Footsteps in the Snow Life in the Freezer


Footsteps in the Snow

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This is the hut at Cape Evans where Captain Scott and his party spent the winter of 1911.

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The freezing Antarctic temperatures have kept everything exactly as it was.

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Food, equipment, even clothing and the bedding on the bunks as if it was yesterday.

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This is how it was on June 6th, 1911, Scott's 43rd birthday.

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He and his team were spending the winter here, before starting the trek to the Pole.

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They lightened the long, dark days with their own entertainment.

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But these were serious-minded men. For some of them, reaching the Pole was of secondary importance.

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They were studying geology, biology, glaciology, meteorology and had a well-equipped laboratory.

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And that is still here too.

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Photography was in the hands of Herbert Ponting.

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He took cine film as well as still photographs, and had his own darkroom.

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They had large stocks of tinned food.

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We now know that this was not nearly as nutritious as they thought.

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Vitamin deficiencies contributed to the disaster that was to come.

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As they waited, they knew that farther along the coast

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the Norwegian, Amundsen and his team were waiting to try and beat them to the Pole.

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On November 1st, at the beginning of the summer,

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Scott and four companions set off on the 800 mile march to the South Pole.

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They wore clothes made of wool and cotton like these.

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They travelled on long wooden skis with simple bindings

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and transported their equipment and food on sledges which they pulled themselves,

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instead of using dogs, like Amundsen.

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They reached the Pole on 17th January,

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to find that Amundsen had got there 34 days before them.

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On the way back they ran short of supplies and died only 11 miles from a food depot

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and less than 100 miles from the safety of this hut.

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Today, some 80 years later, a great deal has changed.

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Modern fabric keeps you warm during the worst of conditions,

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satellites make communication and navigation easy,

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and every day an aircraft flies directly to the Pole.

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Captain Scott marched for 79 exhausting days to reach the Pole.

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This plane will make exactly the same journey in less than 3 hours.

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As you fly along Scott's route, it is not only the sheer distance that impresses you;

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It's also the appalling difficulties of the terrain.

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To begin with, Scott used a combination of motor-sledge, ponies and dogs,

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but after 409 miles, he and his men hauled the sledges themselves, each pulling 90 kilos.

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The decision not to use dogs throughout was probably their undoing.

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Amundsen, by doing so, made the journey much more quickly and with less physical effort.

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So when Scott and his team reached the Pole, they found Amundsen's tent already there,

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with a note for Scott to deliver to the King of Norway should Amundsen himself fail to return.

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Scott, when he arrived and found the Norwegian flag already planted by Amundsen

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wrote in his journal,

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"Great God, this is an awful place." And so it must have been for those five men,

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exhausted and bitterly disappointed, with the return journey to face.

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Today, some 80 years later, neither explorer would recognise the place.

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This summer, over 100 scientists and support staff

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will live and work, protected from the worst of the weather by this dome.

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Beneath it are smaller insulated buildings,

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It stands 16 metres high. It's like a space station,

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an isolated capsule floating on slowly-moving ice, nearly 3000 metres above sea-level.

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All supplies for the Pole Station have to be brought in by air.

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Even in summer, the supply aircraft have to keep their engines running

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to stop them from freezing.

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The fuel they bring is transferred to vast bladders

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which will last the station through the winter.

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The South Pole is the best place on earth to observe the heavens above.

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The atmosphere is free from pollution,

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and the stars don't disappear below the horizon

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so they can be observed continuously.

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Working in Antarctica demands a special kind of scientist.

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You may have the most brilliant mind,

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but that may be of little use if you can't pitch a tent or re-start a diesel engine.

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Most of the stations are built on the edge of the continent,

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like the Australian base at Mawson. They stand on rock instead of ever-moving ice.

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Here there are other living creatures with which to share your life.

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Emperor penguins, like you, will sit out the winter.

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The wintering crews will see no other human being for six months or more.

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They must find a way of living together. A routine is all important.

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There is plenty to do.

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Not only scientific work, but keeping the station running.

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Looking after the dogs is a much-sought-after job.

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Food becomes hugely important.

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The cook is one of the most critically watched members of the team.

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Most bases have at least a year's supply of food in reserve, in case of emergencies.

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And most also have a building away from these living quarters,

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fully stocked with food, in case of the worst disaster of all a fire.

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No human being could survive without shelter in these conditions for more than a few hours.

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As winter advances and days shorten, the sun skims closer to the horizon,

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and eventually drops below it.

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Now there will be no sunlight for 37 days.

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Mid-winter day. On Mawson Base it is marked with a great party.

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Entertainments that have been secretly practised for weeks are now performed in public.

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OUT-OF-TUNE SINGALONG "Waltzing Matilda"

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Outside, the darkness is broken only by one of Nature's most extraordinary spectacles

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the southern lights, the aurora australis.

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As the sun returns, so do the Adelie penguins.

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They come to one of their traditional colonies only a mile from Mawson Base.

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It's now one of the best-studied of all.

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A wire-fenced corridor with an electronic beam ensures that some of the birds,

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as they go to and from the sea, are counted and weighed.

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A few are caught and measured in detail, to keep a check on the colony's progress.

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Some are given prominent markings,

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so that they can be identified even at a distance.

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It is, it must be said, rather disfiguring,

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but it will disappear at the next moult,

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and it hasn't lessened the affection of its partner.

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Dogs have been used here since Amundsen's day.

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But dogs are ecological aliens

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and it has been decided that they must go.

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Many regret that.

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Dogs are great companions, and they can detect one of the major hazards...

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a snow-covered crevasse. No motorised sledge can do this.

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This team will be sent to Minnesota in the United States.

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Its departure will mark the end of a great chapter in the short history of mankind in the Antarctic.

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They will be replaced by motorised 'quikes'.

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There is a limit to the amount of fuel such vehicles can carry,

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so they can't cover such great distances as a dog team. But they do travel faster.

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It used to take two days, with dogs, to reach Mawson's Emperor colony. Now it's a three-hour drive.

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All year round, scientists visit this colony to monitor its progress as part of a long-term study.

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There is a serious scientific purpose behind this rugby tackling.

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The bird is to be fitted with a transmitter

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that will send regular signals by way of an orbiting satellite to a monitoring station in Tasmania.

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If this bird is like others, it is now setting off on a 100 mile march to reach open water.

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Once there, it will dive to an astonishing depth of 450 metres to catch fish,

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and all the time be recording information to say where it is.

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Hundreds of miles to the north, a grey-headed albatross is providing similar information.

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It, too, has a transmitter which reveals where it collected the food

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which it is bringing back to its hungry chick.

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It belongs to a colony that has been studied for 15 years by a British team.

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The old method of weighing birds was with a simple spring balance.

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But now they have a new device.

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The scales are electronic and concealed inside a fibreglass nest.

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From now on, there will be no need to man-handle the chick just to get its weight.

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The scales transmit a reading every ten minutes to a nearby hut with recording apparatus.

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This shows that one of the parents brings back 500 grams of squid, fish, lamprey and krill every 3 days.

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The adult has travelled several hundred miles in the process of doing so.

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To film this series, we drew heavily on the discoveries

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made by scientific teams all over the continent.

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We wanted to film just what those albatross and penguins did in the open ocean.

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This involved developing cameras and lenses for these hostile conditions.

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Swimming in near-freezing seas may be second nature to an albatross,

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but it's a daring thing for a cameraman to do.

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The reward, for him, is sights that have never been filmed before.

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On board our ice-strengthened vessel, the ABEL-J,

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we carried boats, diving gear and video apparatus.

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As well as free-diving cameramen, we had remote control cameras mounted on the inflatables.

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One of our priorities was to find a swarm of krill.

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After weeks of searching, we did.

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And so did a pair of humpback whales.

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The remotely controlled video cameras gave us unique pictures.

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They recorded, in unparalleled detail, the whole of the whales' fishing technique

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from the moment they released their curtain of bubbles,

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hemming in and concentrating the krill, to the final catch.

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We also had another vessel, a small steel-hulled yacht, the Damian II.

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She had a retractable keel, and could operate in waters a metre deep,

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and go into shallow bays where no other vessel had been.

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Jerome Poncet is the skipper and owner of the Damien.

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With his biologist wife, he has spent ten seasons

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exploring every cove and bay on the Antarctic peninsula.

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He knows them in a way no-one else does.

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He was able to land camera teams on tiny, remote and uninhabited islands.

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A radio hook-up linked the camps and ships,

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which were often separated by several hundred miles of ice or ocean.

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A camera on a jib arm.

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It gives a splendid high-angle view of a penguin colony

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and enables you to move alongside an individual penguin on its perambulations.

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But it weighs 120 kilos and carrying it over rocky cliffs is not easy.

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To get un-bumpy pictures on the move,

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cameraman Paul Atkins used a special mount and harness called a Steadicam.

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He could move smoothly into close quarters with tricky subjects

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like these fighting fur seals.

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Blizzards often brought land-based operations to a halt but work could be done underwater,

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if you can dig out the air cylinders.

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Diving under the ice is very different from doing so in the open ocean.

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I'm generally a warm weather diver. I like warm weather, sunshine, palm trees and hammocks.

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I jumped into a seal hole, and they handed me my camera.

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I wasn't too cold, except where my mouth held my regulator.

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Suddenly, I found myself looking at one of the most extraordinary scenes I have ever experienced.

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I dropped down through a hole in the ice.

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There was absolsutely no sound except the distant trills of the weddell seals.

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Weddell seal researcher Amal Amji works underwater too but she doesn't get wet.

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She is suspended from a capsule ten metres down beneath the ice.

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From there, she records the sounds of the seals

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while noting on a tape recorder the details of their movements.

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There's a pair at the hydrophone, probably the loudest animals.

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There's one single seal that's on my left,

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and it seems to be watching the mother and pup that were near the hydrophone.

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Other researchers have been studying a colony of Emperor penguins for many years.

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They watch them underwater from within a protective cage,

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for there are dangerous penguin hunters leopard seals or killer whales.

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This leopard seal is huge, nearly 4 metres long.

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A remotely controlled camera will record the exit of the fleeing penguins.

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But even out of water they're not out of danger.

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Another leopard seal waits for them.

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Many people reckon that the leopard seal

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is the most dangerous killer in Antarctic waters

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and that it would be suicide to get in the water with one.

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But Peter Scoones and Doug Allan wanted to film them without the encumbrance of a cage.

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I've been underwater with all the other species of seals and I felt they wouldn't attack...

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At least not without some warning.

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Peter Scoones and I thought we could recognise if their behaviour was becoming aggressive.

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It definitely produces a rush of adrenalin when a 12 foot seal comes out of the hazy distance

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and ends up almost taking the entire front of the camera into its mouth.

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You have to feel sorry for the young penguins. They don't stand a chance.

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It's like a cat with a mouse.

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And here I was, the cat owner, being presented with the prey.

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But I shouldn't deny the sheer excitement

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of filming one of Antarctica's top predators.

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This drama is a symbol of Antarctica, and I count myself privileged to have seen it.

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It's still less than a century since the first man set foot on the Antarctic continent.

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Yet today, hundreds of scientists live and work here, winter and summer.

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Increasing numbers of tourists arrive,

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and modern technologies make it increasingly easy for people to survive here.

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Despite all that, there are still very few footsteps in the Antarctic snow.

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Mining has been banned for a further 50 years,

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and the Antarctic Treaty remains relatively effective.

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But Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent.

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A place where it's possible to see the splendours and immensities of the natural world,

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almost exactly as they were long, long before human beings ever arrived on this plant.

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Long may it remain so.

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Subtitles by Wilma Campbell BBC Scotland 1993

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