Arctic Wilderness Explored

When you get to the Arctic, you normally go there by ship.

And when you are standing on the ship and get in to the ice,

there's a smell which is very peculiar,

the smell of cold water and ice.

And then when you get away from the ship,

and you don't hear the ship's engine any more,

you only have natural sounds, see, the cracking of the ice,

the howling of the wind,

and maybe your own footsteps and you hear your own heart beating,

which you don't hear in Europe.

Everyone who actually goes there

is overwhelmed by it.

First of all, it's enormous.

Second, it's actually a lot more varied.

If you haven't been there, you think, "Oh, cold."

And it's lighter than you think when it's dark...

..because there's not necessarily a lot of cloud cover

and you will get starlight, moonlight

and they reflect off white surfaces which look of course blue

so you'll get a kind of shimmering light even when there isn't any sun.

200 years ago,

most people could only imagine how the Arctic might be.

I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks,

which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight.

I try in vain to be persuaded

that the Pole is the seat of frost and desolation.

It ever presents itself to my imagination

as a region of beauty and delight.

I shall satiate my ardent curiosity

with the sight of a part of the world never before visited

and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.

Mary Shelley wrote at a time when the Europeans

had only ventured to the edge of the Arctic ocean.

In the following two centuries of exploration,

our knowledge and understanding of the region has increased enormously,

transforming the way we imagine it.

It's become a place where heroes were born

and heroes would disappear without trace.

We have discovered that however remote and forbidding it seems,

it is vitally connected to the climate and nature

of the rest of our planet.

It's been both a theatre of war,

where great powers vie for supremacy,

but also a cause for international collaboration.

Recently it has become a symbol of the fragility of our planet.

WHALE MOANS

And now the way we see the Arctic is being transformed once again.

Throughout history, the idea of wilderness has developed

from meaning a place of fear and the unknown

to a place of beauty, unspoilt by humankind.

By any definition, the Arctic once symbolised both these ideas.

In our times, wilderness has come to mean something we must protect,

something we must save from ourselves.

The word Arctic derives from the Greek word Arktos - "bear"

and wilderness comes from old Anglo-Saxon -

"the place of wild beasts".

BIRDS CAW

And in the early 1800s, the British Navy planned to conquer it.

One image above all

inspired the would-be polar explorers of the future -

the Navy's greatest hero, Horatio Nelson,

was said to have fought a polar bear single-handed at the age of 16.

It was an anecdote told by his commanding officers.

It made its way into the Nelson biographies

and certainly many of the polar histories through the 19th century

seized upon this episode of the young boy engaging the Arctic.

Is there truth to the story?

Possibly a mixture of truth and fantasy and myth.

But it's a wonderful story.

The polar bear was to become an integral part of the Arctic image.

BEAR GROWLS

GUNSHOT

If you want to think of it as an allegory for man against nature,

the bear emblematic of the Arctic wilderness in its sort of ferocity.

Certainly for a generation of people reading heroic biographies,

it was a story they cherished.

Young Nelson's Arctic encounter

was to be re-drawn and re-published dozens of times in hagiographies

and schoolboy comics right up to the present day.

As a symbol of the navy against the Arctic, the challenge,

the bear personified as the Arctic wilderness,

it's an image that's taken right through the century.

The Arctic wasn't only playing on the imagination of schoolboys

dreaming of emulating Nelson.

John Barrow, second secretary of the Admiralty, was also looking north.

The maps of the time show that he had as little idea as Mary Shelley

as to what lay beyond the great ice barriers of the north.

He did hope to find the fabled Northwest Passage,

a short and potentially lucrative route

to the great trading emporiums of Asia.

The Northwest Passage was this

elusive chalice which had been sought for centuries

and it was a chance for Britain to plant the Union Jack,

to claim new lands to explore and to, in fact, have the honour

of discovering undiscovered parts of the world.

The Northwest Passage had been a British obsession

since the time of Henry the Eighth.

Numerous expeditions had failed in the attempt to find it.

Now what spurred John Barrow on

was a fear that another nation might get there first.

The Russians have for some time been strongly impressed

with an idea of an open passage round America.

It would be somewhat mortifying, if a naval power but of yesterday

should complete a discovery in the 19th century

which was so happily commenced by Englishmen in the 16th.

The Navy's first expedition was to produce a new model of naval hero -

the Arctic explorer.

First among them was the leader of the expedition, Captain John Ross.

He was vain, he was egotistical, he was a cantankerous Scot

devoted to the Arctic, devoted to enhancing his public profile.

He was a celebrity hellbent

on utilising the wilderness to self-promote.

Captain Ross's expedition was supplied in naval fashion -

all the latest equipment of the day and other essentials.

A 25 volume library and 90 religious tracks,

Also 129 gallons of gin and brandy,

105 pounds of snuff and 40 umbrellas.

If you think of Arctic explorations

as voyaging to the limits of the known world,

these naval voyages in their well stocked ships were literally

sailing to the edges of the map.

They took with them all the things that perhaps

seem totally unnecessary

if you were to travel successfully through the Arctic

but all these things that were deemed necessary

for English gentlemen to sustain themselves

in a civilised manner within a challenging wilderness.

In June 1818, Ross's two vessels

managed to penetrate past Baffin Island into the Davis Strait.

It was the first sight that he and many of his crew

had had of the Arctic in summer.

It's hardly possible to imagine anything more exquisite,

by night as well as by day.

They glitter with a vividness of colour

beyond the power of art to represent.

The weather was beautiful,

fine and clear and nothing could exceed the serenity

and at the same time, the grandeur of the whole scene around us.

The water was glassy smooth

and ships glided gently among the numberless masses of ice.

The land of Greenland - rugged, high

and almost entirely covered with snow - filled up the eastern horizon.

The Arctic was a vast geography of nothingness.

It was a tempting sublime, it was an imaginary landscape.

What could they expect?

They travelled with baggage, they travelled with a perceptual baggage.

Icebergs that reared from the sea like towers and cathedrals.

Midnight polar winter sky

with ribbons of the aurora borealis

in emeralds and golds and deep crimsons,

a beautiful, wondrous, awe-inspiring, sublime place,

a sublime place that was terrifying.

Ross and many of the officers in his crew

were keen diarists and competent water colourists.

The pictures and accounts and of their experiences

were to shape the Arctic image in the European mind.

They also "discovered" a new people -

an isolated band of Inuit they called the Arctic Highlanders.

Until Ross's two naval vessels arrived,

they'd believed themselves to be the only human beings in the world.

What my ancestors have told me is that when the first contacts

were made between the Europeans and the Inuit,

I think there was a sense of fear in many ways

because they had never seen a people

with the type of skin colour that they had,

some of the explorers had blond hair.

They didn't really know where these beings were coming from.

So there was a lot of reluctance and hesitation

involved in actually going up to someone and making contact.

Ross's voyage and indeed his reputation was to be marred

by one of the tricks that the Arctic plays on the naive observer.

He aborted his expedition after, what he perceived to be,

a range of mountains blocked his route through to the Northwest Passage.

He named them the Croker Mountains after an Admiralty official.

"The land I then saw was a high ridge of mountains

"extending directly across the bottom of the inlet.

"This chain appeared high in the centre

"and those towards the north had at times the appearance

"of islands being insulated by fog at their bases."

The Arctic was a great place for illusions as well.

There are Arctic mirages.

They're quite wonderful mirages, they're called fata morgana

and they make things look a lot taller than they are.

They look very real, until you get out your binoculars

and you look at them closely

and you realize that some of the information is missing,

you know, they're shimmering round the edges and then the next minute,

they're gone.

Ross's so-called Croker Mountains

were indeed a polar illusion and not a mountain range.

On his return to London, Ross found himself pilloried for his failure.

The great cartoonist George Cruickshank ridiculed the collection

of Arctic specimens Ross and his officers had brought back.

The Arctic and the prospect of a Northwest Passage

were to entice and confound John Ross and many subsequent explorers

for the rest of the century.

The early British explorers, they really didn't understand the Arctic.

People tend to have this concept of the Arctic ice

as being like a big skating rink,

certainly the early polar explorers kind of thought that.

They figured, once they get on the ice,

they'll just haul off on their sledges and away they go.

It's not like that. I mean, the ice is constantly in motion.

It piles up into great huge ridges.

You see these people, you know,

pushing sledges over ridges that are ten, 20 metres high

and that ridge is extending 30 or 40 metres down into the ocean below it.

For a ship to try to break through that is next to impossible.

Though they failed to penetrate the ice barrier,

their exploits were celebrated in the popular art and literature

of the time, making them national heroes despite huge loss

of ships and lives.

One expedition above all

was to dominate the 19th century culture of the Arctic.

# We were homeward bound one night on the deep

# Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep

# I dreamt a dream and I thought it true

# Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew... #

John Franklin, who is a veteran explorer,

he was given a command of the Northwest Passage expedition in 1845,

left England full of optimism,

his ships full with the latest Victorian gadgetry,

but he didn't return.

The Franklin saga occupied the minds

of a generation of naval men going in search of him...over 30 voyages.

He's perhaps remembered now as

a bumbling old man who was full of all sorts of Victorian ideals

and didn't really approach the wilderness

in an appropriate manner.

I think that's probably a harsh analysis.

Well, the Franklin expedition was one of those things like the Titanic.

In fact, there is a great parallel between the way

those two stories both came out.

Both involved ships, both involved ice,

both involved huge fanfare when they set out -

"state of the art", "best we've got" modern technology.

"No danger, it'll be a snap.

"There's never been anything like this before."

They had special plating on their hulls,

they had steam organs, they had libraries and best of all,

they had tinned food.

The best-equipped expedition to date with 129 men

disappeared among the frozen islands above the Canadian mainland.

Unfortunately, his expedition

coincided with a particularly cold sequence of years.

If nothing else, Franklin can be accused of bad timing.

You know, he sailed at really one of the coldest periods in 500 years.

It was a period where you know, already, very forbidding landscape

in terms of the geography, very... It was like a puzzle.

It was like a maze.

It was an extremely difficult challenge to begin with.

Usually the pan ice would melt

in the summers and for three years, it didn't,

so their ships got in to a place near King William Island

and they couldn't get out again. They were stuck.

And when you're beset by the ice,

it's not just that you're frozen in, as in an ice cube,

the ice is actually pushing and being driven up against you,

so that it piles up.

If there's a wind, the sticking out parts of the ice act as sails

and it can move very quickly and it can move with enormous force.

ICE ROARS AND CRASHES

Quite what happened during the three years

that Franklin and his two ships were iced in is still a mystery.

They had to abandon the ships. Nobody quite knows where those ships are.

Had they walked north,

they might have been rescued by whalers, because there were a lot of

whalers in the summer went there.

But they didn't, they walked south, dragging a sledge,

which contained such things as a copy of the Vicar of Wakefield,

just what you would wish to drag on a sledge.

Lots of bars of soap, also very handy.

There was obviously something wrong

with their ability to reason at this point.

They went in the wrong direction, they took a lot of unnecessary things.

It took three years before people in London began to wonder

whether anything had gone wrong.

Spearheading the "lets find Franklin" lobby

was his redoubtable wife -

the first heroine of the Arctic story, Lady Jane Franklin.

Amazing celebrity in her own right, this remarkable woman who...

who turned her husband's

tragic disappearance into a career.

She became this incredible celebrity.

She was beautiful, she travelled the world.

She certainly made the most of his loss.

Her charisma and exertions

were to launch more than 30 Arctic expeditions

over the next few decades.

Many lasted for years at a time.

New landscapes were charted, ships were wrecked,

more heroes emerged, more lives were lost.

Neither Sir John nor his two ships were ever found.

Successive search parties returned from the north

with handfuls of artefacts, assorted human bones and a lot of conjecture.

There's a book called Dead Elvis,

which is about the posthumous life of Elvis Presley

and it turns out that he's led a much more vigorous, energetic and

varied life since being dead

than he did when he was alive.

And you could write a book called Dead Franklin,

which would follow the life of Franklin, after he died.

The first phase of that would be Franklin - The Mystery,

you know, "Where has he gone?"

The second phase, when Lady Jane Franklin really got going,

was Franklin - The Brave Hero.

And she built him up to no end,

making him almost like somebody who had died in a war,

or had sort of selflessly martyred himself.

The fact was that he was setting out to find the Northwest Passage,

which was not a war. It was going to be a cheap way of getting to Asia.

It was a commercial venture,

but nonetheless brave Franklin, heroic Franklin,

got statues in Westminster Abbey

and mythology of the very heroic person kind.

Just as money was being raised

to commemorate Britain's great Arctic martyr in Westminster Abbey,

one of the most intrepid Franklin searches returned with new evidence.

From Lady Franklin's point of view,

Dr John Rae was decidedly off message.

The bodies of some 30 persons and graves

were discovered on the continent.

From the mutilated state of many of the bodies

and the contents of the kettles,

it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven

to the last dread alternative -

cannibalism.

John Rae brought the wrong news.

The wrong news was they were eating each other.

This was the wrong news. It caused great indignation,

both from Lady Jane - hard to get your husband into Westminster Abbey

if he had been practicing that kind of cuisine -

and also from Charles Dickens, who wrote a very outraged piece,

no honest, virtuous, good, true English sailor

would ever, ever, ever eat another honest, good, true and virtuous

English sailor.

The three earliest casualties from the expedition have lain buried,

high up in the Arctic, for the last 160 years.

Their graves on Beechey Island have remained one of the few

tangible symbols of the Franklin disaster.

In 1984, some Canadian scientists exhumed their bodies

and gave a new breath of life to the Arctic mystery.

To be able to look in to the eyes of someone who's been dead

for more than a century,

who was a participant in one of the great discovery expeditions,

it is a profoundly moving experience.

But I think for people who saw that image, saw that face,

this is a face that they know,

this could be the face of a family member or a brother or a friend.

I think that that really opened up a new era of interest

in Arctic exploration.

We can see that in terms of the number of sort of amateur sleuths

who are poking around King William, Beechey Islands every summer.

Forensic analysis drove the Canadians to the conclusion

that Franklin's crew had been poisoned by the lead

from the tin cans they had stored their food in.

Lead poisoning may explain why the remaining crew hauled bars of soap,

silver spoons, silk slippers

and a copy of the Vicar of Wakefield across the ice

and in the wrong direction.

The Canadian theory is hotly disputed

and has re-opened the Franklin mystery to yet more speculation.

This is one of those historical stories

that really is very difficult to answer.

It's a story, I suppose, about the ongoing appeal

of the Arctic as an imaginative space.

The North Pole is an absence of anything.

But it's a featureless spot but at the same time,

it's that point where scientific curiosity and imaginations combine

and continues to capture people's interests.

There was one significant by-product

from 15 years of Franklin search expeditions.

Almost the entire coast line and island system above North America

was mapped out, showing the region to be almost permanently icebound.

By the 1860s, however, after years of sacrifice and failure,

the awesome nature of the frozen north seemed to have sapped

the strength of British ardour.

Edwin Landseer's picture summed up the sentiments of the time.

Landseer's Man Proposes, God Disposes

is this wonderful, biting controversial painting,

painted in 1864, that people cried when they saw it.

Newspaper reports said, "Gosh, this is too awful to be proper art."

It wasn't a patriotic picture,

it was a picture exposing the vanity of human effort.

There's an echo of cannibalism in there too,

these ravenous polar bears,

the personification of a hostile Arctic,

are chewing on the corners of a Union Jack.

There's a shipwreck, there's a chaos of tumbled icebergs.

At this particular moment in 1864,

Landseer so well expresses a dissatisfaction

with the sheer uselessness of polar endeavour.

The disillusion of the 1860s was only a brief respite

in a savage struggle between the Arctic wilderness

and Victorian endeavour.

Although the Northwest Passage was written off as a viable trade route,

a new Arctic goal emerged - the North Pole.

And from now on, there was to be international competition,

and there was little place

for the large scale British naval expeditions.

The key to success lay in the Arctic itself.

HUSKIES BARK

The Inuit have been part of the polar image

from the beginning of European exploration.

They had survived thousands of years in an Arctic environment

where the British failed.

It eventually dawned on would-be polar explorers

that the Inuit were more than just another exotic part

of the flora and fauna.

They and their use of the raw materials of the Arctic

might be the key to conquest.

And the new conquerors were not going to be the Brits!

Norwegians like Roald Amundsen and Americans like Robert Peary

were to be the new pioneers of the Arctic,

and they adopted the ways of the Inuit to get to places

no Brit had gone before.

Peary was to take the Inuit example further than anyone else -

he not only copied the Inuit, he co-opted them onto his expeditions.

Peary learned to travel on the ice with light sledges, with dogs.

They'd figured out the problem of scurvy,

lead poisoning was no longer the issue.

So Peary was able to...

by adapting the local Inuit way of living in the Arctic,

was much more successful at achieving the farthest north.

On the 6th of April 1909, Peary had himself,

his black servant Matthew Henson and his Inuit team

photographed at what he claimed to be the North Pole.

The discovery of the North Pole

stands for the inevitable victory of courage,

persistence, experience over all obstacles.

Here is the cap and climax, the finish,

the closing of the book on 400 years of history.

Such was the glory associated with reaching the Pole

that another rival explorer, Frederick Cook,

also claimed to have got there first.

The world's media was captivated

by an acrimonious debate among rival claimants.

Peary's claim prevailed at the time.

But doubts remain.

Did Peary get to the North Pole?

Does it really matter?

He certainly got farther north than anybody had been.

His claims of distances, the 40-odd kilometres a day

that he travelled or he must have travelled

to actually get to the Pole, it's maybe hard to believe,

but, you know, we weren't there.

Maybe he got very lucky ice conditions

in these variable ice conditions.

And whether he really got to the Pole or not, like I say,

doesn't really matter.

The Arctic Pole is kind of a virtual place.

If you stand on the North Pole one day, the ice is moving

and if you don't even move yourself,

you won't be at the North Pole the next day,

so, you know, whether he really made it or not, I don't think it really matters.

Peary certainly exploited his achievement

to bring the Arctic into every American household.

A whole plethora of merchandise was emblazoned with his picture

and his polar success.

So by the early 1900s,

the Arctic had become imbedded in the public consciousness.

Its pole had been conquered

and its image had become a global marketing gimmick.

Now its inhabitants were to become the heroes

of the world's first ever cinema documentary.

It's a wonderful film, a beautiful, a technical piece of cinema.

It's pivotal in the 1920s as marking a change of the way

the Arctic wilderness is represented

from explorers' narratives in the 19th century

through to a new forms, new technologies of image representation,

the camera and the cinema

which gave quite wonderful and new and challenging images

of the Arctic as a wilderness.

It gets its world premiere in New York in 1922

and it really goes global.

The image is seen in Australia

the film shows in London in Indonesia, in India, in Africa

an image of the Canadian wilderness albeit a romanticised one possibly.

Nevertheless an image of the Canadian wilderness,

the Arctic wilderness travels the world.

The film opened the eyes of millions of people to a distant region

very remote from their own.

Its release coincided with the discovery that, far from

being an isolated wilderness,

the Arctic was powerfully connected to the rest of the hemisphere.

That connection was the ever moving boundary

between the mass of cold air over the Arctic

and the warmer body of air moving north from the equator.

You see they discovered that we have

on the Northern hemisphere, two big air masses,

the sub tropic air over the North Atlantic,

and the polar air over the Polar Regions.

And these air masses touched each other at a border

which is called the polar front.

The polar front is where the cold Arctic air

meets warm air from the equator.

Bad weather or cyclones form along the front.

Find where the front is and you can predict the weather.

If the polar front is north of us, we'll have good weather.

If the polar front is...

in our area or even south of it, we will get the cyclones.

As the Second World War drew closer

the Arctic became an area of vital strategic significance.

On the oceans,

the safe passage of Atlantic shipping would depend upon it.

So would the success or failure of military campaigns on the mainland.

All year round prediction

necessitated all year round presence in the Arctic.

After years of trials and tribulations, Europeans had

finally developed the capacity to operate in the high North.

It was during the Second World War that the technology finally allowed

southern individuals to actually be able to function in the North.

It's the development of the steel hull vessel,

the steam engine and the aeroplane,

that meant for the first time ever, that if you were a non-Inuit,

you could actually have a reasonable hope of having

transportation within the region,

and it's within that context where we start seeing the ability to go forth.

And we see this of course from the German secret weather stations

that they had in Greenland and in Labrador, where they're trying to

ascertain what the weather was going

to be in the Atlantic, by having these weather stations in the Arctic.

Some of the secret weather stations had to be manned.

In September 1944

Dr Wilhelm Dege and a team of young German meteorologists

were secretly transported out to the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard

to set up a station that would help forecast the weather in Western Europe.

Dr Dege carried a film camera

and was able to provide an extraordinary record

of a year in the Arctic.

And the last station 1944 to 45, was led by my father.

You see they were very well-equipped

because their status was higher than the submarine people,

so higher status, they got everything, even in 1944,

but they stressed the food was hunting...

and they stressed the heating material was collecting

and chopping up, up drift wood.

He had to keep people busy. It was a bunch of ten young men,

I think between 18 and 21 years of age

and the official job,

weather measuring didn't take up all their time.

We have a nice movie,

shows a beautiful scene of everybody disappearing

in the steam bath, they had a sauna,

and they claimed that was the best thing they had up there.

You see once a week, on Friday, they had a, a steam bath, yeah.

Dege's team did provide crucial forecasts that made a significant

contribution to the German war effort.

Determining the timing of one famous battle in particular.

THUNDERING OF GUNS

And one weather report

in which my father was involved was in the, in December 1944,

the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium,

the last German offensive on the Western front,

which was timed for a weather situation,

when the Allied planes were grounded because of

drifting snow and fog.

After initial setbacks the Allies eventually repulsed

the German attacks and went on to force German surrender in 1945.

Dege and his team were shipped home,

leaving behind a year's worth of sardine supplies.

Elsewhere on Svalbard other artefacts of war were left to rust.

But from a military point of view

things were going to hot up rather than cool down.

The region was now about to play a central part in the story

of the superpower rivalry of the Cold War.

'Here is a shadow that hangs above our world.

'Our fears, suspicions, nightmares of the future

'are all held in this picture of our shrunken Earth.

'From here we can see the main centres of human life.

'America, Europe, Asia gathered in close, in range of one another.

'But whether this is to be a new link between us

'or our last battlefield

'depends not on the machines we fly, but on ourselves!'

Most people are used to thinking about the Arctic as being a peripheral region.

It's a little strip of white you see at the top of your map at school, of the world

which is a Mercator projection,

but when you look at a proper projection,

the polar stereographic projection,

you see that the Arctic is a little blob, surrounded by all the

advanced industrial countries of the world, North America, Europe, Russia.

So the Arctic Ocean becomes, geo-politically,

it's the centre of things, it's not on the edge.

During the Cold War, therefore,

it became very very important and a huge amount was being spent on,

on Arctic research, not because of the climatic implications

but because of the military implications.

From the end of January

to the middle of March the big delta country of Alaska

is a snow bound wilderness

where the mercury can drop to 50 degrees below zero, and often does.

Yet during these 3 months your army held exercise "Moose horn".

# Oh, the weather outside is frightful

# But the fire is so delightful and since we've no place to go...

# Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow... #

It completely transformed itself.

When the Soviets and the Americans

had both figured out how to use their captured German rocket scientists to

the best avail and develop what become known of course as ICBMs,

intercontinental ballistic missiles,

and you figure out how to put a nuclear warhead on it,

the means of targeting is over the Pole.

So, from '47 onward,

the polar region becomes the major strategic transfer point

as tensions continue to develop between the Soviets

and the NATO countries and in particular the North Americans.

You had to have a clearly working system

that was going to alert you to the missiles.

Ultimately, within North America this becomes known as the DEW Line,

distant early warning, and it was basically a trigger point

in which we would be told the nukes are coming, basically say

goodbye to your family we're just about to go kill Moscow.

All around the rim of the Arctic,

small bands of indigenous people, including the Inuit

had been eking out

a highly adapted livelihood for at least 5,000 years.

The Cold War and the Dew Line were to change this forever.

The DEW Line completely transforms the economic situation

of the Inuit across the entire North American Arctic.

You had town settings where the major construction was occurring

and many of the Inuit who had traditionally only lived off the land

started looking for employment

and being introduced into the whole idea of a wage economy.

The unique traditional way of life for Inuit

has disappeared in many respects.

The part that we still retain is our cultural identity and our language.

We've now come into communities, everybody goes to school,

people go to work that can find a job

so you can see the transition that has taken place,

it's very, it's very stark

compared to the way it used to be in a very short time.

I mean they have never been such big changes I don't think

in any culture that we've had to go through in the last 70 years,

it's been tremendous.

Cold War and Nuclear technology

was to have another major impact on the North Polar Region.

As a wilderness the Arctic is unique in that it exists

both above and underneath the ice.

The Arms race led humankind to where no man had gone before.

Prior to the development of nuclear power and being able to build a small

reactor, there was no way of going under the ice.

You would never go under the ice in a conventional powered sub

as there is always the danger that when you needed to surface to get air

and re-charge your batteries, you weren't going to break the ice.

When the Americans and the Soviets figured out how to put a nuclear

reactor in a submarine, that eliminated that issue.

By the end of the 1950s

the Americans were able to cross the Arctic under the ice.

On March 17th 1959 the USS Skate was the first submarine

to surface at the North Pole.

On this voyage the crew of the Skate had been able to navigate for

4,000 kilometres under the ice, surfacing only 10 times.

And as such you saw nuclear deterrents being above the air

in terms of bombers and ICBM's.

You saw nuclear deterrents under the ice.

The sea under the Arctic became the scene for games of hide and seek,

where submarine crews of each side

listened for tell-tale sounds of each other's engines.

Occasionally scientists were allowed on board

to measure the ice from below and take soundings of the sea bed.

Frequently the sonar equipment picked up

some of the wildlife from below.

WHALE MOANS

A lot of the early understanding of whale behaviour in the Arctic came

from recordings done from submarines

US and British Nuclear subs and that was partly because

they needed to collect a library of sounds so that they could recognise

natural sounds and separate them from artificial sounds made by other subs.

WHALES CALL

There has been a project

to map the migration of belugas under the ice.

And it turns out that not only

do they migrate around the edges of the Arctic

but sometimes they take quite long, dangerous voyages

under the ice itself to get from between two feeding grounds,

so for instance in the Beaufort Sea and this means they have to

rely on being able to surface in polynias to breathe

and of course if there aren't any polynias they drown,

so the tracking devices show them swimming under the ice

and then taking very deep dives

so they can use their sonar from a great depth

to survey a bigger area of the surface

and find where there's a hole.

But the wonders of Arctic wildlife were not only on the minds of

scientists and submariners listening on hydrophones.

Towards the end of the '80s the importance of the polar

environment was dawning on yet more powerful figures.

It was here in a Soviet Union's Arctic capital

that a dramatic new vision of the high North was to be outlined.

When Gorbachev comes forward even before the Cold War ends,

he comes forward in what is known as the Murmansk Speech in 1987,

in which he starts bringing forward

his whole ideas of Perestroika and Glasnost and says to the West,

"You know, we've got this commonality,

"we're Arctic nations, we should be co-operating in the Arctic."

TRANSLATION: Let the North of the globe,

the Arctic, become a zone of peace.

Let the North Pole be a Pole of peace.

We suggest that all interested states start talks on the limitation

and scaling down of military activity in the North as a whole.

Now in '87 when he makes that speech

he basically gets dismissed, basically it's seen as a Soviet ploy,

the Russians are just doing this for some form of protection

of their Northern Fleet,

but he also makes the very strong point that we need

to come together on the environment.

TRANSLATION: We attach special importance to the cooperation

of the Northern countries in environmental protection.

The urgency of this is obvious.

It would be well to extend joint measures for protecting the marine

environment of the entire oceanic and sea surface

of the globe's North.

Although his speech was too early and possibly too utopian,

Mikhail Gorbachev did set out a vision of an Arctic

surrounded by a community of polar nations collaborating peacefully.

Once demilitarized,

the polar region was something that could bind hostile nations together.

He sets the stage.

When it becomes evident by 1989 that in fact he is very serious

and then you start seeing events overtake him,

you start seeing some of the other Arctic nations saying,

"Hey, you know, maybe he was on to something."

Well, when you get everyone together and say, "OK, well, what are we going to do besides talk?

"Well, let's start looking at environmental issues, nature issues,

"I mean there can't be anything too terribly bad in the Arctic

"but you know, let's, let's actually get substance."

Well, lo and behold when they start looking they discover that the image

of a pristine environmental condition in the Arctic is completely wrong.

That it is completely and utterly connected to almost

all other environmental sections in the world.

So pollution occurring in Pakistan ends up in the Arctic.

For the Arctic is no longer understood as an isolated area,

but in fact becomes the corner stone

of understanding environmental processes worldwide.

Parallel to the twists and turns of the Cold War,

the media, particularly television, was bringing Arctic wildlife

into the homes of millions.

For many this created an image of a remote and pristine eco-system

supporting large and exotic mammals.

One animal above all, became the emblem for the region.

A high slope above the sea ice

is a relatively safe position for a bear's maternity den.

Polar bears have between one and three cubs,

or very occasionally four, but twins are the most common.

Since their birth under the snow around Christmas,

they have suckled their mother's milk, but she has not fed

since November and having lived only on her fat reserves

is now extremely thin and hungry.

The filmmakers also recognised the fragility of the environment.

If disturbance were to reduce the number of seals,

or industrial waste poison the Arctic Ocean,

then polar bears would feel more strongly than most

the sweeping changes that now face the North.

Just as the Arctic was emerging as a symbol

for the vulnerability of the planet,

another more insidious and ultimately overwhelming threat became apparent.

Global temperatures have been rising

and the warming has been greatest in the Arctic.

Each year the sea ice expands and contracts with the seasons.

Normally, the summer time minimum of ice

is around 7.5 million square kilometres,

which is about half the winter time size.

In the past decade we've seen smaller and smaller amounts.

2005 set a big record with only five million square kilometres,

so a couple of million square kilometres than the normal.

2007 was stunning to the Arctic scientists where we reached a minimum

of 4.1 million square kilometres.

So 4.1, almost half the normal minimum size of ice in summer.

If the trend continues then it's possible that the

Arctic Ocean will be clear of ice in the summer, by as early as 2030.

The scientists are only confirming

what the Inuit have been observing for years.

Some are now seeing their homes sink into the thawing permafrost.

Now, with the change in the climate

and the sea ice melting,

the elders are no longer able to predict the weather

and they're very uncomfortable now about using their knowledge base

because they themselves

are questioning whether it's valid or not.

There's pockets of ice that have melted and hunters

don't know that, and you, you hear about accidents quite a bit where,

snow machines have gone through the ice and people have gone, you know.

These are things that would not normally have happened years ago.

But it's the Arctic's number one icon that has now become

a global emblem of climate change.

What's so powerful about the imagery of the Arctic is that if you start

talking about climate change in the impacts

of say New York or London and you start saying,

"OK in a few years, you know,

"you'll have to start dealing with a much higher tide line here. "

You start showing a picture or an icon,

such as the polar bear or the walrus,

and you say here it is in all its glory in the Arctic.

Everybody can understand that right now, and you say in 20 years,

30 years, it will no longer be there,

that is one of the most powerful images that I think people have

in terms of the environmental distress the Earth is now facing.

In just a few decades the polar bear

has been transformed from being a ferocious symbol of the Arctic that

nearly ate Nelson, to the victim of mankind's abuse of the planet.

Human induced climate change

is fundamentally altering the way the Arctic is perceived.

I think once upon a time, and as we're talking only of

the European perception here,

once upon a time it was the harsh, threatening but beautiful,

very alien, other place.

So from there, I think we have now come to a point where it's now

seen as a fragile...

a fragile, easy-to-destroy place.

Throughout the 19th century the frozen north had been seen as

the great ice barrier which enticed brave seamen on heroic voyages...

many never to return.

Now this 19th century obsession is literally melting away.

The Northwest Passage, now in 2007 has been open, clear of ice

for two years in a row, for an extended period, about six weeks.

We, we don't have any record

of it being like that for, so frequently in time.

Franklin came through, 1847 he found a bit of a route but he was stopped.

Now, today we're sending ships through that area more and more

frequently but we still expect we'll be seeing years

when there'll be difficult ice conditions,

well into the next few decades

until all the ice finally melts in the summer time.

The Arctic is more accessible than it's ever been,

no longer the exclusive reserve for Inuit, explorers and camera crews.

An open ocean in the north,

surrounded by industrial nations is a possibility that might

be realised within the next two or three decades.

There'll be losses as well as gains.

As in any other massive transformation

and I'll use the adjective massive very purposely,

there are pros and cons.

The cons are getting fairly understood, you will

have the elimination of most of the major mammal species,

particularly polar bears, walruses, you will have

a major disruption of the traditional way of life for the Inuit,

and for other Northern indigenous peoples.

But by the same token you are going to have opportunities.

You are going to have economic opportunities, in terms of the exploitation

of natural resources, oil, gas and diamonds.

You are going to have the ability to have new transportation routes.

We're not entirely sure where it is going but it is going to be massive.

Some estimates suggest that

as much as 20% of the world's oil and gas reserves

may be found beneath the polar sea bed.

Discoveries are being made of yet more gold, diamonds and tungsten.

Environmental consequences will be inevitable

as exploration gets underway.

There is also the prospect of

an international land grab and disputes over sovereignty.

Two centuries ago, John Barrow of the British admiralty was spurred

into action by the prospect of Russian domination of the polar sea.

History seems to be repeating itself.

It continues to be a stage for geo-political contest,

just in 2007,

the flamboyant Russian explorer Artur Chilingarov planting a flag

on the sea floor, 4,000 metres below the North Pole,

below the sea ice as a gesture of Russian sovereignty.

The melting Arctic is now between two visions.

Will it become the scene of peaceful collaboration

as Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in 1987

or will it return to being the scene of armed hostility

that characterised the Cold War?

We are literally on a crossroad. We have a possibility

of seeing true international co-operation develop in the north.

Unfortunately, there are also forces that are coming to the forefront

that are suggesting that nations

may in fact start looking to their own interest.

We have the choice at this point in time in terms of how we respond

to this transformation, but it's...

at this point it's not entirely clear, which of the two

we are in fact going to follow.

It's now 190 years since Mary Shelley opened her story of

Frankenstein, with the idealistic imaginings of a young explorer.

"I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks,

"which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.

"I try in vain to be persuaded

"that the Pole is the seat of frost and desolation.

"It ever presents itself to my imagination

"as a region of beauty and delight.

"I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight

"of a part of the world never before visited,

"and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man."

This is now a landscape where the imprint of humankind is so powerful

that we are fundamentally altering its appearance and its ecology.

But it is still within our power to ensure that, at least in part,

the Arctic remains a wilderness,

a place of wild beasts and a region of beauty and delight.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd