Revisit: Antarctica - testing ground for the human species
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Two hundred years ago, Antarctica was discovered by Russian explorers and throughout this year the the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust is marking that anniversary. As we approach the date in June which is celebrated as midwinter with a special meal on the research stations - here's a chance to hear Rana Mitter and guests discussing the lure of this polar region both in our imaginations and as an aid to understanding what is happening to the planet.
Rana Mitter's guests are: writer Meredith Hooper, who has visited Antarctica under the auspices of three governments, Australia, UK and USA and is currently curating an exhibition about Shackleton and the Encyclopedia Britannica he took with him on Endurance. Polar explorer Ben Saunders completed the longest human-powered polar exploration in history to the South Pole and back, retracing Captain Scott’s Terra Nova expedition. Architect Hugh Broughton is the designer behind Halley VI, the UK's scientific base on the Brent Ice Shelf Jonathan Bamber is one of the world's leading experts on ice and uses satellite technology to monitor the mass of Antarctica's ice sheets; his work is central to predictions of ice melt and rising sea levels. He is head of the Bristol Glaciology Centre.
Recorded in front of an audience at BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival of Ideas at Sage Gateshead in November 2014
You might also be interested in this discussion of Ice with Kat Austen, Michael Bravo, Jean McNeil and Tom Charlton https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001jzq You can find further information from the British Antarctic Survey https://www.bas.ac.uk/ and the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust https://www.ukaht.org/
Producer: Jacqueline Smith
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 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, 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 is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello, I'm Ron Amitter, and thanks for listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:41.8 | As you'll hear in this free-thinking episode, mid-June in the Antarctic is usually marked by a special meal. |
| 0:49.0 | Well, 2020 marks the 200th anniversary of the first sighting of Antarctica. |
| 0:54.3 | So I've been into the deep freeze and defrosted this conversation |
| 0:57.6 | that I recorded at the 2014 Free Thinking Festival. |
| 1:05.8 | The ice was here. |
| 1:08.0 | The ice was there. |
| 1:09.3 | The ice was all around. |
| 1:10.7 | It cracked and growled and roared and howled. |
| 1:13.9 | That's an early glimpse of Antarctica from the pen of Coleridge and, of course, his rhyme of the |
| 1:19.1 | ancient mariner. Sixty-five million years ago, a huge chunk of the Gondwana supercontinent |
| 1:24.8 | broke off and formed a vast southern continent. As late as |
| 1:29.0 | 1959, when the Antarctic Treaty System came into effect, Antarctica was a continent |
| 1:34.5 | very few of us were ever likely to see, let alone actually visit. But today, it's a well-established |
| 1:40.4 | tourist destination, regularly features on television, or at least the coastal fringes |
| 1:44.9 | with their penguins, seals and whales. And environmentally, Antarctica sits at the heart |
| 1:50.2 | of global climate change debates, which have been hitting the headlines this autumn. |
... |
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