Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

The ice was here. The ice was there. The ice was there. The ice was all around. It cracked and growled and roared and howled. That's an early glimpse of Antarctica from the pen of Coleridge and, of course, his rhyme of the ancient mariner.

Sixty-five million years ago, a huge chunk of the Gondwana supercontinent broke off and formed a vast southern continent. As late as 1959, when the Antarctic Treaty System came into effect,

Antarctica was a continent very few of us were ever likely to see, let alone actually visit. But today, it's a well-established tourist destination, regularly features on television, or at least the coastal fringes with their penguins, seals and whales. And environmentally, Antarctica sits at the heart of global climate change debates, which have been hitting the headlines this autumn.

It doesn't feel quite as remote as it used to be, but how much do we really know about it?

Well, with me to talk about passing that Antarctic test and discussing the challenges of the world's fifth largest continent to our sense of ourselves and our collective future

are Ben Saunders, conqueror of both poles and a modern

air to the heroic age of exploration, Scott and Shackleton. Jonathan Bamber, who is a glaciologist

at Bristol University, and his field is central to the predictions on rising sea levels.

And Hugh Broughton is the first architect to get his fingers on an Antarctic building

project and his company designed Britain's new state-of-the-art research base, Hally 6. And Meredith Hooper,

an award-winning writer who's visited Antarctica under the auspices of three different government

programmes, the Australian, the American and the British, a real-life global ambassador

for the Antarctic. I wonder if each of you could describe something that brings Antarctica

to mind in sound. Meredith Hooper. The obvious inhabitants of Antarctica are the daily

penguins, if you're in the South. And I just arrived on shore. I was sitting on the ice,

contemplating the beauty and the amazement. And suddenly I heard this extraordinary sound come

from beyond my sight. It was like a football crowd. From nowhere came this tremendous,

deep-throated noise. And it was the daily penguins in a colony.

Something had triggered them off and it came from nowhere and then suddenly it stopped.

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