Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Kirsty Young
Geologist and director of the British Antarctic Survey, known for studying Antarctic climate history from 40-million-year-old fossil pollen and leaves.
Eight records
This is Lou Reed's Perfect Day and it's a piece of music which is often associated with Antarctica. When people make movies of Antarctica they usually do it on a fantastic day when it's blue sky and the sun's shining and the ice is twinkling and they use this often as backing music and so when I hear this I'm instantly transported back either to one of my camps or to a station somewhere in Antarctica.
Well, this is Enya, and it's a song called Orinoco Flow, but it's about sailing. I call it Sail Away because the first time I went to Antarctica was in 1989, and it was a special expedition with the British Antarctic Survey. We went down to the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the bit that sticks up from Antarctica towards South America. We played this on our ship. There's a particular line in it which says Ross and his dependencies. And actually, we were visiting James Ross Islands, and this record was playing about Ross and his dependencies.
Heard It Through the GrapevineFavourite
Well, this is something different. This is Marvin Gay, Heard It Through the Grapevine. And this is something I remember so clearly from school. I went to a fantastic school and One of the things that we did very frequently was we had sports lessons and gym lessons, and most of the time they were fairly traditional, was climbing up ropes and faulting over boxes and things like that, which didn't particularly excite me. And then one day we had a teacher come in and she played this record, and our gym lessons totally changed. I guess now you'd call it aerobics, but I don't know if aerobics existed. So, what you were moving to the music? Yes, we were doing physical exercise relating to the music, and I absolutely loved it. And whenever I hear this record, because it was the record of the time and much later as well when I was a student all through my student years, but it takes me back to a certain day in the gym at my secondary school when I heard this for the first time.
So, this is Vangelis' Antarctic Echoes. And you know, most of the traditional music about Antarctica is often quite harsh and heavy, masculine-type storms and quite loud, booming music. But actually, Antarctica for me is all about those wonderful days when it's actually a perfect day when the sky is blue, when the sun is shining in the summer, and the wind drops, and it's absolutely tranquil. That's the definition of tranquility on a quiet day in Antarctica. You can often see the icebergs twinkle in the sunlight. Sometimes you get these small ice crystals in the air called fairy dust and they twinkle in the light and it's just so perfect. And I think this music reflects that kind of day.
This is Men at Work Down Under. After I finished working at the British Antarctic Survey for that one-year contract, I had the most amazing opportunity to go to Australia to do research. And initially, I was only going for six months, but I ended up there five years and I almost stayed there for life because it was amazing. And I had a project in which I had to work on rocks in Central Australia. So I spent many, many months going out with colleagues, four-wheel drive trucks, out in the heat, out into Central Australia, into the Red Desert, wrapping rocks and looking for fossils.
I always used to take a stack of music with me when I went on an Antarctic geology expedition and when the weather was really bad and we couldn't go outside, we would literally be in the tent for sometimes 24 hours a day or more. And we would be cooking sometimes, eating, reading books. So it's a great place to take books that you just couldn't get into in normal life. So you really would have to get into these really big, thick books. But also listening to music. Annie Lennox, I listen to an awful lot. So when this music is going to start playing, I'm going to remember storms in Antarctica.
I spent many happy years, almost 20 years, as a lecturer and professor at Leeds University. And the university is very famous for the rock bands that used to play there. And one of the most famous and well known is The Who, and they made an album live at Leeds a long time ago. But in 2010, The Who revisited Leeds and they played in the refectory again. And the one thing I remember about that day was it was in the afternoon before the concert, and I was sitting in my office, it's quite near the refectory, and they were practising and they were playing Who Are You? And it was booming out across the campus and coming in my office window. And it was Leeds University.
This is Trinity College Choir. This is in Paradisum. This is um. I think recognizing life in Cambridge now, I think human voice is absolutely spectacular and I would miss it on on my desert island. And this will remind me of being in Cambridge because the choirs in Cambridge are quite spectacular.
The keepsakes
The book
a big encyclopedia of plants of the world
because, you know, I've worked on fossil plants and that would be relevant. But I'd also want to know what I could eat and what was poisonous.
The luxury
a year's supply of horseradish sauce
because one of the things that I always used to take to Antarctica with me was a box full of goodies, you know, to supplement the kind of dried food that we had. And having horseradish sauce, which I love from my my father used to make very hot horseradish sauce, and I love it on the sardines, on the crackers that we have for lunch.
In conversation
Presenter asks
Why does Antarctica have its unique status under the Antarctic Treaty?
Antarctica is a continent that nobody owns, no one nation governs, and it's governed by an Antarctic Treaty, which is essentially an agreement by all the nations that work there to work there in peace and harmony for the good of science and to protect the Antarctic environment. So every year we go to a meeting, an Antarctic Treaty meeting, where all the nations attend, government officials, lawyers, environmental conservationists, different groups. In two weeks we discuss some of the issues coming up in Antarctica and at the end of two weeks we agree to carry on working in peace and harmony for the good of science of Antarctica.
Presenter asks
What straightforward evidence do scientists have that the world's temperature is permanently increasing?
Well, it's increasing now. I mean, as a geologist, I can see that the climate has changed over millions of years. But now, if we go to Antarctica or the Arctic, we can see changes that haven't happened for several millions of years. I mean, in the Arctic, it's very clear the sea ice is shrinking in an extent. In the Antarctic, we can see that some areas are warming up. And there are changes that things are happening that really are going to have a global impact. So the ice shelves are breaking up. Part of that is natural, but there are things that are going on which really show that the Earth is warming. ... So, where we are at the moment is that the climate is changing very rapidly, and it's changing much more rapidly than it has done in the past.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Professor Dame Jane Francis
This is the BBC.
Presenter
Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book, and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
Presenter
For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.
Presenter
My castaway this week is the geologist, Professor Dame Jane Frances. Even though she has reached the summit of her profession, 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, all in pursuit of understanding the story of our planet.
Presenter
She knows a lot about the coldest, driest, windiest place on earth, and as director of the British Antarctic Survey, she's not only in charge of helping monitor the current environmental health of an entire continent, 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. She says of her time spent roaming the Transantarctic mountains, I love the power of the wind, and a proper Antarctic storm is quite exciting. 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. So welcome, Aunt Jane Frances. What's been your greatest experimental dish then when you've been out in the field?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Well, I'll 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. 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. And on Christmas Day, we had this elaborate menu from our fairly limited food boxes. Or we had prunes wrapped in bacon, we had fantastic tuna tacos, we had lamb stew of some kind. And it was my job to make dessert. And so I was going to make a custard slice with custard powder with a crumbled biscuit base. That should be very easy. And I was going to serve it with ice cream. So it was my job to make the ice cream. So I whipped up some milk powder with water and I just put it in the bowl and stuck it outside the tent at about minus twenty, expecting it to freeze in about five minutes. But it wouldn't. And I couldn't understand why it wouldn't freeze. And we left it out for days on end. We left it for weeks and it still wouldn't freeze. So we did a little bit of scientific investigation about why I couldn't make ice cream in Antarctica. And it turned out that I'd also put vanilla essence into this ice cream to make it taste nice. And I'd used nearly a bottle of it to make it taste stronger. And we discovered that some vanilla essence is actually imitation vanilla essence. Oh, that's a cheap one.
Presenter
Oh, the cheap one, yes.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
And imitation vanilla essence is made of ethylene glycols, which is antifreeze or a similar kind of compound. So no wonder it wouldn't freeze. So I I couldn't make ice cream in Antarctica.
Presenter
Which is that?
Presenter
Uh you say you put a bottle of that in. Do you have to make things taste stronger there?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Surprisingly, your senses are quite dulled. I mean, if you imagine the colours in Antarctica, there's blue sky, there's white clouds, white snow, there's brown rocks and there's orange tents mostly. But apart from that, there's very little colour. Often there's no sounds except the sound of the wind blowing against your clothes. And the cold also dulls things, though we don't smell very much, even though we don't wash very often. Do you wash at all? Every now and then. Wet cloths are quite good, you know. Wet wipes. But but in the cold temperatures, you don't really smell very much. It's only when you go home and you get back onto a ship or into a warm station that then you really do and then you become ostracized.
Presenter
Like wet wipes that
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
David
Presenter
And what about music then? Do you have a little headset on? Do you sort of listen to your music player while you're doing your work? Or are you just concentrating?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yeah.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Not when I was out working. Music comes in when there's a storm, or something keeps us in the tent.
Presenter
Rice.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yeah. And then we've got to pass usually one or two days without going outside. And then it's books, food and music is becomes really critical.
Presenter
But tell me then about
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Uh
Presenter
Your first piece today. What are we going to hear?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
This is Lou Reed's Perfect Day and it's a piece of music which is often associated with Antarctica. When people make movies of Antarctica they usually do it on a fantastic day when it's blue sky and the sun's shining and the ice is twinkling and they use this often as backing music and so when I hear this I'm instantly transported back either to one of my camps or to a station somewhere in Antarctica.
Speaker 4
Just a perfect day.
Speaker 4
Drink sangrea in the park
Speaker 4
And then later.
Speaker 4
When it gets dark we go home
Speaker 4
Just a perfect day.
Speaker 4
Feed animals in the zoo
Presenter
That was Lou Reed and Perfect Day. So, Professor Francis, Antarctica then is very carefully monitored and protected, governed by this strict international treaty. Why does it have that unique status in the world?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Antarctica is a continent that nobody owns, no one nation governs, and it's governed by an Antarctic Treaty, which is essentially an agreement by all the nations that work there to work there in peace and harmony for the good of science and to protect the Antarctic environment. So every year we go to a meeting, an Antarctic Treaty meeting, where all the nations attend, government officials, lawyers, environmental conservationists, different groups. In two weeks we discuss some of the issues coming up in Antarctica and at the end of two weeks we agree to carry on working in peace and harmony for the good of science of Antarctica.
Presenter
And you have this very important role as director of the British Antarctic Survey. And I as I understand it, you've just come back from that two weeks. You've been in China for two weeks discussing these important things. What's top of the agenda? What did you decide was absolutely on the list at number one that you had to make sure was done?
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
There's a lot of discussion about protection, environmental protection in Antarctica. The climate is changing in Antarctica, and we really need to know in terms of the scientific outcome, but also implications for the whole planet, what is going on in Antarctica to allow science to work properly. Climate change.
Presenter
Is I mean, it is a very highly charged subject, as you will be well aware, and there are people with lots of qualifications behind their names, some of whom disagree with the conclusions that surround the main body of opinion on climate change.
Presenter
In the most straightforward terms, what evidence do you have as scientists that the world's temperature is permanently increasing?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Well, it's increasing now. I mean, as a geologist, I can see that the climate has changed over millions of years. But now, if we go to Antarctica or the Arctic, we can see changes that haven't happened for several millions of years. I mean, in the Arctic, it's very clear the sea ice is shrinking in an extent. In the Antarctic, we can see that some areas are warming up. And there are changes that things are happening that really are going to have a global impact. So the ice shelves are breaking up. Part of that is natural, but there are things that are going on which really show that the Earth is warming. So one of the big topics that many nations are working on are the big ice shelves in Antarctica. So these are the big areas where glaciers come down from the land and then they float out to sea. So these are big flat areas, shelves of ice that are floating in Antarctica. And they have an important role because they act as kind of doorstops to glaciers that are carrying frozen water off the land. And what seems to be happening at the moment, or what most people are investigating, is that warm ocean water is getting up underneath the ice shelves, melting them from below. Some are melting from above, but some are melting from below. And the issue is that if those doorstops of ice melt, they will take away this sort of buttress effect. And all of the glaciers on land in Antarctica, and there are many of them, I mean, the ice sheet there is up to four kilometres thick in places, and you know, it holds 70% of the world's fresh water. If those glaciers from land start coming down to the sea and then melting, that is going to cause a global rise in sea level. So, where we are at the moment is that the climate is changing very rapidly, and it's changing much more rapidly than it has done in the past. How do you know that? We have a really detailed record of the Earth's climate for the last 800,000 years from ice cores. Is that the best place that scientists can get evidence from? The thing about ice cores is they show us the climate story almost year by year for the last 800,000 years. So, it's a really fairly unique record. And that's because when snow forms, the snow is gradually compacted, and as it's compacted, it traps the air.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
around at that time.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
And over time the air is compacted and it's the the air is trapped in these little bubbles in ice. So when ice core scientists drill in an ice core, they get a big core of of solid ice and then they cut it into slices.
Presenter
How big would it be the question?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Oh, about six inches across. They cut it into small slices on a sort of almost an annual layer. And if you hold it up to the light, it looks like glass, but you can see these tiny little bubbles trapped in the ice. And inside those little bubbles, there is this amazing record of what the air was like, what the atmospheric composition was like hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Presenter
It's time for some more music. Tell me about this second one then. Wh why have you chosen this?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Well, this is Enya, and it's a song called Orinoco Flow, but it's about sailing. I call it Sail Away because the first time I went to Antarctica was in 1989, and it was a special expedition with the British Antarctic Survey. We went down to the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the bit that sticks up from Antarctica towards South America. We played this on our ship. There's a particular line in it which says Ross and his dependencies. And actually, we were visiting James Ross Islands, and this record was playing about Ross and his dependencies.
Presenter
That was Enya and Orinoco Flow, and you said Dame Jane Frances it was chosen because it has so many memories for you of that first trip. It was nineteen eighty nine, wasn't it, when you first went to Antarctica? I want to take you from the Frozen Wests then back to Wiltshire in the mid fifties. That was when when you were born. You were the eldest of four children.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yeah.
Presenter
It was a farming family that you were born into. What are your strongest memories of your childhood?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Well, now, nostalgically, I think of my childhood a bit like a cider with rosie type of book, you know. All my family, a farming family, we live out on the landscape. I remember my mother taking us for walks, teaching us about the plants, teaching us which ones we could forage and eat. It's spectacular.
Presenter
And your parents must have had their hands full then, because they were hands-on farmers. They were not, I mean, they were landowners, but they were farm. What was it they farmed? They farmed arable landscape.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
All sorts of things. Yes, in in my childhood it was ma mostly arable and dairy.
Presenter
And Airy? And so it was mixed farming, yeah.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yeah.
Presenter
But you
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Mum, what sort of character was she? Well, she loved all things to do with nature, but she loved handicrafts and things like that. She always had a project on the go, but she was also a very good gardener. So part of her family was into horticulture, so she was always growing exotic plants. She was sort of a a judge at flower shows, but she loved crafts, so she was always inventing things, doing pottery, making things. Very creative, very creative person. So
Presenter
Tell me about your next piece of music then, Dame Jane Frances. What are we going to hear now?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Well, this is something different. This is Marvin Gay, Heard It Through the Grapevine. And this is something I remember so clearly from school. I went to a fantastic school and
Professor Dame Jane Francis
One of the things that we did very frequently was we had sports lessons and gym lessons, and most of the time they were fairly traditional, was climbing up ropes and faulting over boxes and things like that, which didn't particularly excite me. And then one day we had a teacher come in and she played this record, and our gym lessons totally changed. I guess now you'd call it aerobics, but I don't know if aerobics existed. So, what you were moving to the music? Yes, we were doing physical exercise relating to the music, and I absolutely loved it. And whenever I hear this record, because it was the record of the time and much later as well when I was a student all through my student years, but it takes me back to a certain day in the gym at my secondary school when I heard this for the first time.
Speaker 4
I'll chose the hands to make
Speaker 4
What's up with the girl?
Speaker 4
You knew before between the two of us, guys. You know I love you.
Speaker 4
It took me by surprise, by surprise.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Presenter
That was Marvin Gaye. I heard it through the grapevine. So tell me about your school. It was a grammar school, wasn't it?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yes, I went to uh a fantastic girls' grammar school, Simon Langton girls' school in in Canterbury with superb teachers and I just loved learning.
Presenter
'Cause your your family had moved to Kent, but
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yes, that's right. And fantastic science teachers, so I did a lot of science. Geography was my favourite subject. And actually, it was through geography that I first started going out climbing and walking. So I remember some trips in geography. I remember going on a hiking trip to Snowdonia, also to the Yorkshire Dales. And that sort of was my first experience of going out and hiking and sort of inadvertently looking at rocks on the way.
Presenter
I remember Sir David Ettenborough telling me that he credits the beginning of his life long passion for natural history with being a little boy out on his bike and finding the first fossils with his little hammer and cracking them open. Can you tell me about the first time you encountered your first fossil? Do you remember?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yeah.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
We were living in Kent, and and my father on the farm used to get some of the rocks from the local coal mines to put on the tracks on the on the farm. And some of the rocks used to be in small lumps, and I remember going to finding them and breaking them open, and they used to mean the most perfectly preserved fossil leaves.
Presenter
To put
Professor Dame Jane Francis
These were Carboniferous age, three hundred million years old, and these are the kind of plants that made the coal seams in the UK. So I had a collection of fossil plants all that time ago. And what age would you have been then?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Probably about
Presenter
About, um, ten or so.
Presenter
Is there a sort of romanticism about it too, the idea that your eyes are falling upon something that has not seen the light of day for millions of years?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Absolutely. I mean, many's the time it's the first time that that fossil has been revealed. But it tells you about something. So over the years, my specialty has been using fossils and rocks to reconstruct what the earth was like in the past, ancient environments, paleoenvironments we call it, paleo climate. And so I realize that now with experience, when I look at a cliff of rocks, there's a way that geologists read rocks. So we always start at the bottom, the oldest rocks, and we always read the layers of rocks upwards as they get younger in time. And you can read them like a book. When I look at a layer of rock
Professor Dame Jane Francis
I look at the rock, but in my head I'm looking at the environment in which that rock was formed. So I'm seeing a picture of how that rock unit formed millions of years ago. Time for some more music.
Presenter
Now, Jane Frances, tell me about this. We're on your fourth.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
So, this is Vangelis' Antarctic Echoes. And you know, most of the traditional music about Antarctica is often quite harsh and heavy, masculine-type storms and quite loud, booming music. But actually, Antarctica for me is all about those wonderful days when it's actually a perfect day when the sky is blue, when the sun is shining in the summer, and the wind drops, and it's absolutely tranquil. That's the definition of tranquility on a quiet day in Antarctica.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
You can often see the icebergs twinkle in the sunlight. Sometimes you get these small ice crystals in the air called fairy dust and they twinkle in the light and it's just so perfect. And I think this music reflects that kind of day.
Presenter
That was Vangelis and Antarctic Echoes. So, Dame Jane Francis, not surprising, then you studied geology at university first of all, and when you graduated.
Presenter
What sort of job were you looking for, and how did you get on finding it?
Presenter
Yeah.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
This was in the 70s, and I was in a geology course at the University of Southampton. I was one of 23. I think there were four girls, and the rest were folks. And we had a fantastic course, and it was fairly normal at that time to graduate with geology. You'd go and do what's called core logging. So you start at the bottom of the work scale, if you like, and you would be looking at cores that were taking up chips of rock, and you'd try and identify them. And this was basically for oil exploration. And all the adverts were up for core loggers, for geologists. And it said, I distinctly remember this. At the bottom of the page, it said, women need not apply. I do wish I'd taken one of those bits of paper away because nobody can believe, especially young students can't believe that this day and age. But of course, in that time, women weren't allowed to work on oil rigs and women weren't allowed to work in the Middle East where all the oil was coming from. So there were an awful lot of geology jobs that weren't open to me. And then the opportunity to do a PhD came up again at the University of Southampton. Did you?
Presenter
Did you find it sickening or disheartening or did you just It's pretty depressing actually.
Presenter
So you worked at the British Antarctic Survey in the in the 1980s, a year-long stint. Did you get to travel to Antarctica then?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
No, no.
Presenter
Um that was just a one-year contract. It would have been normal, would it, for you to go if you'd had a longer contract?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Well actually not at that time, no. The British Antarctic Survey started taking women to Antarctica to work in the field and camp in the field. So women did go to Antarctica but they lived on the ship. But to camp in the field in attendance, I think it was 1991. 1991? Yes. Other nations, there were women in Antarctica, but. How was that explained at the time? No, I'm director. I did have looked back at the files and I think, you know, Antarctica is fairly traditional. It was male-dominated. And it was felt, I think, probably that it was going to be quite difficult to put women into a field camp, you know, with a lot of men around and that they might have to have separate toilets and it might be disturbing to, you know, the daily routine and that kind of thing.
Presenter
But given that at that time the USA and Australia, for example, had been sending women, you know, how was it justified, that antediluvian attitude by by the British?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
I think they knew things had to change. So a new director came in and things did change and women went down.
Presenter
And so you were the first female director of the British Antarctic Survey appointed in the autumn of 2013.
Presenter
Given how long it had taken them to change, and that they didn't change until the the beginning of the nineties, w w was your appointment met with quizzical looks, or worse?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
I have had some strange comments, I must admit. I've never had any kind of particular bias all the way through my career, being a woman in geology, which is a male-dominated subject, to be fair.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
But I haven't ha experienced any kind of prejudice or bias except when I've been director. And then it's just sort of people just have been quite credulous about the fact that I'm a woman and I'm
Presenter
Sing sing what do you think?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
There's a conversation with people and they said, Oh, so you're the new director. When I saw that you were named as director, I thought that perhaps this was you're the token woman that needs to be put at the top. When I saw your C V I realized you had all the right credentials. Have you assumed for them? Yes, that's right. Was I a member of HR?
Presenter
Reassuring for them.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Or I remember somebody helping me unpack in my office and asking me if I was the new director's secretary. I mean, it's all innocent comments, but it just shows you that nobody expected to be a women as director. You're quite smiley about it here. Do you feel smiley about it? Yes, I think it's their problem, not mine. Tell me about your next piece of music then. Why have you chosen this? This is Men at Work Down Under. After I finished working at the British Antarctic Survey for that one-year contract, I had the most amazing opportunity to go to Australia to do research. And initially, I was only going for six months, but I ended up there five years and I almost stayed there for life because it was amazing. And I had a project in which I had to work on rocks in Central Australia. So I spent many, many months going out with colleagues, four-wheel drive trucks, out in the heat, out into Central Australia, into the Red Desert, wrapping rocks and looking for fossils.
Presenter
You quite
Speaker 3
Saddling in a fire.com baby
Speaker 3
On a hilly trail head full of zombie
Speaker 3
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous.
Speaker 3
She took me in and gave me breakfast.
Speaker 3
She said, Do you come from Alanda or Nonda?
Speaker 3
Women's War and Men Fund War
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Enjoy.
Presenter
That was men at work and down under. So let's talk for a moment then, Dame Jane Frances, about this. It was a sort of five year period where you you went between Australia, you were working in the very hot deserts there, and also going um to uh the pole between poles actually with your well, I'm guessing more than your fossil hammer, but you were going there doing
Professor Dame Jane Francis
You will go
Presenter
The same sort of thing in very different places. There are people who like the cold, there are people who like the heat. How do you get on in the heat?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Well, what I don't like is humidity. So I don't I love deserts. So you're probably all right. I was fine, but it was hot. I have to say it was hot at times. But it was wild because at that time it was in the eighties, there was very poor GPS, there were no satellite images, there were very poor maps. And basically we were going out mapping these rocks where very few people had been. And we just always kept getting lost. And we kept getting stuck in sandy creeks and we would have punctures all the time. And you know, we had everything with us, food, fuel bits for the truck. So it really was an adventure.
Presenter
You know, you've spent so much of your life where very few people have been. What have you learned about yourself living for these extended periods of time in such extreme circumstances?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
I've learned to be pretty self sufficient and pretty patient and relaxed actually, because there's no point when your truck breaks down in the middle of the desert where there's nobody for hundreds of miles, you can't just say, Oh no, what's going to happen here? I have to call somebody up and panic about it. You just have to sit down and think, hmm, well, first of all we'll say, Let's have a cup of tea.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
And, you know, make a fire and put the billy on. And then we think, well, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to fix it? So you have to be fairly self-sufficient.
Presenter
Some more music, Jane Frances. Tell me about this. We're on your sixth.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
I always used to take a stack of music with me when I went on an Antarctic geology expedition and
Professor Dame Jane Francis
When the weather was really bad and we couldn't go outside, we would literally be in the tent for sometimes 24 hours a day or more. And we would be cooking sometimes, eating, reading books. So it's a great place to take books that you just couldn't get into in normal life. So you really would have to get into these really big, thick books. But also listening to music. Annie Lennox, I listen to an awful lot. So when this music is going to start playing, I'm going to remember storms in Antarctica.
Speaker 4
For the air to breathe, the heart to beat, the eyes to see again
Speaker 4
All the things that's been undone, the battles won, the good and bad, and everyone wants to repent of God.
Speaker 4
So
Speaker 4
Here I go again. Here I go again.
Speaker 4
Oh, wait.
Presenter
A thousand beautiful things Annie Lennox there. You said Jane Frances that that was uh it would remind you always when you hear it of storms in Antarctica'cause you'd often listen to whole albums of Annie Lennox whilst you were safe in your tent there. I've seen a remarkable photograph of you surrounded by a group of Emperor penguins. I looked it up and I read that Emperor penguins can grow to about a metre thirty, so they're big beasts. What was it like to meet them at such cl
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Close proximity. We were sitting on the sea ice on that beautiful sunny day, and suddenly out of the water popped up about 30 Emperor penguins. I mean, it was a real surprise, real surprise. And there is a rule in Antarctica that you don't interfere with the wildlife. So we just sat down on the ice and they just waddled towards us. You're right, they are big. They are very big. I mean, they were way above my head while I was sat on the ice. And they have very big, pointy peaks, I can tell you. And you always see them on the David Attenborough films sort of bowing to each other. So they were completely surrounding me, bowing away, you know, very close to my face, actually. But one of my colleagues took a photo of that.
Presenter
So
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Oh, it was an amazing day. And then after a while they I guess they got just got bored because we just sat there taking photos of them and then they just popped back in into the water again. Tell me about your seventh.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
I spent many happy years, almost 20 years, as a lecturer and professor at Leeds University. And the university is very famous for the rock bands that used to play there. And one of the most famous and well known is The Who, and they made an album live at Leeds a long time ago. But in 2010, The Who revisited Leeds and they played in the refectory again. And the one thing I remember about that day was it was in the afternoon before the concert, and I was sitting in my office, it's quite near the refectory, and they were practising and they were playing Who Are You? And it was booming out across the campus and coming in my office window. And it was Leeds University.
Speaker 4
Hey!
Speaker 4
I remember
Speaker 4
Jimmy Chain, but who are you by?
Speaker 4
Tell me why
Presenter
That was the who and who are you. You said during that, Dame Jane Frances, that you remember your office desk vibrating at Leeds University as they played. You didn't actually go to the gig. You know, you've reached the very pinnacle of your profession. What would you like your legacy to be? I know you have lots more work still to do and you're clearly somebody who's entirely engaged in it. But when you think, you know, actually I'm going to take that great big book and read it at home instead of a tent in the frozen wastes of Antarctica, what would you like people to say about the work you've done?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Oh, I think probably about my science. I mean, I've not done this alone. It's always been with students and other colleagues and quite a big research group over the years, but it's just to reveal part of the history of life on Earth, you know, some of the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, and then some of the Arctic work, and then in Antarctica, so that to help the understanding of what life was like in the past. Has it given you?
Presenter
When you pause for thought existentially, as it were, do you think, you know, m my moment on earth you know, if you look at the the broad sweep of the amount of time that you are looking at, you know, millennia have passed and you've held in your hands things that are one hundred million years old, and here you are, you know, on earth, if if you do well into your nineties, it's nothing really, is it?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
You know
Professor Dame Jane Francis
No. And in fact, one of the things about going to Antarctica is it really does make you feel very humble. It does give you a sense of the smallness of you as a human being. So I do remember once I was with on a New Zealand expedition and we were at a place called Allen Hills in the Transantarctic Mountains, which is the mountain chain across the centre of Antarctica. Very remote, very remote, and huge walls of rock.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Around us, and I was out by myself, which I shouldn't have been, you know, but I could see where my colleagues were a few miles away. And I was just standing there, and you realize that there's nothing living there, and the rocks are there, and they're like
Professor Dame Jane Francis
huge, solid, massive landscapes, and you realize that you're this tiny, tiny little human being there. And if if really anything happened to me, I would just sort of curl up on the rocks and and desiccate and then be blown away in the wind. There's sort of no record of me interacting with that kind of landscape. Makes you very humble, very small, and you realize how sort of transient life is on earth.
Presenter
And therefore you will be ideally suited to this life alone on a desert island. You'll be completely fine with it, I imagine.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yeah.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
So long as it's not a humid tropical desert island, then I don't
Presenter
Then I'll send you a
Professor Dame Jane Francis
And
Presenter
Uh
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Uh
Presenter
You might be in trouble, do you think?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yeah. Well, if I could choose my type of island, I'm not sure which I would. You know, a tropical island might be a bit too humid. Some of the islands I've been are rather cold and it'll be quite difficult to find anything to eat and to survive unless I had a really good field kit with me. But um yes, I have been to many islands in my time.
Presenter
Yeah.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Yeah.
Presenter
You'd make a good fist of it, I think. Right, Dame Jane Frances, it's uh time now for your eighth. Just tell me about this next track. Why have you chosen this?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
This is Trinity College Choir. This is in Paradisum. This is um.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
I think recognizing life in Cambridge now, I think human voice is absolutely spectacular and I would miss it on on my desert island. And this will remind me of being in Cambridge because the choirs in Cambridge are quite spectacular.
Presenter
In Paradisum from Foray's Requiem, sung by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, with the London Musicky directed by Richard Marlowe, and it was Richard Pearce on organ. So, Jane Frances, I will give you the books the complete works of Shakspere and the Bible, and you get to take another one along.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Well, it would have to be something pretty practical, wouldn't it? It'd have to be how to fix everything or how to build something. But probably would have to be a big encyclopedia of plants of the world because, you know, I've worked on fossil plants and that would be relevant. But I'd also want to know what I could eat and what was poisonous. Okay. That's yours then. And a luxury. Well, again, if it was practical, I would take a machete because I think that would be quite handy. But actually, what I really would need is probably a year's supply of horseradish sauce, because one of the things that I always used to take to Antarctica with me was a box full of goodies, you know, to supplement the kind of dried food that we had. And having horseradish sauce, which I love from my my father used to make very hot horseradish sauce, and I love it on the sardines, on the crackers that we have for lunch.
Presenter
Okay, that's yours then, absolutely. And if you could only have one of these eight, which one disc would it be?
Professor Dame Jane Francis
Oh, that's a tricky one. I think probably the Marvin Gaye heard it through the grapevine, because I can imagine if I was there on my desert island I'd need some exercise so I could do aerobics to it, but also I think it's quite a cheerful piece of music, so I could quite happily do my aerobics along the beach.
Presenter
Oh my Island. It's yours. Professor Dame Jane Frances, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.
Presenter
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You'll find more interviews with comedians, artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars and more at bbc.co.uk/slash desertisland discs.
Professor Dame Jane Francis
This is the BBC.
Presenter asks
Can you describe your first memory of discovering a fossil?
Yeah. We were living in Kent, and and my father on the farm used to get some of the rocks from the local coal mines to put on the tracks on the on the farm. And some of the rocks used to be in small lumps, and I remember going to finding them and breaking them open, and they used to mean the most perfectly preserved fossil leaves. These were Carboniferous age, three hundred million years old, and these are the kind of plants that made the coal seams in the UK. So I had a collection of fossil plants all that time ago.
Presenter asks
How was the British policy of not allowing women in Antarctic field camps justified, given that other countries already sent women?
I think they knew things had to change. So a new director came in and things did change and women went down.
Presenter asks
What have you learned about yourself from spending extended periods in extreme environments?
I've learned to be pretty self sufficient and pretty patient and relaxed actually, because there's no point when your truck breaks down in the middle of the desert where there's nobody for hundreds of miles, you can't just say, Oh no, what's going to happen here? I have to call somebody up and panic about it. You just have to sit down and think, hmm, well, first of all we'll say, Let's have a cup of tea. And, you know, make a fire and put the billy on. And then we think, well, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to fix it? So you have to be fairly self-sufficient.
Presenter asks
What would you like your legacy to be as a scientist?
Oh, I think probably about my science. I mean, I've not done this alone. It's always been with students and other colleagues and quite a big research group over the years, but it's just to reveal part of the history of life on Earth, you know, some of the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, and then some of the Arctic work, and then in Antarctica, so that to help the understanding of what life was like in the past.
“Well, I'll 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. 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. And on Christmas Day, we had this elaborate menu from our fairly limited food boxes. Or we had prunes wrapped in bacon, we had fantastic tuna tacos, we had lamb stew of some kind. And it was my job to make dessert. And so I was going to make a custard slice with custard powder with a crumbled biscuit base. That should be very easy. And I was going to serve it with ice cream. So it was my job to make the ice cream. So I whipped up some milk powder with water and I just put it in the bowl and stuck it outside the tent at about minus twenty, expecting it to freeze in about five minutes. But it wouldn't. And I couldn't understand why it wouldn't freeze. And we left it out for days on end. We left it for weeks and it still wouldn't freeze. So we did a little bit of scientific investigation about why I couldn't make ice cream in Antarctica. And it turned out that I'd also put vanilla essence into this ice cream to make it taste nice. And I'd used nearly a bottle of it to make it taste stronger. And we discovered that some vanilla essence is actually imitation vanilla essence. ... And imitation vanilla essence is made of ethylene glycols, which is antifreeze or a similar kind of compound. So no wonder it wouldn't freeze. So I I couldn't make ice cream in Antarctica.”
“Absolutely. I mean, many's the time it's the first time that that fossil has been revealed. But it tells you about something. So over the years, my specialty has been using fossils and rocks to reconstruct what the earth was like in the past, ancient environments, paleoenvironments we call it, paleo climate.”
“So, this is Vangelis' Antarctic Echoes. And you know, most of the traditional music about Antarctica is often quite harsh and heavy, masculine-type storms and quite loud, booming music. But actually, Antarctica for me is all about those wonderful days when it's actually a perfect day when the sky is blue, when the sun is shining in the summer, and the wind drops, and it's absolutely tranquil. That's the definition of tranquility on a quiet day in Antarctica. You can often see the icebergs twinkle in the sunlight. Sometimes you get these small ice crystals in the air called fairy dust and they twinkle in the light and it's just so perfect. And I think this music reflects that kind of day.”
“There's a conversation with people and they said, Oh, so you're the new director. When I saw that you were named as director, I thought that perhaps this was you're the token woman that needs to be put at the top. When I saw your C V I realized you had all the right credentials. ... Or I remember somebody helping me unpack in my office and asking me if I was the new director's secretary. I mean, it's all innocent comments, but it just shows you that nobody expected to be a women as director.”
“Around us, and I was out by myself, which I shouldn't have been, you know, but I could see where my colleagues were a few miles away. And I was just standing there, and you realize that there's nothing living there, and the rocks are there, and they're like huge, solid, massive landscapes, and you realize that you're this tiny, tiny little human being there. And if if really anything happened to me, I would just sort of curl up on the rocks and and desiccate and then be blown away in the wind. There's sort of no record of me interacting with that kind of landscape. Makes you very humble, very small, and you realize how sort of transient life is on earth.”