Original subtitles

I try and describe Antarctica,

but it's really difficult.

You have to feel the cold,

you have to feel the wind and how brutal it is.

*

It's really the most wild and natural place I've ever been.

But down here, you recognize very quickly

that this is an environment where people shouldn't be.

*

*

I have a lot of stuff outside here.

All of sudden when the wind picks up, everything blows away.

So you've got to quickly run around

and strap everything down.

Alright, now we're good.

This is Scott Base,

New Zealand's permanent research outpost in Antarctica.

What's the forecast up there for the next,

have you looked at the next couple of days?

What we've got here at the moment is a long range forecast.

The extreme weather conditions are gonna increase.

Over the last 24 hours,

Comms has been watching a storm system

move up from the South Pole.

There's a southerly blowing at the moment,

but the visibility is still up to a good 500 meters.

Once it gets below the 300-meter mark,

we look at putting on Condition 2,

which will restrict travel away from the base.

Wind speeds can be pretty severe at times,

getting up to, you know, 50, 60, 70 knots.

Exceedingly low temperatures, as low as minus 35 degrees.

Something like this is over and above

what we've already planned.

Additional pressures on the office here,

and to support those guys in the field.

Bad weather jeopardizes

a critical piece of Scott Base's mission support...

helicopter flight time.

What do you think, Graham?

Consensus is the weather is not real good.

But the pilot says the light is changing quickly.

So, we'll just see if we can have enough definition

to land on the glacier sites.

And I hope you've got your overnight gear with you,

'cause that might happen.

Graham Hill is a lead scientist

for the Mount Erebus team.

They're working on the slopes

of Antarctica's most active volcano

to get an image of its internal magma flow.

Our goal for this project is to make measurements

at 132 different locations around Mount Erebus,

creating a map of the insides of the volcano.

Pretty much all of our locations are accessed by helicopter.

So we've got to really try

and get all the work we need to done,

because simply understanding where the magma reservoir is,

is really helpful for those monitoring volcanoes.

Yeah.

Danny Uhlmann is a world class mountaineer

in charge of keeping the rest of the team safe,

in one of the most unpredictable environments on Earth.

Weather is a huge factor here,

because there's no trees in this environment, there's no rocks.

There's nothing that will help your eye

define distance and depth.

If you have gray skies,

you just kind of see, like, this broad gray in front of you.

The snow surface and the snow texture and all that

become almost invisible.

Locked.

So, for the pilot, it would be very easy

to crash the helicopter, depending on the situation.

Alright.

Their last mission was cut short by weather,

so they're pushing the envelope to try to make up time.

The light is flat, so we can't see the bumps in the snow.

You know, am I 10 feet off the ground,

am I 50 feet, am I 30 feet?

****

Over 2,000 miles from Mount Erebus,

on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula...

...a low pressure system is moving in,

creating swirling winds and a higher chance of snow.

We're just about to get going here.

Just kind of do a circumnavigation.

Dr. Ari Friedlaender and his team are here

to take tissue samples from whales

to see what effect changing climate is having

on the marine food supply.

These whales are one part of a very big ecosystem,

but they're an important part,

and there are very different changes

happening in the environment for different species,

and seeing how that plays out

and how that affects other parts of the world

is something we're really interested in.

He's hunting for whales

in an inflatable Zodiac raft,

leaving the relative safety of his research vessel,

the Ortelius, behind.

The wind is kind of out of the east,

so my thought maybe is to hug the coastline,

and just kind of wrap around.

I think most of the animals, if we see anything,

are gonna be tight,

and best conditions would be kind of close to shore.

And just cover ground, I guess.

All good?

When you leave the ship, which is basically your refuge,

the place where you're going to survive, you've got to get back.

And anything that takes you away from that ship is a risk.

*

We've got a waypoint for the position of the ship.

We'll probably go out of visual range,

but we'll stay in radio contact,

and just kind of check in wherever we see anything,

or as we pass by landmarks.

Roger.

So, you need to have a reference point

to be able to say where you are relative to it.

If you're trying to use landmarks to navigate,

something like the mountains or the rocks,

and we're constantly trying to remember where we are,

because you're literally in a life raft,

and if anything went wrong, it would be bad.

His last time out, Ari managed to place a video tag

on a humpback whale, a 66,000-pound beast.

*

But today, he's hunting minke whales,

and even in a known feeding ground, they're harder to spot,

weighing about 45,000 pounds less than humpbacks.

What's that over there?

It's just ice.

Is it? Okay.

Not much visibility.

It's calm.

But it's pretty hard to spot a whale

any further away than a few hundred meters.

The minke whales are a lot more challenging,

because they're smaller, they're faster,

and they don't surface nearly as high.

They're a real pain to work with

because they're difficult to see,

and generally, you see them once or twice, and then they're gone.

The horizontal visibility is pretty low.

Even with a minke whale,

they surface so low, and they're so small.

You can only see them from a couple hundred meters,

but you can probably hear the blow

from, you know, two or three times farther, so.

What I might do is I might shut down for a little bit.

You know, five minutes, and just kind of have a listen.

Shut us down.

So, we'll do that.

My most favorite times in the Antarctic

is when you can remove all of the human sounds.

And it's a silence that...

you can kind of feel.

It seems kind of primitive.

You hear ice crackling.

You hear glaciers rumbling.

You'll hear a seal barking.

When you can hear your heartbeat,

you know that it's quiet.

Keep your eyes and ears open.

If you hear a little blow, that's a minke whale.

5,000 miles away,

far from the storm pummeling the mainland,

is the US Coast Guard cutter...

Polar Star.

*

Polar Star, Mac-Ops, roger.

Mac-Ops, this is Polar Star, 1-6, over.

Her mission

is to smash a path

through the thick ice

surrounding Antarctica,

to open a shipping lane.

Current speed, 10 knots.

Right full rudder, again.

Helmsman, right full rudder.

Right full rudder, aye.

This is her captain, Matthew Walker.

The Polar Star is one of

the world's most powerful icebreakers,

and the mission is to cut a channel that's 18 miles long

through 8 to 12 feet of ice,

so that the supply ships can resupply the continent.

I can never lose focus on the mission.

Antarctica cannot survive without that food or fuel.

*

Aloft-con bridge, let's bring her down nice and slow,

see how she settles out.

Roger, Captain.

They're still 260 miles from the ice edge,

but they're already up against the circumpolar current.

It's a band of deep water

that insulates the continent from the outside,

but is driven by wind,

creating a recipe for rough seas

and strong gusts at the surface.

Around Antarctica,

there's a series

of low-pressure systems

that rotate around

Antarctica constantly.

So, as we get closer to Antarctica,

it might get rough until

we get to the actual ice edge.

Then the seas will lay down.

As if that wasn't bad enough,

next comes the ice pack...

a floating mass of icebergs

that gets thicker and thicker.

And there's no clear path through it.

The Puma guys.

How are we doing this morning?

Alright!

Are we ready for our flight?

We're standing by to fly.

Alright, sounds good.

This year, Captain Walker has help...

an unmanned aerial vehicle called the Puma.

The Puma is a radio-controlled aircraft.

What do you got for home, Delta Lima Juliet?

Okay.

The plan is for the Puma to do ice reconnaissance for us,

because we want to take

the path of least resistance.

Clear?

Ice breakers used to rely on helicopters

to be their eyes in the sky.

But in 2013, a chopper doing reconnaissance

for the Canadian Coast Guard crashed into the icy waters.

Canadian helicopter patrol

checking out the ice packs,

something the crew had done hundreds of times before,

ended this time in a deadly crash.

Three men were killed

when the coast guard chopper hit the icy waters.

The men were stationed on an icebreaker in the far north

as part of a scientific research study.

The Puma could provide the same support,

without putting a single life at risk.

This is experimental

for us in the Coast Guard.

We are not used to

operating drones.

So, we have a company contracted

to fly their drone down

and see how she operates

in these harsh environments.

As long as it goes well, it should be fairly quick.

We're ready to launch.

Alright, he says go for launch.

Launching!

*

There it goes.

She's flying very well.

With the capabilities

of the drone,

there's potential for it

to get that ice reconnaissance.

Obviously, cheaper and safer

than sending humans

in helicopters

out over ice and water.

Man, she looks good.

You can see, it's going 60 knots

when it's got a tailwind.

Well, and it's 15 pounds.

Yeah, right.

Just testing the approach on the landing?

Yeah.

That's pretty exciting.

*

Back on the mainland,

the storm continues to strengthen

and move north from the pole.

- Yeah. - Wow.

Which means anyone moving south

is driving right toward it.

Speed, Condition 2.

You guys still alright hanging in back there?

We, I mean, we can't really go any faster,

it just makes it easier to see.

Yeah, no worries.

Christian and the team hit the road hours ago,

when the storm was still Condition 3.

It's our first morning on the road,

so people are trying to get packed up.

Just noticing how long everything is taking.

That wind is ****.

Not as sharp as I'd like to see,

but things do take longer in conditions like this.

Long way to go.

And even as the storm builds...

It's 50 knots of wind and blowing snow

with very reduced visibility.

They're determined to get to their research site

to study the impact the Ross Ice Shelf

could have on global sea level rise.

Antarctica, it's hard to get your head around,

but it's like a big thermostat for the world.

And things are changing.

We're talking about big uncertainties.

The Ross Ice Shelf floats on water.

When you put an ice cube in a drink at the bar,

it's going to melt.

Everyone knows that.

If that happens to the Ross Ice Shelf,

I'm pretty certain that we're going to lose

parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet

at some point in the future.

How much of it turns actually into sea level,

that's the big question.

Based on current models,

worst case scenario may be 20 feet of sea level rise,

which would put dozens of major coastal cities underwater.

We got this blowing snow,

and it's sticking to the windscreen,

so we've had to use the windscreen wipers

and the defroster, but they're not winning the battle.

Lots of unusual things, when the weather's terrible,

things break, and things don't work very well.

****

Um, PB1, H1.

Probably should pull over.

We just found a piece of rubber.

There's only one place

that we could get rubber from out here,

and it's from the tracks of the vehicle.

****.

Sure enough, we've got a flat tire.

A real pain in the ass.

*

*

Pretty spectacularly horrible out there.

The Ross Ice Shelf team is at a dead stop,

in a growing storm, 100 miles from help.

You're out here in the middle of nowhere.

No one's really been here before.

Your life is in danger

if you go outside and hang around there too long.

Rob has to change a flat tire on the lead vehicle,

in the middle of whiteout conditions,

before they can get moving again.

Okay, Tom, I'm just gonna back it up

onto that block a little bit,

and then I'll come out, and we'll set this up,

and then as I drive back,

hopefully, it'll just push those tracks apart,

and we can work that out.

Sounds good.

*

I had no idea that a tire could go wrong on a PistenBully.

I just assumed that you just drove on the tracks.

I am not a mechanic, but Rob's an amazing mechanic.

Woo!

Now we're cooking.

The snow and ice conditions you get in Antarctica

aren't like really anywhere else in the world.

You just got to manage it.

We got the spare tire.

There we go.

Working in places like this,

it's not always about what you want to do,

or how you want to do it.

It's, it's almost entirely what you have to do it with.

Right-o.

The team has only been stopped for 45 minutes,

but conditions have gotten much worse.

It's windy, there's blowing snow,

and that affects your visibility.

It gets quite difficult to drive.

It's kind of getting to the point

where really only a couple of options.

What do you reckon?

We have to make a call to either make camp for the night,

or push on, try and make up a bit more time.

Yeah.

The reality is, we have to stop everything.

Stay where we are, hunker down, keep everybody warm.

For now, with what we can see out there,

it's probably just not worth going anywhere.

So, it's a shame to lose one day, you know,

one of our weather days,

even when we're not even doing the science, but you know.

Suggest they just stay inside.

For miles in every direction

the weather is changing quickly,

because at the bottom of the planet,

most winds are katabatic.

That means they drop down from 9,000 feet of elevation

at the South Pole, gathering speed as they fall,

and they can send cold air rocketing across the continent.

*

****

At the end of the day,

you're not in control of the environment.

The only thing you're in control of

is where you put yourself in the environment.

So, if the forecast is bad, there's nothing you can do.

That was really tough light, man.

That was, like, the worst we've had so far.

Yeah.

I was glad he didn't land,

because I couldn't, I couldn't see anything.

It's not our fault.

It's not our fault.

But I've seen storms that have rolled in that have sat here,

and there've been nobody going anywhere for 10 days.

*

With the weather approaching Condition 1...

Get in, everybody in!

Scott Base is now on lockdown.

It's just picked up really quickly.

Yep.

Tight timeframe of when to do our flights.

I know.

We'll just see what we can do.

That sounds good.

It's not easy.

Something like this is over and above

what we've already planned.

Additional pressures on the office here

and pressures on people in Christchurch

who supply this stuff

and pretty much increased pressure on everybody.

The weather always wins.

In these conditions,

C-17s, the giant aircraft that bring in supplies once a week,

are grounded.

That's our lifeline with New Zealand

and the outside world,

so it's bringing our passengers, it's taking out our passengers,

it's bringing in our cargo.

We'll see what happens.

It's been five days since the last plane,

and head chef Keith is getting creative

to keep 84 hungry people fed.

On the menu today,

we have a simple salami mustard pasta.

We have curry from last night,

but unfortunately, at the moment,

we're overdue for a plane delivery,

because of the weather.

That's the last bag of cheese there.

We're running out of eggs,

we're running out of cheese.

Running out of eggs, running out of cheese.

We haven't got any fresh vegetables.

We've only got one box of butter left,

but that's just part of life down here.

There's not a lot you can do about that, though, really.

That's what it is, mate.

We're in the ****.

We're running out of everything.

Jeez, man.

The base freezer is just outside,

and it takes advantage of the subzero temperatures.

It's minus 15 degrees outside,

so this is actually a modified sea container,

and if you look to your left here,

just down over here, we actually have a heater.

So, instead of a refrigeration system,

we have a heating system.

We also have a ducting system.

So, it takes warm air, once it's risen from there, through,

and circulates through the whole heater.

With its short shelf life,

fresh produce is always the first thing to go.

We're just taking the last of the, the few vegetables

we have for 75 people on base at the moment.

So we're pretty empty right now,

and if the weather decides it doesn't want to play nice,

well, you don't get your plane.

260 miles away

on the Polar Star...

The Puma drone's maiden Antarctic test flight

has been a success.

Okay, roger that.

Now, they have to get the $100,000 system

safely back on deck.

Yeah, roger that.

In the green.

Winds are 19 knots from 266.

You got eyes on?

Right there.

Got it.

What's more risky to lose the Puma,

launch or recovery?

Recovery.

You guys ready?

Yeah.

I'm gonna reroute.

We are at six knots.

So far, so good.

In the green.

Still green.

Still green.

Still green.

****

Puma, Puma's in the water.

Puma's in the water.

*

Puma's down the port side.

Is it in the water?

Port bow!

Shoot! Okay, give her left full rudder.

Left full rudder!

It's coming down the port side.

We're gonna lose it on the port side.

Where is it?

****.

Alright, let's yell stop.

Take it all stop.

All stop!

The Puma drone, Captain Walker's eye in the sky,

just landed in the Southern Ocean,

instead of on deck.

200 yards.

Here, we have a big eight-foot orange wing,

floating on top of the water.

That drone, it's too important to what we're doing down here,

so we have to recover it.

Not only that,

but that drone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Don't take your eyes off it when you give your orders.

Don't look at 'em, just yell,

and keep your eyes on the aircraft.

Just as if you were to have a man in the water,

you'd never take your eyes off him.

You can have a conversation

with never taking your eyes off the guy.

Roger, Captain.

Okay, left full rudder.

Helmsman, left full rudder.

Left full rudder, aye.

Recovery deck, tell me where you're at.

Okay. We'll get it there.

You good?

I think so.

The water is 30 degrees.

At that temperature,

hypothermia can set in in less than five minutes;

which is not much more time than it takes

to turn the ship around.

Is our harness person tethered in?

It's coming your way now.

It's alongside the hull.

I see it.

Speed's good, distance good.

All back two.

All back two.

All back two, aye.

Speed's fast.

Puma's alongside the hull of the CBO.

Looks like they got it, but I can't see.

Easy, easy on the landing.

Easy on the landing.

Eagle has landed.

I repeat, eagle has landed.

- Just a little wet. - A little wet.

Good job, everybody.

With the drone down, we just don't have eyes in the air.

I have no assistance available.

I really have no way to do ice reconnaissance.

It just makes it all harder and harder.

*

*

The Ross Ice Shelf team is stuck in a storm

that's hit Condition 1.

That means visibility is less than 100 feet,

winds are over 63 miles per hour,

or temperatures have hit 100 below.

The wind carries with it blowing snow and extreme cold.

The biting effect that it has on you

can have a fairly disastrous effect.

****

When things do get bad,

you need to be able to manage the situation,

and keep things under control.

We just want to get everything up,

get inside and get out of the wind, 'cause it's not pleasant.

It's miserable.

We're almost there.

We're out in the middle of nowhere.

Condition 1 out there, and we have to just wait it out.

It's about the best we can do, really.

For now.

Even though they're outside chopper range,

Scott Base is the team's only lifeline.

Yeah, I would like to phone back to Scott Base to check in.

Good day, Tom. How are you?

Good here, Mac.

Visibility's down to 15 or 20 meters,

massive amounts of blowing snow and wind drifts.

Tomorrow, about mid-morning tomorrow,

the barometric pressure looks like

it's still gonna be dropping.

So, you might get a bit of ground fog with that.

With the amount of blowing snow,

so, it's just not worth pushing it.

That's, yeah, a good move.

We'll touch base tomorrow.

Alright.

We're traveling a long way from Scott Base,

and once we're out that far,

we'll be out of helicopter support range.

So, if things go wrong out there,

it could potentially be days

from anybody being able to get to us.

So, it's quite a big deal to be away from that close support.

*

*

When it's nice and calm like this,

even if you don't see the whales,

looking for ripples from where they've surfaced

is one of the sort of telltales.

Ari and his team are on the hunt for minke whales,

but so far, blowing snow and low visibility

have stood in their way.

Well, there's a pretty thick ice here.

I can't see **** anymore.

Slow down.

*

Ari, Ari, Lars here.

Yeah, no worries.

When you're out and there's low visibility in the Antarctic,

and it's starting to snow, and the wind is pushing ice,

it actually makes it incredibly difficult.

It can be really frustrating, but you have to be patient.

*

Minke whales don't make a whole lot of a splash

when they surface.

What's that!?

Think we've got a whale here.

Ari, Ari, standby.

I just saw a fin of something.

A fin.

So, I think it might be a minke.

It's right here, guys.

- Yeah. - It's right under us.

We've got flukes right under us.

There we go, over there.

There we go, yeah.

I think we have a friendly whale circling us.

Yep, right out here.

See, it came right behind us.

See these three or four fluke prints?

Right here.

Yep, there's a little minke whale.

Might be able to get a biopsy sample.

Ari's crossbow shoots specially modified darts

that collect skin and blubber samples

about the size of a pen cap.

The samples reveal the whale's sex, diet, contamination level,

and whether or not it's pregnant.

That little sample is absolutely critical for us.

Because from changes in pregnancy rates,

we can look across the season and see how whale populations

are going to change in the future.

That's a very typical little view

of an Antarctic minke whale.

They'll come up once or twice. It's a very shallow breath.

They're really cryptic,

but totally designed for living in this sea ice.

Humpbacks, we can approach them, they let us get close to them.

These minke whales, it's completely up to them

whether or not we get close to them.

And, yeah, the opportunities are very limited for these guys.

Might have been it.

I don't see any more.

No.

When you have ice everywhere around you

and bad visibility, it's not ideal.

*

Saw it twice, and it's gone.

Like, we won't see that thing again.

Yep, sounds good, guys.

Well, at least we know they're here. Over.

Yeah, they're myth no more.

We actually, actually have seen one.

You see, we're not crazy idiots

to go out in the middle of icebergs

to look for made-up unicorns.

No, this is the real deal.

Why don't we get back towards the vessel, Fred?

Let's just dry up, get a drink.

Sure.

Give me your bearings to the vessel.

Yeah, yeah, we should be going this way.

No, no. West, this way.

Getting disoriented can happen really easily.

I recognize a couple of icebergs that we passed along the way.

But to be honest, I don't know where we are.

We came out around this way, right?

You have all this sea ice, and it's not static;

it's moving around.

And so if you're trying to use landmarks to navigate

that are mobile, you can get yourself in trouble.

So it gets a bit confusing in these conditions.

We've been away for a while,

so, we don't really have any land bearing.

Ari, Lars here, we should be heading northeast from here.

Pretty much six o'clock, right?

Six o'clock.

Six o'clock is back to the northeast, alright.

We're trying to pick up a bit of speed here,

because of the conditions, but I can't see much ahead anymore.

This is pretty miserable right now.

****

I lost sight of my ship.

You get disoriented very quickly here.

I feel lost completely,

I have no idea if you're driving into an iceberg or not.

We're lost out here.

*

I see a little bit of the coast now.

Or is that an iceberg?

Ari and his team have lost sight

of their research vessel, the Ortelius,

and visibility is deteriorating.

Yeah, just checking in.

How is our heading at this point?

Maybe you should go 10 degrees more

to the, to the right.

****, this is pretty miserable right now.

I feel lost completely,

I have no idea if you're driving into an iceberg or not.

When we leave and we lose visual sight of the ship,

there's no support.

There's nothing else around you except wilderness.

I can't see much ahead anymore.

You can see the silhouette of the ship.

You see it?

Yeah.

The mother ship is in sight.

That's a bit of a relief, actually.

Thank God for these things.

Having a basic compass is absolutely critical.

We probably would have gotten lost without it today.

As soon as you see it, we can relax a little bit.

The ship is home.

It's our planet, basically,

and that's the place where we can survive.

Gangway, gangway, Ari.

We're off the bow of the boat, the science boats,

and we were gonna drop people off

and be done for the afternoon, if that's okay.

Copy that, bridge. Thank you very much.

We'll come along port side.

Today, even if we didn't get a whole lot done,

we know there are these hot spots now,

so, pretty much guaranteed we're gonna find the animals,

we just need the right conditions

to be able to work with them.

Waiting for another opportunity in the weather.

*

A little bit whiteout, you can't see much.

For the staff at Scott Base,

it's impossible to predict

exactly how long the storm will last.

There's obviously been the delays,

if you have a look outside.

So, can't get a plane in,

you can't get a plane in.

So, you make do

with what you have.

Challenging.

But there is a ray of hope.

A C-17 full of supplies took off from New Zealand

more than five hours ago,

anticipating a short window to land, and it's due any minute.

The conditions, as you can see,

are not the best out there.

You can see, it's fairly low visibility,

and the problem for pilots is definition,

and you can see, there's a white sky and a white landing strip.

It's very difficult.

There's enough fuel for the aircraft to fly,

circle around a few times,

and if they, pilots feel it's unsafe to land,

they'll shoot straight back to Christchurch again.

I've seen aircraft get to the point

of getting to the end of the runway,

and then decide, not traveling, and they just go back.

When I look at that, I don't see a kind of visibility

that I would hope as a pilot would want to,

but hey, they've got skills and experience far greater than me.

So, you never quite know, but, yeah, fingers crossed.

A break in the weather hasn't materialized,

and with cloud cover blocking the sunlight,

there are no shadows on the ground for contrast.

This condition is called flat light.

In 1979, an Air New Zealand flight carrying 257 people

got caught in flat light conditions over Mount Erebus.

Sadly, the DC-10 crashed into the mountain,

killing everyone on board.

It was the biggest tragedy in the continent's history,

and is still memorialized today.

I hear something.

****

****

Not good.

*

*

Let's slow down to 10 knots.

That way, we have a little bit slower approach to it.

Mate Drill Con.

Give Pilothouse control of the throttles.

Out in the Southern Ocean,

the Polar Star isn't being touched by the storm.

You get within a mile, and then alter course,

45 degrees to starboard.

Aye.

They're entering the ice pack,

a thick cluster of icebergs.

This is the first one we've seen this trip, so.

Every time you see the first one, it gets pretty exciting.

It's so wild,

because this thing's freaking huge to me, you know.

Absolutely amazing.

It's almost like a fairy tale to a lot of people.

So, from waterline to the top, 210 feet?

Yeah.

This is a pretty big one.

There is no way we could contend with this piece of ice.

Only 10% of an iceberg is visible above water.

Not only can the hidden mass tear through the hull,

if the base melts,

it can actually become top-heavy enough to roll over,

sending thousands of tons of ice crashing down.

We'll give it a wide berth and stay off of it.

But when it's 200 feet, it dwarfs you.

You realize how little power you have

when you're getting that close to it.

We don't have the drone right now

to be able to go look for a path through the ice.

I need eyes in the air

to know where to maneuver the ship through,

and there's no help.

*

On shore, the storm is raging,

and operations are at a standstill.

On the Ross Ice Shelf, there's no shelter but canvas tents.

And the team could be stuck in them for days.

See, that's all snow right there.

That's a snow wall against my head.

Tomorrow morning... hold on, today.

It's the end of today.

Yeah, I'm confused now with the time, actually.

I think it's morning.

And the deceptive thing, you don't know it's after midnight,

because it's always light, right?

So, it could be midnight now, but it's an ordeal.

So, this is probably

the furthest I've been from civilization.

We're heading towards the, the South Pole on our traverse.

You can't see 30 meters in front of you,

it's just windy, it's snowing, it's cold.

I mean, I've never worked in this kind of environment before,

which I'm sort of stuck inside, freezing in my sleeping bag.

Because of the blowing snow and low visibility,

we're gonna just stay put until it improves.

Spending a day or more in a tent,

it's kind of a weird concept.

A little bit nerve-wracking.

Why am I doing this? Why did I come out here?

Surely, the science isn't that important.

I suppose it is part of Antarctica,

but at the same time, if Antarctica is always like this,

like every single day, then it's miserable.

So, yeah, it's not great.

The weather has deteriorated

significantly enough

that it's not safe for people to be moving around outside.

But it's really important to try and check in with the team.

Out here, it would be very easy

to take a few steps in the wrong direction,

and you look around

and you can't actually see where your tent is.

And you take a few more steps,

thinking that you're going the right way back to your tent,

and suddenly you realize that you're completely out there,

you're lost.