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That's going to be my domain for the next four weeks.
To on one meter of privacy, more or less on the hallway.
In 2017,
I met a small group of scientists
who were preparing an expedition of an unusual kind
to the most southern tip of the world, Antarctica.
Their mission was funded by the Belgian government
to commemorate the 120th anniversary
since the first scientific expedition to the frozen continent.
To find a mockery of the science community,
their journey from the most southern tip of Argentina,
across the turbulent Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula,
would be carried out aboard a 23-meter sail bout.
Small enough to reach entirely undocumented parts of the Polar Shore,
the ship could just about host the scientists,
three crew and their gear.
So after two years of training my new friends with the camera,
I said goodbye to them and my precious equipment at the pier.
The toughest steps are not those taken out of necessity,
but those we choose to take in the name of change.
This is a story of a team of rebel scientists
operating against the convenience of airplanes and icebreakers,
against their communities' trust,
and against the odds of the sea.
I don't know if you heard but the worst part will be tonight.
So it's actually a test of concept, uh, to try working on this small vessels,
small research platform.
There's several reasons. The first one is the agility of the ship.
So it's much smaller,
it can access areas which are inaccessible to other larger vessels,
we can go in shallower areas.
And, uh, the big advantage we have also apart from agility
is the fact that we have complete control over the decisions
about what we're doing with the ship.
So the ship is ours.
And we decide what we do with our time.
So our main objective is collect baseline data.
Uh, baseline data is really important
because in order to measure any change, you have to have a baseline.
So what we're doing here
is we're collecting this kind of baseline data
for the next generation of scientists
to measure the impact of global change and global warming on the area.
We're a group of nine scientists from four different European countries.
From Italy, from France, Belgium, and Germany.
And each of us had a different area of expertise.
First of all, there was myself and Henrik,
we were mainly responsible for fishing.
And then there was Henri.
Henri looked at birds, but also at crustaceans.
And then we have the diving team.
Diving team consisted of three people,
and they were investigating all the flora and fauna below the water.
And finally, there was a team we called the Beach Boys,
uh, consisting of Camille and Quentin,
and they were doing research along the shore.
So it's kind of a holistic research approach
to an area of the Antarctic Peninsula
that to date is almost completely undocumented.
For our campaign,
we are going to dive in many locations where nobody ever dove before.
-Ready to get into the water? -Ready.
Getting used to the temperature now.
It's going to be different because we don't have the whole facilities
of a base where I was used to go,
or a big ship like the Polarstern or other research vessels.
So I think it will be the most challenging trip I ever did.
In Antarctic,
you always dive attached to the lifeline because for instance,
if that iceberg would start to move towards us,
then we have to abort the dive.
And then we have to have a way to tell the diver come up.
I studied soft sediment and the organisms that live within the sediment.
As the soil on Earth, the sediments in the ocean,
they have a lot of exchange with the water column.
So they are very important in the energy cycling
or cycling of the matter.
The Antarctic is very big, so it's bigger than Russia.
You know, so it's… it's a very big piece of, uh, continent.
It's a very important ecosystem in the whole system of the planet.
It produces a lot of deep waters that are full of oxygen
and full of nutrients that actually are spread
around other parts of the globe.
And it's very important in the whole circulation,
let's say blood system are there.
This is my fifth time to Antarctica.
I will never forget the first time I saw a penguin colony.
I was helping the penguin guys at the time
and we were going to get some samples for us as well.
And we were going up, getting to the top
and then a whole plane opened and it was full of it, full,
and I… I cried like it's-- like it was--
like a feeling I couldn't hold because it was really impressive
to be outnumbered so much by nature
There are so many things happening in the ship simultaneously.
It feels like a whole town, like crammed into 23-meters of ship.
There's no space that's left unused and everything is movable.
You can take the panel from the wall off the floor,
there's storage space, electric fuses, pumps, the engine.
It's like a living organism.
And the icebergs that crash against the hull at night,
that's part of the experience.
We are in the Melchior islands.
And so we are for our part focusing on the intertidal area,
So the beach shows things,
so we have investigated biodiversity on that area,
and doing some quadrants experiments
and so just looking for the general diversity of the area.
That's a fucking big sound.
It's never stopping today.
-Okay, so-- -What just happened?
I just saw ice that break,
like this morning, it's happening like every, I don't know,
ten minutes or something.
And this morning, we were so close to…
to one of the stuff so I won't say we were scared, but yeah,
we paid attention.
So… That one was supposed to be more stable,
so let's… let's trust in it. Yeah.
-Well done Camille, a little stressed? -Huh?
A little stressed or are you not?
You trust Camille in these things?
Yes definitely, he's our little McGyver.
He managed perfect.
Well done, Camille.
I-- I think it's done now.
Woah, so impressive.
Oh, shit.
We normally have a very simple rule, which is,
if you see the leopard seal nearby the place where you're going diving,
you don't dive, if you're divers diving and you see a leopard seal in vicinity,
you will recall back your diver,
and if you're diving and you see a leopard seal next to you,
you just keep on looking at the leopard seal, you gather your things,
and you just go up.
You abort the dive.
Not because they're so extremely dangerous,
but because they are very unpredictable.
They're big. They can be four or five meters.
They have no hands to touch you so they might be chewing you a little bit
to understand what you're doing, who you are, what is that?
It was killed this morning by a leopard seal.
It's an interesting feeling
to realize that there's a lot of wildlife just out there.
Every day you see something that's a lot stronger than you
and just high up the food chain.
That's an interesting feeling.
You realize you're not…
not always as in control as you might think you are.
How do you feel Camille?
Oh, sorry, what do you want?
-How do you feel? -How do I feel?
Pretty great.
I just saw a leopard seal eating a penguin.
It was quite impressive.
Um…
That's all for today, France.
Tell me some more.
Some more about?
Some more about what, what do you want to know?
-I don't know, ship life? -Uh, ship life. Uh…
That's a very good question today, thank you.
-Uh… -Maybe the food.
The food, the food the food is great.
Uh, sometimes the pasta are a bit overcooked,
but don't tell.
Um, the food is one of the most important things I think on ship
because it bond's people together
and, uh, when you have good food, you have good mood usually.
Uh, and so far it's been really great and we're all eating quite a lot.
And it's, yeah, pretty enjoyable.
All right.
So now we'll open the trap.
But we can see that many of the amphipods are still trying to get in,
so they're attached to the mesh.
So like… like the krill that has, uh,
like a central position in the food web in the Antarctic.
Amphipods are very important because they occupy
many different niche in the ecosystem.
So these ones are important for degrading all the the dead matters.
This is the head of a fish that we put in
and it's almost perfectly cleaned to the inside.
And they have an extremely fine sense of detection for any carcass,
so they can they can detect that animal from, from hundreds,
maybe hundreds of meters, maybe kilometers away
and just swarm in.
Having to sacrifice a living creature for science is never easy,
no matter how big or small they are.
I have been studying amphipods since the year 2000.
And still we find new species unknown to science and to mankind.
We have to know about their existence, where they live,
what they eat, how they behave.
Without this knowledge,
there is no way to measure our impact on this planet.
The more we know, the better we can protect.
Want to say anything Katy?
Um, I don't know really, I'm just sort of feeding everybody.
Everybody seems super happy and hungry and busy and…
I can't keep up with the cake and the dessert demands
as we're having Bruno's favorite dessert this evening, lemon tart.
I've got to make two; one with meringue and one was not,
because otherwise, Skipper Ben's gonna be me a bit upset
we're not having meringue.
I've already had quite a few visitors popping in heads
looking to see what's going on.
As you can see there's a plethora of food.
What are you reading, Bruno?
Um…
"Quince Mois Dans L'Antarctique."
So this is the journal of the original expedition?
I've had this book for a long time and, uh, I kept it to read it here.
So I'm discovering it. It's really good.
How do you feel? Do you feel connected?
Well, actually more and more when I read it. Yeah.
I think there's not a lot of people internationally or even in Belgium
who are aware that the first purely scientific expedition to Antarctica
was actually led by Belgium.
The Belgica expedition was led by Adrien de Gerlache, 120 years ago.
They got trapped actually in the ice and had to overwinter in the area.
And they drifted quite a long way along the Antarctic Peninsula
until finally, spring arrived and they got released.
It was a very successful scientific expedition.
Actually, they had very good scientists on board
and the collected a huge amount of samples.
Um, there is a huge amount of literature
that has been published afterwards on, on this mission.
It must have been an incredible time for these people.
Because, uh, technology was not there,
they were pretty much the first one to discover these areas.
So there was so much more unknown that we have at this moment.
When you look at the composition of the Belgica team,
they were all selected very carefully and very interestingly.
And it's not surprising that Amundsen was there too.
He was only 24 at the time.
And a few years later, he was the first to reach the South Pole.
Taking the same route along the Java Straight,
as they took in 1898,
made me think a lot about them while being on this mission.
How did they feel when they realize they would spend the winter there?
And how did they pass their time?
The specificity here apparently compared to Melchior
is that there's going to be tourists arriving at 5:00 a.m.
Can we ask them to be silent? Not to wake us up.
Because they're mainly going to bother the, the intertidal guys.
I suppose because they're going to go on the beach and then--
-How many people? -Five hundred.
Five hundred?
One hundred at a time.
So it's kind of a different mindset.
Please not on my quadrat, no no no!
If a tourist steps on your quadrat, do you sample it?
Yeah, you have to take a sample!
-At least take some muscle tissue. -We'll chop one up.
Do we know the time of the tourists or not yet?
The tourist tide?
We wake up, no one is there.
And then suddenly this tour operator voice
gives a rundown for the day and it's like:
Good morning and it's really…
and you just hear it over the water and you feel a bit like, oh,
did we just sign up for Disneyland or what like, what is this?
I was surprised actually to see that all the tourism activity
was very well organized.
And, and there's a lot of rules that they have to follow
and they have a lot of guides that go first on the colony,
they set up a path with little, uh, markers and,
and people who go there are only allowed to follow this little path.
On one side, you have the penguins
just like walking and like doing their thing.
And then on the other side,
you have the humans also just like walking and taking photos.
And it's really-- it's a… it's a funny, um, picture
because I mean, it does feel a bit like, like a zoo, which is the other way around.
I have sort of mixed feelings about, uh, this,
there's a, a lot of good communication between the, uh, tour operators
and the scientific communities.
But still the, the amount of people that, that came,
means there's an impact, it's impossible to avoid.
Microplastics even from,
from our clothes, fly away go in the water.
I mean, it's-- It gets into the, the environment.
And the more people you have there, the more, the more impact you will have.
There were 70,000 tourists going to Antarctica this year,
which is quite a lot.
We caught one big icefish of the family Channichthyidae.
Now the fishes see as a huge head.
So it's, uh,
that's why they're called Dragon icefish's sometimes.
And, um,
the guilds, this here, are white.
In all other fish, except for fish in Arctica, they will be red.
Because of the hemoglobin that binds to, uh, oxygen.
These fish, they don't need to hemoglobin,
water here is so cold, so oxygenated,
that they get enough oxygen just through the skin.
So this is the heart of an ice fish.
It's pretty, uh, you see, it's still pumping. It's pretty big.
And also, it's brown yellowish, not red.
Like this one.
This is the heart of a red-blooded ice fish, of a red-blooded
So that has a hemoglobin,
that's why it's a red and this one is from without hemoglobin.
That's why it's just yellow-brownish.
We're gonna cut open the belly.
We'll see right away that this fish was suffering a lot,
it may have not faded, but it has a lot of parasites,
all these are nematode worms that are inside or top of the liver.
So these fish are very specially adapted to live in cold habitats.
But now, if the water warms a lot,
it may be that they are not fit to live under these circumstances.
What makes the polar region so so fragile
and, and so particularly sensitive to climate change
is that all of these animals are
extremely adapted to this particular environment.
The slightest change will, will shift their comfort zone
to a zone where it's not going to be possible for them to survive.
So from there, they will have different strategy,
either they can cope with it,
which is quite rare usually when,
when you are very much, um, adapted to your environment.
Or you can migrate
but then you go somewhere else where other species exist already.
So there will be competition or you just die.
Bruno where are we heading?
Uh, we're heading to Metchnikoff Point.
So there's a commemorative plaque there
that was set by a Belgian expedition in the '80s.
So we're going to check, uh,
if it's still there, if it's still in good shape,
and take a few pictures for documentation.
We went there on request of the Belgian government
to actually look at the conditions of a place
which purpose was to commemorate the ventures of
It's just rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks, ice, rocks, rocks, rocks,
where is a monumental here, so we were all
looking with the binocular hoping to find it.
We said, okay, the penguins are going up there,
maybe we can go up the same way
because if penguins do it, we can do it, not exactly the same.
It's slippery.
We arrived at the plate
which was in very good conditions actually.
-Act serious. -I can't.
But yeah, what eventually we were surprised to find,
was this abandoned camping sites.
So we are at the…
At the commemorative, uh, plate
to, uh, celebrate the Gerlache.
I don't know what to say.
There's some cans of food still there.
There was a lot of plastic, plastic bags, plastic vials, syringes,
uh, plastic in many different forms.
There was a lot of lipsticks, uh, survival matches.
A couple of thermometers full of mercury that was still used at the time
and the rubbish is pretty much spread over, uh,
maybe 100-meter square.
It's very difficult to land there.
So nobody could have reported this,
these kind of places are not really visited by anybody
unless you go with the purpose.
This time, the government asked us to go so we went.
These are probably remains from a camp from an expedition in the 1980s.
In hindsight, I think
that this has probably been left behind
because they had to abandon their camp during bad weather conditions.
They were stationed there for for two, three years even or so,
and then at some point, they had to leave and never came back.
What does it say?
It says custard powder.
Might be British. Huh.
I just thought, ha, it's us.
That's what we do,
everywhere, no?
Of course the entire thing is special and it has to be
kept pristine, but,
somehow what's the difference from beautiful place in Antarctica
and any other place on this planet?
Everything was as beautiful as Antarctica before.
Barely anything is untouched from human pollution and exploitation.
And Antarctica is no exception.
And not only with this example,
wherever you put a trawl in the water for scientific purposes,
you catch plastic.
So we cleaned up a little bit, but there's so much, it would take,
yeah, a couple of days to clean.
That we won't have time to.
Uh, but hopefully we can, uh, raise a little bit of awareness
about who gets out because then maybe they can come
that would be great.
The only place we're in boldface off.
The only places here that I know that no one else goes to,
I've never even seen anyone at Green Reef,
not not another single boat ever.
I'm the only one that I've known that's ever gone in.
But there are a lot of boats that go up and down--
There are a lot of boats that go up and down that channel.
I've been traveling to Antarctica since 1997.
It was my first, first trip and I've been hooked ever since.
It's the place I feel most comfortable in the world,
not, not where I was born or where I grew up or where I live now.
Like my home now,
but it's here is where I just feel most comfortable on Earth.
For me, it's definitely a highlight of my career
even out of, you know, without question,
this voyage is a seed that was planted four or five years ago.
I feel like it's Barrow that I've been pushing
within the Antarctic science community for a long time.
Because I could see this, I had-- I could see this vision
of exactly this happening and now, it is happening, so it's,
it's like a dream come true for me.
People say to me all the time, you know, once you've seen it,
why do you keep going back to Antarctica, isn't it just all
you know, snow and penguins.
I said, well of course it's not,
once you look deeper, once you start to spend time there,
month after month after month, you start to see colors change,
you start to see the reds,
you start to see the copper in the mountains.
You keep putting up with bad weather and being away from family and friends
and loved ones to do that,
to experience that.
-How's it going? -Good. Good.
It's frustrating that we didn't catch any fish.
We trying a lot today, but I don't know,
fish seem not to be here.
Maybe in the we serve that out,
we gonna put it in after dinner, I think,
and then we see.
Thank you.
Merci.
Grazie.
Danke.
Gracias.
You shaved your head again?
-He's anal about his head. -Can you not see--
-It's hydrodynamics. -…Cue ball shine to the top of it.
It's so I can make sure the boat travels as fast as possible at all times.
Did you do your sideburns as well a little?
You got levels.
I'm not meant to have another one. I can't see what I'm doing in the steam.
Ca suffit!
Knees, eyes, throat!
Does everyone have everything they require?
Water
Some red water maybe.
I can get you some red water.
Right now, it's a bit difficult, I think it's getting too dark.
So, the fish also have difficulties finding our lure.
Maybe once with bait if we given some time,
we would see.
So, this morning at six,
we have been woken up by an iceberg that actually bumped into the boat.
So, what happens here is that we are just anchored in front of a glacier.
And this glacier is very active.
So what happens is that at night, it breaks off
because let's say relatively warm temperatures during the day
and cracks form where the water goes through
and then in the night it freezes and it gives, it expands,
and therefore it generates a break in the ice.
And so, in the morning, we actually have a lot of accumulation of ice over there
which then because of the tide,
therefore, the low tide is going to bring it towards the outside,
it actually moves along the boat.
So, this morning, we have two dives planned
and one in the afternoon, I will have to evaluate the safety now
for the diving of this morning and we might have to wait for the ice
to actually leave our surroundings and…
Yeah, that was one.
-How cold is the water? -Minus one or a bit less maybe.
I am doing models.
The main aim is to produce relevance.
Uh, species distribution models, and physiological models
applied on benthic species like
and so on.
In different areas, species cannot have different metabolisms
and with climate change, we can choose as well.
Before producing models to predict in the future,
we need to produce a good model for presence.
And you can see if a species will die because she has not enough resources
to leave or if temperature is too high or too little.
I always had the dream to actually go and dive in Antarctic,
and I dove.
And then I saw this amazing biodiversity it's fantasy, you know.
I think we are waking up to this call and I know that we are waking up.
The thing is that you may wake up and still be too sleepy
to make it on time to work.
Or you may wake up and figure out that you need to jump out of the bed
and start running to get on time to work.
So that's what I think it's the moment of our species, now we,
we are waking up but now we need to stand up and start running
because, yeah, the planet is giving a lot of signs
that we need to take care of it
if we want to survive the way we are hoping to thrive.
Antarctica is conceived as this very remote place,
and in geographical terms, it is remote.
It's very challenging, even dangerous to do research here.
But we do need to keep in mind that our actions at home
affect what happens here
and eventually these consequences come back around.
Swift.
What are you doing, Bruno?
Uh, cleaning, getting ready for the Drake, backing everything up.
To do, to do.
-Everything is done? -No.
-Boots and jackets away? -No.
Is there space in the freezer?
-In this one? -Just for one of these two. Yeah.
Yeah, it should fit.
Physical samples that we have in our freezer
is a little bit under 2000's.
And much more if you count all the other observations
we made on top of those like observing the birds, whales,
all those things we could not actually physically sample.
Our expedition was quite short,
it was like 22 days effective in the field.
Under certain years comparable to what other expeditions
with large vessels are bringing back in terms of efficiency.
For those players that we surveyed,
we have a good idea of what is really there
and that can be compared in the future.
And I think that's the biggest and the most important result
that we can bring to the scientific world
and to the human communities for conservation.
How does the story end that is told at the point of departure,
at the start of friendship, the beginning of a race,
the first step towards the shift in approach.
The end of this journey is just the beginning of another,
a much harder and much longer one.
I'm glad to have met this group of scientists who can lead the way.
Now what's left to do is to get up and run with them.