Never Before Seen Footage Uncovers Antarctica s First Scientific Missions

Antarctica today is a hotbed of scientific activity. Scientists are shooting weather balloons into space, hunting for galactic particles, and flying across the continent to chart our changing climate. But over 60 years ago, Antarctica was a blanket of unknowns, a territory that was a siren song for adventure junkies and pioneering scientists. And in the midst of the Cold War, international peace was forged on the ice. It was very, very reconnaissance. There hadn't really been serious scientific research done across the continent. But countries came together. We were actually able to unfreeze the international relations between East and West. This is David Drury, a renowned glaciologist and former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute. He's even got a mountain named after him. As a young scientist, David participated in hundreds of groundbreaking flights across Antarctica. We wanted to understand what the climate was like, as opposed to understanding how the climate had changed. While conducting research, David filmed his experience. And we asked him to digitize a roll of cinefilm, which hasn't seen the light of day until now. The rocks and the mountains, it is just one of those magical parts of the world. At one point, Antarctica was primed for conquest. But the international science community stepped in to make the continent politically neutral. From 1957 to 1958, scientists worked side by side in the Arctic. We thought some of the scientists were rubbish. Oh, look at that. All they're doing is studying these little sort of tiny mosses. I mean, who can possibly get interested in that? And they joked about, you know, why are they studying these rocks? Or, you know, what are they doing flying around these aeroplanes? A lot of, you know, good-hearted scientific joshing. Thanks to friendly competition and collaboration, techniques like radioglaciology, which uses radar to map the ice, became vetted scientific methods. This film was the foundation of Redfield. I mean, at a baseline level, they were showing that you can look through four kilometers of ice with a radar pulse and see what the bottom of the continent looks like. But the real breakthrough was in the recording system, invented by a physicist named Stan Evans, who flew with David. So what Stan did was to get a camera with a piece of 35-millimeter film that would slowly pass over the oscilloscope. The film integrated the signal, and with the film continuously moving across it, you built up a profile. We do our activity, and then at the end of the flight, we come back to McMurdo, just sort of socialize, get a drink. We would go to the mess hall. Steaks, lobster, fresh salads would be flown in from New Zealand. And we went to the Russian station at Vostok. It's the coldest place on Earth. The best thing was a glass of vodka, Nostrovia, and, you know, your pals forever. You have to remember just how hostile the Antarctic is. And once you're working and doing all of these things, if anything goes wrong, it goes badly wrong, and it goes badly wrong very quickly. But thanks to these intrepid scientists and radar profiles, a whole new world of lakes, valleys, and mountain ranges were uncovered. The whole object has been to build up this picture of the ice sheet and on what lies beneath it. These techniques are still being used today, inspiring the next generation like Dustin Schroeder, a Stanford radioglaciologist. Decades after these radar films were taken, Dustin is embarking on a massive digitization project to see if there's new information to mine. Thousands of reels that we then combined together. We bought all this, like, used Hollywood equipment off eBay, and we would splice them together and tape them, and then take them, put them onto the scanner and digitize them. And then that produced about two million images that we're now processing through. These radargrams are like slices of the ice sheet and can show how an ice shelf has changed. These two radargrams are of Lake Vostok. They're the same film, and you can see the outline of the bottom of the bed of the ice sheet. You can see the lake. This is how we knew the lake was there. This is how we knew, you know, layers were drying down and melting was happening. It was a huge piece of our understanding of one of the largest lakes on Earth. These films are extending our record of the history of the ice sheet by almost four decades. This invaluable data can now help us better project Antarctica's future. Trying to predict how the ice sheet's going to behave over the next few decades is challenging. It's one of the big tasks. The hope with this whole collection of data is just to give a window into anywhere where we were lucky enough to have data collected at that period and to be able to compare how that's changed from then to now. I think it's fantastic that he's been able to now use different techniques to capture all the information. Antarctica has been and remains an absolutely cornerstone element in understanding global environmental processes. So the more historical information we have, the better. For more science documentaries, check out this one right here. Don't forget to subscribe and keep coming back to Seeker for more videos.