Ice Station Antarctica: Part One Horizon

This is Antarctica, the last great wilderness.

It's the coldest, windiest, driest and most isolated place

on Earth, and it's home to the British Antarctic Survey's

Here, cutting-edge science is making vital discoveries

about how our lives are vulnerable to the sun's activities

and threatened by man-made climate change.

It's 27th of January, 2016, and we're at 75 degrees south.

For the last couple of weeks, we've been on this ship behind me,

the RRS Ernest Shackleton, crossing the Southern Ocean.

We're making this journey to resupply the research station,

but this is also something of a rescue mission.

Although it appears to be on solid ground, Halley actually sits

on a constantly-moving and cracking ice shelf - an ice shelf that's

developed a chasm that threatens to cast the station adrift

on a massive iceberg - and our cargo is part of the effort

I'm Peter Gibbs, and my job is working for the Met Office

as a BBC weatherman, but back in my younger days I worked

as a meteorologist in Antarctica for over two years, and I never,

ever thought I'd get the opportunity to return.

'This is my journey to investigate the threat to Halley's

future...' OK, Hilmar, here we go, then.

It's going over the edge that's the worst bit.

'..and science at the end of the world.'

My journey starts at the southern tip of Africa.

Here, the Royal Research Ship Ernest Shackleton is waiting for me.

As I go below to find my cabin and stow my bags...

We're heading out of Cape Town harbour -

you can probably see Table Mountain in the background behind me -

on our way to the frozen continent of Antarctica.

Now, we're expecting it to take about two weeks.

We'll be going at ten to 12 knots, so at just

We're also heading through some of the roughest seas in the world,

so I'm a little bit nervous about that, but really,

really excited to be heading for Antarctica.

The Ernest Shackleton has been making this long journey

across the Southern Ocean to resupply Halley since 1999,

but British scientific research goes back much further and has

The modern-day British Antarctic Survey actually has its roots

in a secret wartime mission from World War II, which was based

up here on the peninsula at Port Lockroy

The idea of the operation was to protect the waters around

Antarctica, particularly towards the Drake Passage

towards South America, from Nazi submarines.

After the war, territorial claims led to 12 nations signing

the Antarctic Treaty, and this untouched landscape

became a home purely for scientific exploration.

For the British Antarctic Survey, this meant a research station

And that's our destination - Halley Research Station.

Even the buildings I lived in have long since drifted off,

We've still got a long way to go - the best part of a week.

In fact, we are not even on the edge of this map yet.

Various incarnations of the Halley Research Station have

endured some of the most hostile conditions found

Temperatures drop to over minus 50 Celsius, winds can reach almost

150km an hour, reducing visibility to just a few metres...

..and, for over three months every winter, the sun never rises.

Antarctica is also about as remote a place as you can find on Earth...

..but it's this remoteness that allows experiments to be performed

at Halley that simply can't be done anywhere else.

through the Southern Ocean to get to Halley is a challenge.

Well, we finally hit the edge of the Weddell Sea pack ice

There was an almighty bang as we struck the first floe,

The sound when you're actually inside the ship is just remarkable.

It's almost like you're inside a war zone, and this

I'll tell you what, it's still a bit nerve-racking until you

As we crunch through the ice, the captain offers me

the chance of a lifetime - something I'd secretly been hoping

to do - drive his 1,800-tonne ship.

Are you sure about this, John?

At the moment we've got 83% pitch, which is basically your power,

which is giving us about ten knots, but it will build up,

cos we're in a patch of open water here.

So, just be careful what you hit at that

It's a strange sort of feeling of power and terror, actually.

nice new ice coming up, here, and just aim for the crack

That's incredible - the speed that crack's actually formed,

There's a good covering of snow on most of these

It's probably the best part of a metre thick, with

It's certainly slowed us down a bit. Yes.

And are we OK to hit this bit of ice coming up?

You might want to just drop your pitch...

Drop your power a bit there.

My piloting skills have the local penguins fleeing

in terror but I'm not stopping for anything.

I have to say, this is fantastic fun.

I can see why you keep coming back down here, John.

We spend our whole careers at sea, trying to avoid

..and this is our one chance to hit everything in sight.

is an unforgettable experience, like exploring another

universe in a spaceship, but we're still a world away

Even through the Halley Research Station appears

to be built on solid ground, it isn't.

Its home is the Brunt Ice Shelf - a seemingly endless frozen sea -

and, for the research station, this is a problem.

The ice shelves that surround Antarctica are glaciers

that have flowed down from the continent's landmass.

Hundreds of metres thick, they crack as they spread like a stiff honey

So, ice shelves grow with time, as more and more ice is being added,

and typically they then lose mass through an event that they call

calving, which is basically the breaking off of a chunk

of the ice shelf, which breaks away and then floats

This is a natural process, which you always expect.

It happens with other ice shelves as well and certainly will happen

On Brunt Ice Shelf, we have a particular

situation right now, which is that there's

It was formed at least 30 years ago, but recently it has

Now, if this crack were to continue to grow at the same rate as it has

over the last few years, in the same direction,

then eventually it will cut across the whole ice shelf.

We know there was a huge calving event between 1915 and 1956,

when the coastline of the ice shelf dramatically changed,

and now the ice shelf has almost extended to its 1915 profile,

so another major calving event is due.

If that happens, then the research station itself will be cast adrift

into the Southern Ocean on a huge tabular iceberg.

That glistening white line in the distance are the icy ramparts

of the Caird Coast - the continent of Antarctica.

A coast first spotted and named by Shackleton

just over 100 years ago, before he got trapped in the ice

just further down the coast here, and first spotted by me 36 years ago

There's a bit of that young man certainly coming back as I stand

My first sight of the ice shelf brings back a flood of memories.

It's a bleak, beautiful place - an alien world, right

And it's a treacherous landscape - at any moment, at the water's edge,

'But we have a job to do, delivering supplies

'for the research station.' And, with no docks, like everything else

in Antarctica, you make what you need yourself.

So, Captain Harper creates a berth by running the ship

If the shelf doesn't collapse, so the theory goes,

Violent southern ocean storms could drive the Shackleton

off the ice shelf, so, as the weather closes in,

the rest of our day is spent securing the ship.

This means all hands, including me, go to work digging four massive

The 30km snowcat ride across the blindingly white ice

shelf seems endless but, after two weeks at sea

waiting for this moment, I'm not disappointed.

I mean, I've seen pictures, but when you see it for real it's

I mean, it's like something out of The Martian or

Built in 2012, the Halley Research Station consists of 'eight huge

to maintain life in a hostile environment.

to take you through from one end, right through to the other.

So, we're starting in the quiet room, which doubles up as a library,

and we move out of there into the first part

Now, we're into a sort of admin area.

We've got the communications room on the left.

We've got the equipment here, on the right, in case of fire,

and a board up here where you have to tag in and tag out -

safety, a very big concern here at the moment.

Now, we're moving through into the main dining

So, this is the real, sort of, hub of the station far

Oh, and along the wall on this corridor that

we're just coming past, all the pictures of past winterers,

starting from 1956, right through to the present day.

And, of course, there's me and the rest of the guys in 1981,

and you'll notice, back then, no women.

Now, you'll start to hear a bit of a hum.

We're going outside, through these heavy,

And now we're on into the main science area,

and now we're going to go up the stairs to the best view

in Halley, which is the Met Office observation deck, where you get

a panoramic view of the Brunt Ice Shelf.

But, today, the very existence of this unique research

A huge crack across the Brunt Ice Shelf is expanding,

and it may cause the research station to float off

For glaciologist Hilmar Gudmundsson, it's like watching geology in fast

forward, so this faultline is constantly monitored,

and there really is only one way to get a closer look.

The last time I abseiled was 35 years ago, so I'm a

It's going over the edge that's the worst bit for me.

It's quite a long way down, isn't it?

I've been looking at this crack from satellite images, and now

This is a feature which has been here for ages.

When low cloud and snow reflect and diffuse the sunlight,

the full extent of the chasm is difficult to see,

but when the sun comes out, it's a different story.

This is, as you can see, a fairly large crack.

It's a chasm, that's what they call it.

Yeah, chasm, chasm sounds about right from where I'm sitting.

Across, I would say this is maybe 80...80m at least...

..and the whole thing is getting wider as we speak,

Every day? Every day.

15cm from this edge here to the other one over there,

and it's been going like a clock ever since we started

And, Hilmar, the bottom of the chasm, there,

looks very different to the ice round about.

It's much darker down in the bottom, there.

Yeah, I suspect down there we're literally at sea level.

It is the colour of the ocean which is causing this slight tint.

Hilmar is keen to investigate whether we are actually at sea

level, and that means going right to the very bottom of the chasm.

It's a huge relief getting down, but we don't take off

With the freezing Southern Ocean just beneath our feet,

Matt, are you happy with us going down here?

If you follow the trail we've made previously,

OK. Are you OK?

OK, I'll follow - maybe not quite as elegantly as you did.

It really is? Oh.

Yeah, yeah, I thought we had, maybe, one or two metres

So we're on this huge, floating mass of ice,

We've had a journey up from the coast of three

We've come an hour and a half in from the base, across this

featureless snow plain, to this massive, great chasm,

and you get down to the bottom of it and you actually

It feels like you're in the belly of the ice shelf,

and it just brings it home how sort of precarious this whole

I guess, because it's always breaking up, it's growing,

it's widening by about 15cm a day, the sea ice formation just

This rapid expansion of the chasm may prevent sea ice from forming,

but it's not the width that's the threat to

the Halley Research Station - it's the length.

At the same time that this gets wider, it also gets longer

So, if it kept on going at that rate, in that direction,

eventually it's going to reach the sea at the other side of the ice

shelf, and you've got a massive iceberg.

And, of course, the problem here is, Halley, the station,

is on that developing iceberg.

As it lengthens, the greater the chance that the research station

finds itself floating into the Southern Ocean.

But there's another unusual feature in Halley's design,

the first of its kind, which will help it survive.

At the bottom of its hydraulic legs are huge skis...

..so each module will be detached from its neighbour then dragged

to a new site in the same way it was brought here four years ago.

After extensive surveys, a new location has been found 20km

away, safely on the other side of the chasm.

And there, Halley can continue its work.

Before we head home, at the edge of the ice shelf,

all the ship's cargo is finally unloaded.

These big, red shipping containers we brought down on the Shackleton

contain living accommodation - kitchen, bedrooms,

bathrooms, working spaces - and they are going to be used

to build a temporary camp for the team up at Halley VI.

So it's all hands on deck at the moment, the container

is being craned out over the ice onto these heavy-duty sledges that

will then be dragged all the way up to Halley VI.

Once the temporary accommodation is set up, then Halley can be

It is a little bit warmer for us across the UK than it was for Pete,

but it is still not pleasant across the UK. A lot of cloud around and

outbreaks of rain for many. Hints of sunshine