Original subtitles

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.

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