Professor Dame Jane Francis
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2017
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Professor Dame Jane Francis is the Director of the British Antarctic Survey.
She is no stranger to surviving in extreme conditions, because for much of her career her research has taken her to the Polar Regions. Travelling with her fossil hammer, her principal interests are in palaeoclimatology and palaeobotany. She specialises in the study of fossil plants, and how they shape our understanding of climates in the distant past, when Antarctica was much warmer.
In 2002 she received the Polar Medal, for her outstanding contribution to British polar research, and in 2013 she became the first woman to head the British Antarctic Survey.
Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.4 | Hello, I'm Kristi Young. |
| 0:05.0 | Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, |
| 0:10.4 | the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. |
| 0:16.4 | For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. |
| 0:22.8 | You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website. |
| 0:30.0 | Music |
| 0:52.0 | My cast away this week is the geologist, Professor Dame Jane Francis, even though she has reached the summit of her profession. |
| 0:59.0 | It is not a glamorous life. She often walks for miles in freezing winds, climbing steep mountains and lugging heavy rucksacks packed full of rock samples, |
| 1:09.0 | all in pursuit of understanding the story of our planet. |
| 1:13.0 | She knows a lot about the coldest, driest, windiest place on earth and as director of the British Antarctic Survey. |
| 1:19.0 | She's not only in charge of helping monitor the current environmental health of an entire continent. |
| 1:25.0 | She's also an expert on its history, gathering and analysing the wood leaves and pollen that were captured in a frozen snapshot of life on earth 40 million years ago. |
| 1:36.0 | She says of her time spent roaming the trans Antarctic mountains, I love the power of the wind and a proper Antarctic storm is quite exciting. |
| 1:45.0 | So long as I'm snug in my tent and everything is secured and won't blow away, it's a chance to catch up on field notes to listen to music, read books, play cards and try some experimental cooking. |
| 1:56.0 | So welcome, Arch in Francis. What's been your greatest experimental dish then when you've been out in the field? |
| 2:02.0 | Well, I tell you the funniest cooking experience I've had, which was some years ago when I went on an expedition with colleagues from New Zealand. |
| 2:10.0 | It was coming up to Christmas Day and we decided we'd have a rest on Christmas Day because you work every day if the weather's good. |
| 2:16.0 | And on Christmas Day we had this elaborate menu from our fairly limited food boxes. |
| 2:21.0 | Oh, we have prunes wrapped in bacon, we had fantastic tuna tacos, we had lamb stew of some kind and it was my job to make dessert. |
| 2:30.0 | And so I was going to make a custard slice with custard powder with a crumble biscuit base, that should be very easy. |
| 2:37.0 | And I was going to serve it with ice cream. So it was my job to make the ice cream. |
... |
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