Life in the Freezer (1993) s01e06 Episode Script

This is the hut at Cape Evans
where Captain Scott
and his party spent the winter of 1911.
The freezing Antarctic temperatures
have kept everything exactly as it was -
food, equipment
and, perhaps most poignant of all,
clothing and bedding on the bunks.
It's as though
the explorers left yesterday.
And this is how it was
around that same table
on June 6th, 1911, Scott's 43rd birthday.
He and his team wintered here
so as to be ready,
as soon as the sun reappeared,
to start the trek to the pole.
They lightened the long dark days
with their own entertainment.
But these were serious-minded men.
For some, reaching the pole
was of secondary importance.
They had come to make scientific discoveries
in geology, biology, glaciology, meteorology -
and they had a surprisingly
well-equipped laboratory.
And that is still here, too.
Photography was in the hands
of Herbert Ponting.
He took cine film
as well as still photographs.
He had his own cramped darkroom
in which to develop and print
his huge glass plates.
They had with them
large stocks of tinned food.
We now know that this was not nearly
as nutritious as it was supposed to be.
That and other vitamin deficiences
contributed to the disaster that was to come.
As they waited, they knew that,
further along the coast,
the Norwegian Amundsen and his team
were waiting to try and beat them to the pole.
On 1st November, at the beginning of summer,
Scott and four companions
left this hut and set off
on the 800-mile march to the South Pole.
They wore clothes of wool
and cotton like these.
They travelled on long wooden skis
with simple bindings,
and they transported
their equipment and food
on sledges which they pulled themselves,
having decided against the dogs
which Amundsen was using.
They reached the pole on 17th January,
only to find that Amundsen
had got there 34 days before.
On the way back,
they encountered dreadful weather,
ran short of supplies
and died in their tent
of starvation and exhaustion
11 miles from a food depot
and less than 100 miles
from the safety of this hut
Today, some 80 years later,
a great deal has changed.
Modern fabrics keep you warm
during the worst of conditions,
satellites in the sky
make communication and navigation easy
and, almost every day in summer,
an aircraft takes off from the ice near here
and flies directly to the pole.
Captain Scott marched for 79
exhausting, back-breaking days
before he reached the pole.
This plane will make
exactly the same journey
in less than three hours.
And today alone, there are
four other flights like this.
As you fly along Scott's route,
it is not only the sheer distance
that impresses you,
it's also the appalling
difficulties of the terrain.
At first, Scott used a combination
of motor sledge, ponies and dogs,
but after 409 miles he abandoned them all.
Thereafter, he and his men
hauled the sledges themselves,
each man pulling 90 kilos.
The decision not to use dogs throughout
was probably their undoing.
Amundsen, by doing so,
made the journey much more quickly
and with much less physical effort.
So when Scott and his companions
reached the pole,
they found Amundsen's abandoned tent
already there,
and inside it a note for Scott
to deliver to the King of Norway
should Amundsen himself fail to return.
Scott, when he arrived at this exact spot
and found the Norwegian flag
already planted by Amundsen,
wrote in his journal:
"Great God, this is an awful place. "
And so it must have been
to those five exhausted,
bitterly disappointed men,
with the dreadful return journey
still ahead of them.
Today, some 80 years later,
neither explorer would recognise the place.
This summer, over a hundred
scientists and support staff
will live and work protected
from the worst of the weather
by this dome.
Beneath it are smaller, insulated buildings,
for the dome by itself
is not sufficient protection from the cold.
It stands 16 metres high.
It's like a space station,
an isolated capsule
floating on slowly-moving ice
nearly 3,000 metres above sea level.
All supplies for the pole station
have to be brought in by air.
Even in summer, it is so cold
that the supply aircraft,
after they have landed,
have to keep their engines running
to stop them from freezing.
The fuel they bring is transferred
into vast bladders which will
last the station through winter.
The South Pole is the best place on Earth
to observe the heavens above.
The atmosphere is totally clear
and free from pollution,
and the stars don't disappear
below the horizon as they do elsewhere,
so they can be observed continuously.
(HOWLING WIND)
Working in Antarctica
demands a special kind of scientist.
You may have the most brilliant mind,
but that may be of little use
if you can't pitch a tent
or restart a diesel engine.
Most of the stations are built
on the edge of the continent,
like the Australian base at Mawson.
They stand on rock instead of ever-moving ice.
There are other living creatures
with which to share your life.
35 miles from Mawson
are Emperor penguins
which also, like you, will sit out the winter.
When the last supply ships have left,
the wintering crews
will see no other human beings
for six whole months, perhaps more.
They must find a way of living together
in a place where, for some of the time,
there will be no morning, no evening
and no escape.
Routine is all-important
and there's plenty to do -
not only scientific work
but all the jobs necessary
to keep the station running.
Looking after the dogs
is a much sought-after job.
It's refreshing to see
living things other than humans.
Food becomes hugely important
and the cook is one of the most critically
watched members of the community.
Most bases have at least
a year's supply of food in reserve
in case of emergencies.
And most also have a building
away from these living quarters,
fully stocked with food
in case of the worst disaster of all, a fire.
For no humans without shelter,
in conditions like this,
could survive for more than a few hours.
As winter advances, the day shortens,
the sun skims closer to the horizon
and eventually drops below it.
Now, there will be
little or no sunlight whatever
for 37 days.
Midwinter Day.
Mawson Base, as every other,
marks it with a great party.
Entertainments that have been
practiced for weeks in secret
are now performed in public.
(INDISTINCT SINGING -
"WALTZING MATILDA")
# You'll come a-waltzing,
Matilda, with me #
Outside, the darkness is broken
only by one of nature's
most extraordinary spectacles -
the Southern Lights,
the "Aurora Australis".
As the sun returns,
so do the Adelie penguins.
This traditional colony
is only a mile from Mawson Base.
It's now one of the best studied of all.
A wire-fenced corridor
with an electronic beam across it
ensures that some of the birds,
as they go to and from the sea,
are automatically counted and weighed.
But a few must still be caught
and measured in detail
to check the colony's progress.
Some are given prominent markings
so that they can be identified
among their near-identical companions,
even at a distance.
It is, it must be said, rather disfiguring,
but it will disappear at the next moult
and it hasn't lessened
the affection of the bird's partner.
Dogs have been used here
since Amundsen's day,
but dogs are ecological aliens
and it has been decided that they must go.
Many regret that.
Dogs are great companions
and they can detect one of the major
hazards of Antarctic travel -
a snow-covered crevasse -
and stop before they all fall in.
No motorised sledge can do that.
This team will be sent
to Minnesota in the U.S.
Its departure will mark
the end of a great chapter
in the short history
of mankind in the Antarctic.
They will be replaced
by motorised "quikes".
There is a limit to the amount
of fuel such vehicles can carry,
so they can't cover
such great distances as a dog team.
But they do travel faster.
It used to take two days with dogs
to reach Mawson's Emperor colony.
Now it's only a three-hour drive.
All year, even throughout winter,
scientists visit this colony
to monitor its progress
as part of a long-term study.
There is a serious purpose
behind this rugby tackling.
The bird is to be fitted with a transmitter
that will send regular signals
by way of an orbiting satellite
to a monitoring station in Tasmania.
It too is given an identifying mark.
If this bird is like others,
it is now setting off
on a 100-mile march to open water.
And when it gets there
it will dive to an astonishing
depth of 450 metres to catch fish,
all the time recording information
to say where it is.
Hundreds of miles to the north,
a grey-headed albatross is
providing similar information.
It too has a transmitter on its back,
which revealed where it collected
the food in its stomach
that it's now bringing back to its hungry chick.
It belongs to a colony
that has been studied
for the past 15 years by a British team.
The old method of weighing birds
was with a simple spring balance.
But now the researchers use a new device.
Electronic scales are concealed
inside a fibreglass nest.
From now on, there will be
no need to manhandle the chick
just to get its weight.
The scales transmit
a reading every ten minutes
to a nearby hut with a scientist
and recording apparatus.
This shows that one of the parents brings
500 grammes of squid, fish, lamprey
and krill to the chick every three days.
And signals from the satellite
reveal that the adult travelled
several hundred miles to do so.
To film this series,
we drew heavily on the discoveries
made by scientists all over the continent.
Guided by their satellite data,
we aimed, among other things,
to record in pictures
just what those albatross
and penguins did in the open ocean.
That involved developing cameras and lenses
to cope with these hostile conditions,
and finding cameramen
who could cope with them, too.
Swimming in the open ocean
in near-freezing seas
may be second nature to an albatross,
but it's a daring thing for a cameraman to do.
The reward for him is sights
that have never been filmed before.
On board our ice-strengthened vessel,
the Abel-J,
we carried boats,
diving gear and video apparatus.
As well as free-diving cameramen,
we had remotely-controlled cameras
mounted on the inflatables.
One of our priorities
was to find a swarm of krill.
After weeks of searching, we did.
And so had a pair of humpback whales.
The remotely-controlled video cameras
gave us unique pictures.
They recorded in unparalleled detail
the whole of the whales' fishing technique
from the moment they released
their curtain of bubbles,
hemming in and concentrating the krill
to the final catch.
We also had another vessel,
a small, steel-hulled yacht,
the Damien II.
She had a retractable keel,
so could operate in waters only a metre deep
and go into shallow bays
where no other vessel had been before.
Jerome Poncet is the skipper
and owner of the Damien.
With his biologist wife,
he has spent ten seasons
exploring every cove and bay
on the Antarctic peninsula,
and knows them in a way no one else does.
He was able to land camera teams
on tiny, remote and uninhabited islands.
Each night, a radio hook-up linked
all the camps and the ships,
which were often separated
by hundreds of miles of ice or ocean.
Abel-j, this is Bailey Head
reading you loud and clear.
This is Abel-j.
"To confirm your message" -
two tents badly damaged,
one tent, broken pole. Over.
A camera on a jib arm.
It gives a splendid high-angle view
of a penguin colony
and enables you to move alongside
an individual penguin on its perambulations.
But the whole thing weighs 120 kilos,
and carrying that over snow fields and cliffs
reduces even the strongest
camera team to gasping wrecks.
To get unbumpy pictures on the move,
Paul Atkins used a special mount
called a steadicam.
That way, he was able to move
smoothly into really close quarters
with tricky - and dangerous - subjects,
such as fighting fur seals.
Blizzards often brought
land-based operations to a halt,
but there was still work
that could be done, underwater -
if you can dig out the air cylinders.
Diving under the ice is very different
from doing so in the open ocean,
as cameraman Mike Degruy explains.
I'm generally a fair-weather diver.
I like warm weather, sunshine,
palm trees and hammocks.
I jumped into a seal hole,
pushing the ice away as I entered,
and they handed me my camera.
Surprisingly, I wasn't too cold,
except around my mouth,
which instantly froze and became numb.
Suddenly everything was quiet
and I found myself
looking at easily one
of the most extraordinary scenes
I had ever, ever experienced.
I dropped down through a hole
and was completely surrounded by ice,
a tunnel maybe 20 feet across.
Everything above me
on the land was roaring with wind.
Down there there was absolutely no sound
except for the distant trills of Weddell seals.
Weddell seal researcher Amal Ajmi
works underwater, too,
but she doesn't get wet.
She makes her observations from a capsule
suspended 10 metres beneath the ice.
From there, she records
the sounds of the seals
while noting on a tape recorder
their movements.
There's a lot of activity, a lot.
There's a pair next to the hydrophone,
probably the loudest animals.
There's one single seal that is on my left
and it seems to be watching
the mother and pup
that were near the hydrophone.
Other researchers have been studying
a colony of Emperor penguins for many years.
They watch them underwater
from within a protective cage,
for where there are lots of penguins
you can expect
to find dangerous penguin hunters -
leopard seals or killer whales.
And this is a leopard seal,
a huge animal, nearly four metres long.
A remotely-controlled camera properly placed
will record the exit of the fleeing penguins.
But even out of water
they are not out of danger.
Another leopard seal waits for them.
Many people reckon that the leopard seal
is the most dangerous killer
in Antarctic waters,
and that it would be suicide
to get in the water with one.
But the camera team were
determined to film them hunting
without the encumbrance of a cage.
Peter Scoones and Doug Allen
were the first to try.
I'd been underwater with all
the other species of southern seals,
so I had this feeling
that the leopard seals
wouldn't actually attack us,
at least not without some warning.
We thought we could recognise
if their behaviour did slip over the borderline
from curiosity to aggression.
It produces a fair rush of adrenalin
when a 12-foot seal appears
and almost takes the entire front
of the camera into its mouth.
You have to feel sorry
for the young penguins.
They just don't stand a chance.
It's like a cat with a mouse.
"And here I was" -
the cat owner
being presented with the prey.
But I shouldn't deny the sheer excitement
of filming so intimately
one of Antarctica's top predators.
This drama is a symbol of Antarctica
and I'll always count myself
privileged to have seen it.
It's still less than a century
since the first man set foot
on the Antarctic continent,
yet today, hundreds of scientists
live and work here,
winter and summer.
Increasing numbers of tourists arrive
and, every year,
modern technologies
make it increasingly easy
for people to survive here.
Yet there are still very few
footsteps in the Antarctic snow.
Mining has been banned
for a further 50 years
and the Antarctic Treaty
remains relatively effective.
At a time when it's possible
for 30 people to stand
on the top of Everest in one day,
Antarctica remains a remote,
lonely and desolate continent,
a place where it's possible
to see the splendours
and immensities of the natural world
at its most dramatic,
and to witness them
almost exactly as they were
long, long before human beings
arrived on this planet.
Long may it remain so.