other volcanoes elsewhere in the world. Because quite a lot of people live near volcanic centers, so if they erupt, they can just wipe out the surrounding area. Volcanoes have a big impact on human life. Let's get over there. [00:09:36] Speaker 11: Time to go to work. Another day in paradise. [00:09:41] Speaker 1: Danny isn't a scientist. He's a world-class mountaineer, and it's his job to keep the team alive on the side of the volcano. Let's go. [00:09:50] Speaker 11: I love doing my job. I get to take people on all these fantastic adventures, but you're not in control of the environment. Either you're safe and you come home, or you screw up and you don't come home. [00:10:00] Speaker 12: This is Hef. [00:10:12] Speaker 1: Hef flies the chopper. Mount Erebus is just more than 20 miles away, and he has to navigate unpredictable winds. Bit of a breeze up here. [00:10:22] Speaker 13: 20 knots, maybe. Pretty good. [00:10:24] Speaker 1: He also has to find a safe place to land, and the whole mountain is covered in crevasses. [00:10:36] Speaker 11: Basically, a crevasse is like an opening in the glacier like this. There's a lot of action in this area, a lot of movement in the glacier. Oh, look at that. [00:10:46] Speaker ?: Wow. That's amazing. [00:10:48] Speaker 11: Sometimes you can see right into that. I mean, you go, "Yep, that's a crevasse. I'm not going to land in that big gaping hole." But often, it can be hidden underneath a snow bridge. From the helicopter, they could be any old size, you know? Yeah, something like that. [00:11:13] Speaker 3: Some people would think that we're a little bit crazy to come to Antarctica and fly around. on a crevasse-filled volcano that is erupting. [00:11:20] Speaker 11: You can see we're kind of out in the middle of that ice stream there. Yeah. [00:11:24] Speaker 3: When you tell people these kind of things back home, they do look at you a bit odd. Why would you do that? It's just one of the realities of actually doing the work. [00:11:34] Speaker 11: Oh, I want more. Is that looking? We'll just find the nicest looking spot. Right in front of us. That's great. Yeah. [00:11:42] Speaker 3: But we're working with excellent pilots, some of the best in the world. We've got total faith in the guys that we're flying with. All right, let's get down to the business end. All right, I'm just going to come in there. [00:11:54] Speaker 14: Gravity's taking hold. They've landed, but they're not out of the woods yet. [00:12:08] Speaker 1: Just this year, a veteran pilot from an Aussie base landed on what appeared to be safe ground. [00:12:15] Speaker 12: He was delivering fuel to a depot on the West Ice Shelf. But after getting out of his helicopter, he fell into a deep crevasse. They managed to retrieve him from a depth of about 20 metres. But he died of his injuries. [00:12:30] Speaker 1: It's Danny's job to check for crevasses, like that one, while the pilot keeps the rotor spinning to take off quickly if the snow caves in. [00:12:39] Speaker 14: All right, obviously he jumped in. [00:12:41] Speaker 11: The probe's in the pod there? It's in your pod, yep. [00:13:01] Speaker 1: The Mount Erebus team's chopper is still powered, so it can lift off if a crevasse opens up beneath them. [00:13:08] Speaker 11: I'll just go have a little poke. [00:13:10] Speaker 1: And it's Danny's job to test for hard-packed snow and avoid hidden holes. [00:13:15] Speaker 11: There's no doubt in my mind that we're on terrain that has crevasses underneath it we can't see. It is a pretty heavy responsibility. I've had very close friends die in crevasse falls, in situations just like what we're dealing with here. So, for me, it's something that's very real. Okay. [00:13:40] Speaker 1: He's wearing skis to spread out his weight. But even so, every step is treacherous. It's kind of like this. Walking between two skyscrapers. At least the walker can see the drop. See the wire straight ahead. Crazy as it might be, if he puts one foot in front of the other, he'll make it safely across. And avoid a 1,300-foot drop. Danny could be over a similar drop. And he can't even see the wire. [00:14:33] Speaker 11: I'm just going to poke around a bit. I have to poke around and really have a good inspection of the site. I'm kind of feeling in the snow for the consistency and the snow depth. [00:15:03] Speaker ?: Aha! [00:15:06] Speaker 9: We made it! [00:15:09] Speaker 11: Hey, guys. I think it looks good to get out. It's a nice accumulation zone. So, there's lots of snow here. And it's a nice compression area as well. So, I think as long as we keep it nice and tight, we should be fine. You just have to have a little bit of faith. Now, it kind of blessed the area. This area is safe. And people can get out and then start working. [00:15:33] Speaker 1: Graham and his team are on the clock. They have to bury four sensors in four different directions and run hundreds of feet of cable back to a central computer. And the chopper will be back for them in two hours. [00:15:48] Speaker 15: Fingers are getting a bit chilly trying to do this out here in the wind. I think I've drunk too much water. [00:15:58] Speaker 11: Wow, man. Looks like you were hydrated. Good job. [00:16:00] Speaker 1: In Antarctica, nothing gets left behind. Not even urine. In an effort to preserve the most pristine environment on the planet, all human waste is brought back to Scott Base. And every bit of it ends up here. [00:16:25] Speaker 14: After this comes out, you know woman will never look at me again, don't you? [00:16:28] Speaker 1: Paul is in charge of the water treatment center, better known as the poo plant. [00:16:37] Speaker 14: Because there's so much influent at the moment, it's kind of easier on the system to do some manual stuff. Our influent comes in through the main sewer pipe and through the brush screen. Our brush screen takes out solid stuff and that goes into a bag. So this is what we end up with out of the sludge in the process. It's almost like beef jerky looking. You wouldn't sell it in your local store, but that's the look of beef jerky. [00:17:06] Speaker 1: The waste becomes Scott Base's primary export. [00:17:09] Speaker 14: There's one. Good to go. [00:17:11] Speaker 1: Everything that can't be recycled is sent back to New Zealand. It's part of a global effort to minimize impact on the frozen continent. A goal of a treaty signed by 53 nations. [00:17:27] Speaker 14: You can't just have the waste from people and everything happening here just disappearing into the ocean. It's got to be treated. We got to look after. [00:17:37] Speaker 1: Just like the continent itself, the surrounding ocean is carefully protected. Wildlife migrates to these waters every year. And perhaps no feeding ground is more important than one off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost tip of the mainland. [00:18:02] Speaker 9: Do you see any particular sites of concentration? [00:18:04] Speaker 6: Back in here, if it's calm, this is where those animals will be sleeping. Oh, nice. [00:18:10] Speaker 1: Dr. Ari Friedlander is one of the preeminent scientists and conservationists in his field. [00:18:15] Speaker 6: So there's something special about three or four areas right in here that there's always whales. [00:18:20] Speaker 1: His goal is to study humpback and minke whales to find out how their ecosystem responds to a changing climate. [00:18:28] Speaker 6: His goal is sort of right in the middle of that feeding season. So filling that gap of what these animals are doing at this time of year is going to be pretty awesome. We're trying to measure the underwater behavior and movements of the whales, get an estimate of their size, and we're trying to understand what whales need to survive and the amount of food that they eat. If you don't eat enough, you're not going to reproduce. If you don't reproduce, it's a very quick process into your population not growing. [00:18:57] Speaker 9: We just left Deception Highlanders so we'll easily get into the Galax Straits in the mouth of the Herrera Channel by dawn. Perfect. If the whales are looking good, you can be out working. Cool. [00:19:09] Speaker 6: This is a place where people have made huge changes in the environment. Over the last 50 years, the winter air has raised by about 5 degrees Celsius. The sea ice over the last 30 years in this part of the peninsula has decreased in the number of days that are ice covered. There's a huge standing stock of krill here, and that's what they need to feed on. But the warming that's occurred here, if that affects the way that krill are distributed, it could mean something pretty significant. [00:19:39] Speaker 1: More than 4 billion people rely on seafood as a staple, and the fish we eat eat smaller fish. Which eats smaller fish? In some cases, all the way down the chain to this: krill. As sea ice recedes, the algae they eat goes with it. And if krill disappears, so does the whale's food supply, and a big part of our own. [00:20:07] Speaker 6: We've got the drones and the suction cup tags. Let's see if they survive the trip. We have a small UAV, a little quadcopter with a camera on it. When we fly that over the whale, we can get a very precise estimate of the size of that animal. [00:20:22] Speaker 5: So we're just gonna fire the motors up without the props to make sure that it's all running. [00:20:27] Speaker 6: The other thing that we do is deploying suction cup tags. These tags, they're basically like a smartphone. They record the angle of the whale, whether it's rolled over on its side, the heading of the whale, the depth, and the speed of the whale, and it does that hundreds of times a second. It also records video, which is awesome, because we can then sort of corroborate the things that the sensors are telling us with what we actually see the whale doing. It's got two 720p cameras in there. We can get about nine hours of continuous data. And all of that packaged together gives us a really precise estimate of the health of the animals down here. [00:21:03] Speaker 5: Tag data, UAV data combined is gonna be, you know, opening new worlds, really. [00:21:08] Speaker ?: So let's find some whales. [00:21:09] Speaker 5: Yeah, let's do it. [00:21:13] Speaker 8: Okay, team, let's mark the sheer zone, so it's been nice and close behind us. Thank you. [00:21:41] Speaker 1: The Ross Ice Shelf team has traveled about 30 miles, and they're facing the most dangerous part of their traverse. [00:21:48] Speaker 4: Oh, we're just about to answer into the sheer zone here. We just want to make sure that everybody's capable should the worst possible case happen. [00:21:57] Speaker 1: The sheer zone looks like a safe patch of snow, but like Mount Erebus, it's full of hidden crevasses. [00:22:05] Speaker 8: For as flat and benign as it looks, there's a lot going on. One side we've got sort of the McMurdo ice shelf, and the other is the Ross ice shelf. It's where two large kind of ice masses are coming together, much like a river comes together. And the reason it's called a sheer zone is because there's kind of a sheer effect between the two. So it's quite an active area. [00:22:31] Speaker 4: Interesting spot. The sheer zone is an intimidating area, around about six or so kilometres, that have a number of significantly large crevasses in them. We know that there's a route through there. We really reduce that speed down even further, so that we're 100% sure what we're driving on is good to drive across. [00:22:52] Speaker 8: Just keep a little extra following distance. How far do you want? Oh, maybe 50 metres. [00:22:58] Speaker 16: We're just going to be going a little bit slower through here. And if we stop, you should too. We're just going to get all our gear prepared for mass rescue. Proceed with caution. Fingers crossed. [00:23:12] Speaker 1: This zone should take a few hours, but Tom and Rob have been preparing for it for weeks. [00:23:19] Speaker 8: So this is the radar boom for our PB-100. We'll be fitting a GPR unit, a ground penetrating radar, and we'll be able to see on the monitor when we're approaching crevasses. And that'll enable us to not drive into them. State-of-the-art technology, real key piece of this whole project for this year and going into the future as well. So, yeah, just got to get it up and running. [00:23:53] Speaker 1: The boom stretches 24 feet ahead and connects to a screen that shows ice composition up to 49 feet deep. Bends in the lines indicate empty space under the snow. [00:24:05] Speaker 4: So if we had a few crevasses through here, we'd literally swallow this whole vehicle and probably the two trailers behind it. So if we hadn't looked at the radar imagery and we actually just carried on, dropped into a crevasse, it would probably be all over. [00:24:20] Speaker 8: OK, team, we're just going to head off slowly, aiming for about 12k an hour. We've got some black flags coming up here, Tom. Should be seeing something fairly shortly or so. [00:24:43] Speaker 10: It's kind of creepy, you know. So each one of these wooden stakes here represents a known crevasse. Right now we've got one five metres that way and one six metres that way. [00:24:56] Speaker 17: You know, black flags are a little bit freaky when you see them, like, right by where you are. Just along the whole road in the crevasse area, you see black flags everywhere. Black flags mean, well, death or don't go there. So that's a bit nerve-wracking. [00:25:14] Speaker 10: It is a bit spookier when you know, you know you're walking through the alligator pit. [00:25:23] Speaker 4: And we believe this to be probably the most dangerous area. Hey guys, we're about halfway through. [00:25:31] Speaker 8: You can see how this flag line's kind of no longer straight, sort of vindicative of... How much this road's moving? [00:25:39] Speaker 10: Yeah, roger that. That's crazy. Wow. There's so many crevasses here. We don't want to have any dance before we even get the science done. [00:25:53] Speaker 1: The largest crevasses ever measured on the Ross Ice Shelf are almost 350 feet across and 500 feet deep. And since the whole ice shelf is floating, the cracks in it are constantly moving. [00:26:09] Speaker 8: Couple more black flags coming up. [00:26:11] Speaker 4: They look like reasonably new black flags. There's something coming in now. Pretty high actually. The boom is about seven and a half metres long. And it gives us around about three to six seconds of stopping distance once we see something come up on the screen. Big, big, big wood going down. Yeah, something to be concerned about. [00:26:32] Speaker ?: Stop there. [00:26:33] Speaker 4: Stop. [00:26:35] Speaker 8: Stop there. [00:26:36] Speaker ?: Stop. [00:26:36] Speaker 10: Stop. Stop. [00:26:38] Speaker 8: The Ross Ice Shelf team is in the shear zone. The Ross Ice Shelf team is in the shear zone. an area littered with deadly cracks in the ice. Uh, obvious void underneath. [00:26:54] Speaker 4: Deep void underneath, but the surface is pretty drenched right across. Stop, man. Stop. [00:27:02] Speaker 10: Obvious, actually stop now. [00:27:04] Speaker 1: The Ross Ice Shelf team is in the shear zone, an area littered with deadly cracks in the ice, and the lead vehicle is right on top of one. [00:27:13] Speaker 8: So we just stopped over a crack, obvious void underneath three, four meters bridge. [00:27:24] Speaker 4: Bridges are basically hiding the crevasses, so they're giving you a false idea of what's beneath there. So driving along, you can't actually see that there's a crevasse down there. Robert, I'll run it around your side, and then you can clip on as well. We're making sure that we've got everything we need. The harnesses are setting correctly. All the buckles and loops are done up as they should be. Uh, we've well and truly opened this up. That's all that snow bridge that we were talking about. You can't quite see the bottom of it, but it goes down at least 30 meters. So, yeah, I'm just going to pry and probe this side here, Rob, and see how that looks for a slightly better crossing. [00:28:13] Speaker 8: Yep. [00:28:17] Speaker 4: Boy, that I've got through there. That looks good. Yeah, so the crack's still here, but it's only maybe 15 or so centimeters wide, so it's obviously narrowing as we go. [00:28:40] Speaker 8: Let's just watch them come across and get them to park up before this next post here. Yeah. And once they stop, then we'll go. All right, guys, we're just going to head off slowly. You can see the two lines that Tom made over by the flags over there. That's going to be where you guys are going to cross. Thank you, guys, they're going to cross. [00:29:20] Speaker 2: Oh, Roger, thank you. It is actually quite scary doing this. [00:29:32] Speaker 10: I'm very nervous driving. You can fall down into a big hole, and you probably will die. It happens. It's happened before in Antarctica. But we can't turn back. We'd spend so much time planning. You just have to-- you just have to get through that. I mean, that's what Tom and Rob were there for. [00:29:47] Speaker 8: We're getting coming a little bit right now, Rob. Bring it over towards me a little bit, please. And stop. Clear. Whoo! We're alive. Well done. Should be good to go. [00:30:14] Speaker 4: Let's get some kilometres under the belt. [00:30:17] Speaker 1: The team is safely across. But now, Scott Base Coms is monitoring a storm heading up from the South Pole. [00:30:26] Speaker ?: The weather is a determining factor here. They're showing the rate of 40 knots of wind. Possibly gusting up to 55 knots. Fair conditions are visible. [00:30:28] Speaker 1: It will drop from snow. Get a pass through the area. Quite heavy snow. [00:30:31] Speaker ?: Okay. It's definitely a release to get through the shear zone. [00:30:33] Speaker 4: But where we're driving to is pretty much directly south, which is where the storm system's going to come in from. I guess you're always hoping it's going to be going to be able to get through the shear zone. [00:30:36] Speaker ?: I guess you're always hoping it's not going to be as bad as it's forecasted. [00:30:37] Speaker 4: It might blow out. And it might blow out. And we'll have fine winds. [00:30:40] Speaker 18: The weather is the determining factor here. They're showing the rate of 40 knots of wind. Possibly gusting up to 55 knots. The weather conditions are visible. It will drop from snow. Get a pass through the area. Quite heavy snow. [00:30:50] Speaker ?: Okay. [00:30:50] Speaker 18: It's definitely a release to get through the shear zone. [00:30:55] Speaker 4: But where we're driving to is pretty much directly south, which is where the storm system's going to come in from. I guess you're always hoping it's not going to be as bad as it's forecasted. It might blow out and we'll have reasonably good weather. But a year's worth of planning has gone into these events. So getting moving and seeing how it goes is kind of part of how it has to work down in Antarctica. [00:31:18] Speaker 2: Rob and Tom have guided us through. Now we advance onwards into nothing. Wow. [00:31:25] Speaker 13: Crazy. [00:31:27] Speaker 2: Just eye-shelping horizon now. [00:31:41] Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm ready, man. Three degrees to the left of this little cloud. [00:31:46] Speaker 11: Okay, I'm going. I think we have to be a little bit more minimal with the stopping. Or else we're going to get in trouble. [00:31:55] Speaker 1: Start digging. The Mount Erebus team buries instruments on a north-south and east-west axis to measure the naturally occurring electric and magnetic fields that are constantly passing through Earth's surface. Am I going in a straight line? [00:32:10] Speaker 11: It's always a question. [00:32:15] Speaker 1: The currents move through different layers of the Earth at varying speeds, and a central computer records those differences. Their goal is to collect data across 132 different sites and combine them to create a picture of the volcano's inner structure and magma flow. [00:32:35] Speaker 15: This little box is the brains of the operation out here and is basically a really, really fancy data collector. [00:32:45] Speaker 1: And all of it has to happen before the chopper comes back for them. [00:32:48] Speaker 3: It takes us about an hour and a half to put one into the ground. Or if it's a site where it's not snow that you're trying to dig, it's glacial ice. It can take six, seven hours. So you have to realize that things are going to take longer than they would pretty much anywhere else in the world. It's been about an hour of sleep in the last 36 hours for me. But that's a good hole. [00:33:29] Speaker 6: So, Nick, let's just have you right in that spot there is good. Yeah, I feel good up here. And then we'll try and do it off whichever side the animal gives us. [00:33:38] Speaker 1: Ari is in a small inflatable boat looking for a 66,000-pound humpback whale. The frequency is 151.333. And he has to get close enough to attach a suction mount to it with a 23-foot metal pole. [00:33:54] Speaker 6: We're in Wilhelmina Bay. One of the locations that we've worked in for a long time. And we're going to try and deploy one of the video recording multi-sensor tags on a humpback. Let's see if we can see if that whale is still there. The whales come because the krill is there. When they're done feeding, they'll basically take a nap at the surface. Essentially look like a log. For us, it's a great place because the whales behave in a way that allows us to approach them to put our tags on. I think I see something in there. There we go. Right out in front of us. Off our bow. If that guy looks like he stops and logs for a while, we'll go up and approach him. First approach, always the best. I'm going to come either from 5:00 or 7:00 o'clock and just try and get the tag on as high up as possible. Is that cool? Yep. All right. And just stay-- whichever way we're going, just kind of stay on the opposite side. It's probably going to be on the left side of the Zodiac. We're basically prepped up. We're going to go sneak up on this guy, go real slow. The key is to not wake them up as we approach and not have them respond to us. So if we can get up to it by the time it's still logging, we should be good. So you're going to have to be full extension for this guy. Yeah. When we're approaching these whales, it's definitely a high-risk kind of situation. If it's fluke, hit the Zodiac, it would flip us over without much trouble. You probably have five or six minutes in that water at the most before hypothermia would set in and it would be game over. He's not going to hear it. Well, now it's going to dive. If the whale responds to what you're doing, its general response is going to be to dive. There he goes. Sometimes we lose track of the whale and we have no way of finding it. You might see a footprint in the water from where it kind of kicked away, but it's like one and done. This sucks. I did see a whale. I don't see a logging whale now. I don't know where the one was that went down here. [00:36:47] Speaker 1: Ari and his team were close to deploying a suction tag, but the whale they were chasing went under water. [00:36:54] Speaker 6: Is that a logging whale out there? Can't tell. No, it's not. These animals move over big distances very quickly. They're a real pain to work with because they're difficult to find. Do you guys want to get the drone in the air? This wouldn't be a bad spot. [00:37:11] Speaker ?: Yeah. [00:37:12] Speaker 1: Ari's UAV specialist, Lars, pilots a drone that can give them a bird's eye view to help find a whale and give them more information about it when they do. [00:37:22] Speaker 19: We can use this footage to look at body size of these whales. Typically, we usually fly them in warmer climates. This is the first time we've been in Antarctica flying in these colder conditions. [00:37:44] Speaker 5: Is the loiter working all right? Yeah, it seems to be fine. [00:37:47] Speaker ?: Good. [00:37:48] Speaker 19: How's your feed in this distance? It's good. What's that? There it is. Oh, nice. Yeah, that's good. [00:38:06] Speaker 6: Oh, he's got a buddy. That's why he's kind of fired up. [00:38:09] Speaker 19: We'll take one of our vessels within the frame with the whale. That allows us to scale the size of the whale to the boat. And that will allow us to get us direct measurements of how big the whale is. Nicely done. [00:38:28] Speaker 6: Sweet. So, Nick, it'll be no different if the animal is not logging. Okay. All right, we'll approach as slow as we can to still be making up speed on it. Sure. When we're approaching a whale, human safety is the first concern. The thing you don't want to do when you're approaching these animals is to start a lot. Anywhere you can put it kind of territory. Are you going to-- I'm going to swing around. Don't worry. It's going to be on our port side. Okay, so we're still going to port. If someone else wants to take the tiller, I'll tag. Okay. I gotcha. [00:39:07] Speaker 18: Go ahead. [00:39:30] Speaker 19: Very nice. [00:39:32] Speaker 6: Sweet. Nice, dude. We're happy. But the work is definitely not over. The suction cup tags archive all the data on them, so we have to retrieve that tag to get anything back. Oh, look. Sweet. There's the tag. Awesome. I think these animals have a lot more going on than we understand or that we have the ability to be able to comprehend. Holy . [00:40:04] Speaker ?: I don't think it's a big one. Yeah. [00:40:13] Speaker 6: These animals get as curious about us as we do about them. It's looking at you, and it's kind of wondering what you're doing there. And we're asking the same kind of questions. Lars, correct me if I'm wrong. This is the first ever flight in the Antarctic, right? For this equipment? Yes, that's correct. Couldn't ask for more, except for Lars to buy us a couple of drinks. Not a big one. Out here, every minute counts. [00:40:47] Speaker 3: We've got to really be efficient to get the job done. [00:40:52] Speaker 1: The Mount Erebus team has installed three out of their four sensors and run wiring back to the main computer. [00:40:59] Speaker 3: The storm direction has definitely changed, and that cloud is not good at all. Because that's coming up off the water on the other side. But the same storm that's been threatening [00:41:14] Speaker 1: the Ross Ice Shelf team is increasing the winds at high altitude. Hey, Danny. [00:41:21] Speaker 3: Have you noticed the change in weather? That cloud could lead to a camping trip. If the weather descends on us when the helicopter's not around, you have your survival bags, which have tents and sleeping bags in case you don't get home that night. But you don't want that to happen. Scott Bates from Graham? Are you-- Yeah, if you can get hold of Sean, can you tell him to rush out to get us right now? Roger. Ah. How are you doing, Miha? How many minutes do you think you'll be doing that, Grant? Uh, we've probably got another six or seven minutes. There we go. It's working now. Oh, we're coming together. Close. [00:42:22] Speaker 10: Oh, real good? We're good. We're good. Oh, yeah. We're running for the ride a couple hundred meters and set up. [00:42:39] Speaker ?: Yeah. We're running for the ride a couple hundred meters and set up. Yeah. [00:42:44] Speaker 8: I'll pull up here, guys, and you can come in nice and close behind us. [00:42:59] Speaker 1: The Ross Ice Shelf team is now 40 miles south of Scott Base. After a long day of driving, they have no choice but to stop and rest. But since they're the furthest team south, the worst of the storm could be just a few hours away. [00:43:16] Speaker 4: All right, so this is going to be our home for the night. So what we need to do here is establish a camp. So let's say this is our area here. Prevailing wind's going to come in from here. I'd like to have my camp kind of in a nice, neat line going. [00:43:32] Speaker ?: Psh, psh, psh, psh. [00:43:33] Speaker 4: Does that make sense? That's good. All right. [00:43:38] Speaker 10: OK. We just want to get everything up and get inside and get out of the wind because it's cold. Definitely, fellas, colder than at Scott Base. Scott Base is going to feel tropical compared to this out here. [00:43:56] Speaker 1: Once the storm hits, these Scott polar tents will be their only protection. [00:44:02] Speaker 10: Thomas Leitho. [00:44:04] Speaker 1: They're named after one of the first men ever to explore Antarctica. Robert Falcon Scott. The design hasn't changed much since he used them. And he was in one just like it right here on the Ross ice shelf. According to his final message, had we lived, he said, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardy hood, endurance, and courage of my companions, which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. That message was discovered after he and those companions froze to death. [00:44:49] Speaker 10: Suddenly quite a bit colder. [00:44:51] Speaker ?: Okay. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. I'm nervous. [00:45:11] Speaker 11: We're in a nice high wind speed hat. Looks like a little nuclear bomb. [00:45:16] Speaker 3: Yep. It was one of those days where bad weather comes in out of nowhere. And half hour later, it's gotten real flat and real dark. And, uh, turn around and come home. I think it looks worse now than it did when we were in the helicopter. Here's the other technical bag. The number one priority is that everybody's safe and everybody comes home. If the helicopter had left us, I'm pretty sure we would have been using it in our, uh, our survival bags. Tomorrow we try again and hope for a bit more sunshine. [00:46:06] Speaker 20: I see the weather is changing. It's due to a, um, a low pressure area sitting in the Ross Sea. And it's dragging some cold air up from the South Pole. With the low cloud coming through into the position, there's a lot more energy in the wind. This is our best prediction for, um, out on the Ross Ice Shell. And they're driving straight into it. [00:46:34] Speaker 13: The main thing is you just have to be patient. You can't get antsy about it. Because it's not you that makes the decisions here. It's intact again. [00:46:57] Speaker ?: You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it. You can't get antsy about it.