Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Geologist and director of the British Antarctic Survey, known for studying Antarctic climate history from 40-million-year-old fossil pollen and leaves.
On the island
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.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:31Why 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
6:56What 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 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.
Presenter asks
14:44Can 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
20:09How 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
23:50What 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
28:08What 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.”