Dan Snow's History Hit - ENDURANCE22: Onto the Ice

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

On today's episode, Dan takes the podcast out onto the Antarctic ice to find penguins, seals and the expedition scientists conducting experiments. He joins Dr Stefanie Arndt of the Alfred Wegener Institute as she researches climate change in the Weddell Sea's ice. Dan catches her just as she discovers some tiny and very rare snow crystals and her enthusiasm is infectious.He also takes a trip back up to the ship's bridge to speak with Captain Knowledge Bengu, South Africa's first black ice pilot about his trailblazing career and the sheer might of the SA Agulhas II as he navigates through the heavy ice.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi there everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm sitting in a snowstorm in the Weddell Sea, staring out of my porthole at an expanse of white. There's no way to tell where the sea ice ends and the sky begins. We're still here in the Weddell Sea, we're still searching for Shackleton's ship Endurance. In this episode you're going to hear from the captain of the ship, Captain Knowledge Bengu, the first black African ice pilot, the first black African Antarctic survey vessel skipper in history. You're also going to hear all about my trip to the ice. We climbed off, we got craned off the Aguilas II onto the ice pack. We walked around on ice that was about a metre thick, hopefully, well, a bit more, sometimes a bit less, as you'll hear. I talked to a couple of ice scientists. You're going to be hearing from

leading ice and snow specialist, Steffi Arndt. She's a German scientist. As you'll hear, she's happiest on the ice. I just want to quickly address the fact that war has broken out in Europe. I'm down here, and some of you may think I'm merrily chirping on and posting on Instagram and TikTok and other platforms, and there's something somehow inappropriate and jarring about that. I am very, very aware of the bizarre resonance, the bizarre parallels between Shackleton leaving Britain at the beginning of August 1914 as Europe went to war, as the Austrians prepared to invade Ukrainian Russian-held territory,

and us leaving and coming to the Weddell Sea and war breaking out in Eastern Europe again. We at Endurance 22 are an international expedition. We are a Russian national on the ship. We are keenly aware of what's going on. We're following it very closely and we are particularly missing friends, family, loved ones in Europe. Some of them very close to where the fighting is happening. I'm sure everyone feels a feeling of helplessness as they watch these events unfold on their screens. But being down here, you feel particularly remote and it's very scary.

Everyone on the ship is now sort of trapped between wanting to make the most of this expedition, make the most of the archaeological and scientific opportunities presented to us, but also wanting to get back and hug loved ones and reconnect with our community, wherever it might be. We at History Hit have made the decision

that we will continue to broadcast. I hope we get the tone right. We will continue to post pictures of what's going on down here. We think it will hopefully be diverting and continues to be of interest. And I hope, like everyone else, in the hours and days that follow,

we will stagger towards some kind of resolution to this terrible situation. So here's a podcast you listen to. I'll go back to sitting in my cabin thinking about the outbreak of war in 1914, the decisions made by those old, pessimistic, terrified generals and politicians, terrified of looking weak, obsessed with projecting strength. Men who in retrospect should have realised how unbelievably lucky they'd been, how precious that peace was before 1914.

Anyway folks, I hope you enjoyed this update from Endurance 22. So this is the routine on board ship. We dive for maybe eight hours at which point the ship has to be dead still in the ice flow. It keeps its engines on, very just ticking over and that clears little bits of ice that have broken off the pack, clears them away from a sort of pool at the stern of the ship and that allows the drone of ice that have broken off the pack, clears them away from a sort of pool at the stern of the ship, and that allows the drone to be lowered up and down in clear water. Those propellers also stop that ice freezing over

because it puts a little energy through the water. It keeps it moving, it doesn't give it a chance to freeze. During that time when the AUV is diving, the rest of the ship's company are allowed out on the ice, and that's what I'm doing here now you get winched over the side by a crane you cling on to the crane is a attached to a kind of rubber disc that is about a meter and a half wide and four people stand on it clinging to netting and then that is clipped onto a crane and then that crane delivers you over the side of the ship

then you're on the ice, and I've done this several times now. The scientists immediately start beetling away, doing their drilling, their core samples, learning about the nature of the ice, how much snow there is on the ice, how much seawater leakage has been at the bottom of the ice, learning about the effects of climate change

and the sea ice changing patterns. Two scientists I'm looking at now are dragging a sled with some depth measuring equipment on there so they're going to get a detailed survey of this particular ice float. The edge of this float could be about half a mile wide. Like a huge pancake of sea ice really. Now this one's quite flat. Shagton reports the pressure in the ice used to cause these huge ridges to move up to six metres high.

And in the far distance I can see those, perhaps in a different ice flow. This one though is flat as a pancake. A few little humps and bumps, maybe no more than a meter, two meters high. It would have been quite easy trekking across this bit. Shackleton, as you'll remember, tried to, when endurance sunk, he tried to make it across these ices, he tried to walk dragging those rowing boats, those lifeboats, he tried to walk to the Antarctic Peninsula or an island, but he wasn't able to do so, the going was so slow, he could only manage a mile, maybe two miles a day, and he would have run out of food if they attempted to keep doing that. And the reason was because of the humps and bumps, the great ridges that you had to pull these boats over. This ice flow would have

been good going for him though. I love getting out here. I love getting out here partly because you see penguins and you see seals. It's fun to watch the scientists. Scientists come alive when they're allowed off the ship and they don't have to wait for these subsea marine archaeologists to get on with their work. They go, ah, fine. In their view, the real reason for being down here is doing experiments on the ice and snow on this pack.

The sea place is probably a slightly tiresome little side feature. They want to get measuring snow, looking at flakes. Who can blame them? Fascinating stuff. And they start running around the ice having a great old time now. Oh look at that, the sun has just come out and in the distance I can see a giant iceberg, so that's very different to these ice flows I'm on. An iceberg is a gigantic chunk of the continental ice sheet that has broken off,

carved off they call it, and is now floating in the sea and eventually working its way north. And that stands very proud of the sea ice. I mean that could be 20-30 metres high over there. Looks like an island, looks like a huge island, cliffs, great sea cliffs surrounding it of ice in the distance, probably a few miles away. It's nice to be out on the ice because, you know, it's quite claustrophobic on the ship. You're on this ship, we've been on there for about three weeks now, and you eat, and you chat, and you work alongside everyone. There's a limited amount of communal space. So when you're out on the ice, it's the furthest I've been.

In fact, I'm now standing 200 meters from the rest of my crew. It's probably the furthest I've been from anybody else in the last month. So there you go. That's what it's like on board ship. It's beautiful out here. And also nothing's ever silent on the ship.

You can always hear the humming of equipment, the beeping, the crashing, the crunching of gears as we go through the ice, particularly the grinding of the ice around the hull. So it's never quiet. On the ice, finally you can come to a place where it's quiet and it's peaceful. I'm looking over there, there's a colony of penguins,

probably 200 metres away from me now. They seem to frequently, it's kind of knobbly, they like the bits that stand proud. So these bits of snow and ice that stand clear of the pack, I think they obviously can find shelter behind there from the wind, so they're all clustered on there now, looking at us, wondering what on earth we're doing. So while we're on the ice, I thought I might talk to Steffi, the German ice scientist about what she is up to.

Let's go and have a chat with her. Steffi, how are you doing? I'm doing perfectly on the ice floe. Look, I've been watching you. On that boat, you're like a chained animal. You're like a caged animal. This is your happy place, right? Definitely. Whenever I'm on the ice,

when I'm allowed to dig in the snow, so I'm totally into it. And every time I see you, you are literally digging in the snow. You're digging into the ice. What are you looking for today? Today, I was looking again just for snow crystal structures. And today today it was super exciting and super nice

because I saw the first time on that expedition Depth Hall. Those are like my most favorite snow grains and they are just beautiful and so I'm super excited and happy today. There's probably a joke somewhere about your favorite kind of snow and I should be jealous but I don't know what that joke is so I'll just park it there. So what's particular about this particular kind of snow that you saw today? So basically it grew given that it's so cold. So I mean, we experienced the last day's temperature below minus 10. So therefore those crystals then can just like grow because of the strong temperature gradient,

because the ice is pretty warm. For me, warm is minus 1.8. And the atmosphere is super cold with like minus 10 minus 15 and then those super nice grains can form and that's just beautiful every time we stop the ship the underwater guys do their thing you couldn't care two hoots about that you're off the bows you're doing your thing what do you want to get from this whole trip well from the whole trip i get an idea on how does the sea ice change probably over the last couple of years, especially in the year where we had now again a rather low sea ice extent in Antarctica and especially in

the Weddell Sea. But in addition, and this is what excited me the last day even more, is that the ice flows we are now standing on are part of an ice regime that just drifted in that area from the eastern part of the Weddell. And on exactly that regime I was standing already one year ago in the eastern Waddell so this is why it's like super like kind of twice exciting for me that's so cool so you're seeing this for the second time yeah like kind of so at least it's the same ice regime yes and this is why it's scientifically super interesting to see how did the sea ice and the snow evolve over that year drift through the Waddell.

And now to get back to the history, I'm so interested about the Waddell for the historians because this is unusual in the Antarctic in that the ice, the sea ice lasts more than one year right? Elsewhere around the Antarctic it will mostly melt in the summer will it? Yes, so the summer sea ice extent is mainly driven by the sea ice remaining in the Waddell Sea so we have also some older ice patches in the Ross Sea but most of the older ice meaning like second or third year ice is situated in the western Weddell Sea yes. So Shackleton trying to come in and they didn't really know that so Shackleton trying to come in here even in the summer was a very stupid thing to do really. It's never stupid to go to the ice but But, I mean, it was, of course, there was not much known about drift.

It was not much known about the currents, about how thick the ice would get, how they would be transported to. So, therefore, it was a real adventure, I would say. There were some women who applied to Gomes-Shackens' expedition. He rejected them out of hand. He said no women at all. What's it like being a pione know pioneering female high latitude ice scientist yeah it still it feels like that it's still kind of special so there are still not that many females so the female rate is increasing actually so i mean also our german polar institute is led by

females since many many years so we have also female and leading females in polar science but it's we are still like the the less part of of the cake i must admit what's it like being in that position do you notice it day to day yeah i think i do not notice it that strong anymore so i think i i noticed it in earlier years more because there i was not only the female but i was also the really young female i mean okay i'm still, but not that young anymore. So therefore I think like I have now my standing in the field of science I'm working in.

Therefore it doesn't matter whether I'm male or female. What about, Shackleton always said, I dream of returning to the ice. What is it about the ice that keeps you coming back? That it's also still there. And that I hope, of course, that it will remain staying here and that I can still learn so much will remain staying here and that I can

still learn so much from it like over the past but also for the future for the future generation and and this is what makes me super exciting about it and it's also I think what I really love about my research here is that it's so easy to transport back home in terms of stories in terms of visuals in terms of just like explaining people what I'm doing and why it's important to do it for climate change and also like to motivate younger generations also to continue exactly that work. Thanks, Steffi. I'll take it to your time. Get back to it. I do. You listen to Dan Snow's history. I mean, Antarctica. More coming up after this. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm in Antarctica.

More coming up after this. How can you tell if your neighbour is a witch? If you're obsessed by witches, then maybe there's something wrong. How would you go about painting Henry VIII? I think Henry's a monster. And so I see a sort of puffed up, balloon-faced, impotent guy. Would you invite Oliver Cromwell to dinner? There's no point in having Cromwell to dinner other than to be entertained with his heavily skewed version of events.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything. From ballads to banqueting, sex to spying, ghosts to gunpowder plots. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. So we're now breaking through this ice, Captain Knowledge. What makes this ship so good at doing this? Obviously it has special design features. Yeah, no, the way that she's obviously designed is to slide over the ice and then use its weight to crush the ice. But the specification of this vessel is to break one meter thick ice at five knots. So the one meter thick ice at five knots, it's a continuous speed without having to

back and ramp. But anything thicker than that, she will run until she can't run anymore and then we have to back out. Reverse. And then go again, yeah. And at the moment with the Weddell Sea, you seem to be able to move around this search area very easily. Yeah, because most of the ice is, predominantly is the first-year ice,

so it's within the specification of the vessel. However, it's starting to get a bit more consolidated, looking at the open water getting less and less, but because it's first year ice, she's still able to move around. Yeah. How many years have you been doing this ice piloting and captaining in these waters?

Since 2012, but I've been involved in Antarctic since 2003. So that my first time I came to Antarctica and I've been on and off. I think this is my 14th time to Antarctica within the space of, let's say, 20 years. Do you enjoy this challenge, this environment, or would you like to be a captain in hot seas? Because it must be difficult for you. I think it grows on you, you know. And if I go on other vessels which are less challenging, I get bored.

And partly because I think I like dealing with different people and having continuous operations and having to make those critical decisions. I think it's something that starts off as an abuse and then once you get addicted to it, you can't shake it off. So that is the one bad thing about this vessel. And when you go on other vessels, you realise, but I'm doing 40% or 30% of what I do when I'm on the Akkala. Unfortunately, you can't say, well, there's more workload on the Akkala,

I need more pay. What's it like though for you, because you're a historic figure, you know, you're the first African ice pilot, you've fought so many firsts. Yeah. Has that been pressure on you or do you not just, do you not think about that? It has at the beginning,

but then it also motivated me to transfer the skills quite quickly, which I'm just in most cases intending to do. You probably noticed that the dead officer was almost driving most of the time, because you know you can't teach experience, you just, the person needs to get the feel of how the vessel behaves and have that relationship with the vessel. So I just more piloting now and again, but also just to see how he's judging his decision making. But it has in a way put some pressure, but now I've been a captain now for like 10 years,

I think, and I've transformed in the way that I do things or manage the vessel. Is this something that when you were a kid you dreamed you'd be doing? Because everyone dreams about being captain of a huge ship, right? Is this something you thought about when you were a kid? Hell no. Really? Strange enough, I wanted to be a doctor and specialise in gynaecology.

Okay. Yeah, so unfortunately my next door neighbor was a seaman. He was a bosun working for the tanker company. So when the opportunity started opening up for everyone, as you know, history of our country, so he became a training officer for Unicorn, doing short courses, you know, your survival, first aid at sea. He then started bringing me pamphlets to say, listen, I think you have the brains,

would you mind venturing into sea going? At the time I was just going to high school. So then every time he just kept on feeding me and planting the seed that gets I guess germinated then I started swaying away from my initial dream of being a medical doctor and that's how actually it all started so from my school I went straight to study my return studies without any hesitation as I'm listening to you talking I know we're getting off the subject here but as I'm listening to you talking I think how different are your kids to the way you grew up now that

South Africa has changed so much? Do they think that they could do anything in the whole world? Yeah, no, it's completely different. I mean, it's all integrated. Everyone is treated the same. They go to multiracial schools. I mean, I grew up from a township where, you know, probably my teachers received Bantu education, they transferred that to me, but my kids have been living a normal life. I think they have the

same opportunities like anyone, if they need to study abroad or whatever, it's all open now. Because when we grew up we were limited on jobs that you can dream of, but they can dream of doing anything. So it was kind of difficult for a person like me, or Captain Michael for that sake, to actually dream of something that you know is out of reach. You know, you just, there's a wall, you know. So then when everything started opening up, then we knew that, okay,

you will raise the kids to understand that you can now, the sky is not the limit. Does it make you very proud knowing that there's other kids all around the world watching you now and realizing because of you, what you've achieved, the sky's the limit for them? Yeah, it is quite, hence I don't hesitate to participate because i know the importance of actually having to

know about something that you thought it was out of reach early enough because then you can start dreaming towards the goal so it's quite good for me and fulfilling you know that i believe i can actually inspire and make an impact captain thank you very much for having us aboard thank you sir you're welcome thank you for making it to the end of this episode of dan snow's history i really appreciate listening to this podcast i love doing these podcasts it's a highlight of my career it's the best thing i've ever done and your support your listening is obviously crucial for that project if you did feel like doing me a favor if you go to wherever you get your podcast and give

it a review give a rating obviously a good one ideally then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it we obviously depend on listeners depend on more and more people finding out about it depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in really appreciate it thank you you