The Infinite Monkey Cage - The North Pole Unwrapped - Russell Kane, Felicity Aston and Lloyd Peck

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

In this Christmas episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage, Brian Cox and Robin Ince head to the North Pole to explore the dazzling science behind the northern lights, the extreme adaptations that help animals - and even Santa Claus - survive the Arctic cold, and how the Earth’s magnetic field might just guide him home. Joining the monkeys are comedian Russell Kane, Arctic explorer Felicity Aston and Polar biologist Lloyd Peck, as they brave the chill to uncover the wonders of one of Earth’s most remote and magical frontiers.Series Producer: Mel Brown Researcher: Alex Rodway Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem A BBC Studios Production

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Do you ever walk into the kitchen and think, What am I doing here? Or you put your phone down a moment ago. And then it's like... Where is that? New episodes of Science Versus are out now. And in one of them, we're looking into the science of memory

and how you can improve yours. Plus, does the full moon make us go crazy, how you can reach your goals, the secrets to being happy, and so much more. Just search for Science Versus, that's ScienceV-S. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Inx, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

And it is Christmas Day! Happy Christmas! Here's a shiny shilling, Brian Cox. Got me the finest turkey in the window. Hope you got everything you wanted under the tree. Brian didn't. surprisingly, because Brian got a particle accelerator, and he's got one of those already.

And so I was like, oh, why did I get a part? I wanted a Hubble Space Telescope. No one understands me. I'm going back to my room to listen to Heaven 17. Heaven 17. Yeah, I thought Heaven 17 was quite a good choice for you. I thought you'd have been into them. It was either them or flock of seagulls.

But Human League was kind of too mainstream, I thought. No, Human League, I would have been for it. So today, we're going to visit Father Christmas. his home and see if we can find Santa and discover why Brian didn't get the presence that he demanded. As usual, Robin is in a linear superposition of right and wrong, because we are going to the North Pole today, but not in search of Santa. Though we will have a little look, won't we? Maybe. But mainly, we'll be looking at how our proximity to the geomagnetic North Pole affects

navigation. What does the latest research tell us about the northern lights and the behavior of our star and how is the polar environment changing and what effects is that having on the flora and fauna of the far north? And also what is the best way of hosting a cocktail party at the North Pole? Now astonishingly that last statement is part of the not wrong branch of Robin's wave function. To help us explore we are joined by an astrophysicist Arctic explorer, a physiologist marine biologist and a comedian with an antipathy to the Aurora Borealis for some and they are. My name is Felicity Aston. I'm a polar explorer and the coldest temperature I've ever experienced was not at the North Pole. I've been there several times. It was actually in a place called the Pole of Cold, which is the coldest inhabited place in the world. So this is a tidy village called Omicon in the very northeast of Siberia and there's a population of about 300 people there, but their average wintertime temperature is below minus 70 degrees centigrade. Oh, my goodness, me.

Hi, I'm Lloyd Peck. I'm the physiologist, marine biologist, and I'm a polar one. I work for the British Antarctic Survey, and my thing is scuba diving underneath ice. And the best way I've found in the past to keep warm when you're cold is to get in a sleeping bag with somebody else, and body heat is a really good way of keeping warm. Cover story. I'm Russell Kane. I'm a comedian. If you're over 50 in your name's Terry, you can put out in inverted commas.

And the coldest I've ever been was in Luton. It was last December just after Kirstama took Man's radiator allowance away. Well, that's ended a rather gloomy opening turn, isn't it now? I wish we'd done the pole of cold now. That seems upbeat, doesn't it? Anyway, this is our panel. Well, I suppose really to start off, Lissy with you, one of the major questions that are not people at home

we'll be thinking about at the moment is how difficult is it to build an enormous toy factory in an area like the North Pole? I mean, what would be the issues? I've been to the North Pole a number of times and I go quite often into schools to talk about the Arctic and the North Pole and all these sorts of things.

And the question I always get asked without fail Is have you ever seen Father Christmas Or any elves at the North Pole And you can hear the collective intake of breath From all the adults in the room Like you do not mess with Father Christmas And you can hear them thinking What's she going to say? What's she going to say?

What secrets are she going to give away? But unfortunately I have never seen any sign Of Father Christmas or the elves at the North Pole Because it's magic, isn't it? You're not supposed to see it. But I have seen Father Christmas, but he's on the Arctic Circle in his office. There is an office in Finland, just north of Rovanimi, and Father Christmas is there pretty much every day with his elves,

and I have been to see him many times, not always accompanied by children. So that is the place to go to see Father Christmas, not the North Pole. So that is what I can reveal. How do we define the North Pole? How is it defined? Depends which North Pole you are talking about, because there are many North Pole. north poles on planet Earth. The two that are absolute north poles by anybody's definition

is the magnetic north pole and the geographic north pole. The geographic north pole is the one that everybody thinks of, the one at the top of our planet at 90 degrees north. The magnetic north pole is the north pole of our magnetic field that surrounds planet Earth. So that's not too far away from the geographic north pole. But then it starts to get a little bit more esoteric and it depends some people think these are true north poles some people think it's a load of rubbish so you've got the geomagnetic north pole so this is like a theoretical north pole this is if the earth really was a definite sort of bar magnet and we had a perfect magnetic field that was all nice and even in uniform then that's where our north pole would be so this is the north pole that's

used by a lot of models computer models but then you've got things like the pole of cold that I just mentioned and something like that's not really a proper north pole and you've got the pole of inaccessibility which is the place that is most inaccessible from all directions and you've got a northern pole of inaccessibility and a southern pole of inaccessibility and then you really do start to get a little bit bottom of the barrel so there's the celestial north pole so that's not the bottom of the barrel well talking to an astronomer So astronomers use this a lot because if you imagine that the sky is actually a sphere that surrounds the Earth, then the north pole of that sort of celestial sphere, if you project that down onto the surface of the Earth,

then some people say, well, that's another north pole on the surface of the planet. So how many is that? There's that six? That's six. So, you know, you could maybe stretch it to seven if you include the pole of cold. So it's two kind of north poles. just some general flibbitty-jibbitty stuff. But no, you could go for three at least.

Do you reckon three? I reckon you could go for three absolutely rock-solid ones. Which are? What's the third one then you go for? So there's the geographic, there's the magnetic, and there's the geomagnetic. Oh, fair enough, yeah. Those three you can measure. The others are subject to argument.

And so the geomagnetic pole is the one that's wandering. The geomagnetic pole is fixed. It's the magnetic one that's wandering. So that one's wandering around. And that one sometimes flips. So hang on the... Right, look, this is going to be an absolute. I'll tell you what,

considering most of the people listening at home are drunk already on Christmas Day, this is not following Rheithian values. So where is the magnetic North Pole now? Well, for ages, it was sort of floating around the Queen Elizabeth Islands in the northern Canada,

Northwest Territories and none of it. But then the last 10 years, it started really, accelerating so it started moving 50 to 70 kilometres in a year so it's gone right the way across the Arctic Ocean is now closer to the coast of Siberia than it is to the coast of Canada it'll never go south though will it like it won't like go on tour and appear in Manchester or something it will yeah it will it's gonna it'll come here well it'll go down to the South Pole but it doesn't actually it doesn't keep right let's just get this clear it doesn't kind of keep sliding down does it

there's a point isn't there when it flips yeah so it's doesn't kind of just go, oh, it's just gone past Guernsey. It doesn't do that, does it? It's a bit like the expansion of the, or the Big Bang. You know, there's definite theories, but no one yet knows which of those theories are right. So one theory is that our magnetic field will slowly decrease until there's nothing,

and then it will reappear equally gradually over time in a different orientation. Another theory is that it's an instant flip and that we might get lots of flips really rapidly, but I mean, we're talking rapidly over geological time. We have a record of it, don't we? Because we have essentially a barcode across the Atlantic, for example, when rocks cool and they line up with the magnetic field.

So we can see when it flipped in the past, and it's irregular, isn't it? We should say this is the North Pole to which your compass points. And then the question arises, as an explorer, is that a problem? Yeah. But your compass is pointing to different places. Yeah, okay. So the last time I skied to the North Pole, a helicopter set me down on the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean about 80 kilometres away from the North Pole. And I have to find my way to the North Pole.

There's nothing to see out there. So every direction looks exactly the same. So what do you do? Do you use a compass? But the problem with a compass is that it's pointing not to the geographic North Pole that you're aiming towards. It's pointing towards the magnetic North Pole, which is several hundred kilometres away. from the geographic North Pole. And occasionally in Canada and occasionally in Siberia.

Exactly. So you can't really use a compass. And the other difficulty is that the difference between the magnetic North Pole and the geographic North Pole changes depending on your location. It's called declination. So you have to know what the declination is

so that you can use a compass to direct you to the geographic North Pole. And you're trying to do that while the ice that you're standing on is also moving in an erratic motion, not always at the same speed or in the same direction. So then you think, well, I'll use a GPS then. So, yeah, okay, you can use a GPS. But you're at temperatures of maybe minus 40 degrees centigrade,

and every handheld GPS device that there is uses batteries of some description, and they run down very quickly at those sorts of temperatures. So you can't always navigate using a GPS. So unless you're going to drag out a sextant, which they used to use in the old days, but that's working out your position based on the position of the sun, a bit difficult when it's really cloudy and you can't see the sun. So all of these different methods of finding your way to the North Pole have their inherent disadvantages in them.

And so you end up sort of using a bit of a mishmash of all of it. So you go, oh, we'll just go to the right a little bit. And then maybe the ice will drift us back on to the North Pole and all will be good. So it's all a bit of a guessing game. I can't get anywhere without a sat nerve. I'll just be dead within... How did you get there?

I mean, it explains why I've never seen Father Christmas, doesn't it? I mean, maybe I've never actually been to the North Pole and it's all just been a big mistake. Lloyd, you make it even more difficult for yourself by diving under it. Could you just outline what the challenges are in diving in the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic?

So in one sense, we don't have it. more difficult because we usually know where we are. And we've got batteries in our GPS system, so we're pretty good because we're not out for days and weeks on our own. So our location is pretty good. The way we dive through ice is we take out a five-foot chainsaw and we cut oxo patterns in the ice until we get a block. And the problem with that is that as you cut lines with your five-foot chainsaw,

it freezes behind the chainsaw. So it probably takes you about three hours to dig a hole in the ice. you're looking aghast. Yeah, you could work for the council. That sounds like the pot hole rate is about the same. And then you bounce the blocks in the middle out and you pull them out with a skidoo and you're left with a hole that's about...

And you think I'm going to dive in that? Well, yeah. Not only that. You think I'm going to dive in that because that's great. That's the best diving you are ever going to do on the planet anyway. What is it about that diving?

So there are several things. One is that that time of year when the sea is frozen, everything settles out of the sea. ocean and the visibility is hundreds of meters. Wow. And you can see all this life that's around you on the seabed that you wouldn't otherwise be able to see because in the summertime when the phyto plankton blooms are on, you can't see your hand at the end of your arm so you don't see anything. And you said the whole freezes over. So the whole does freeze over. So if we want to go back to the same place day after day after day, we put a cover over it. What's my cover made of then?

Everything else bloody freezing. Well, we use plywood. Was anyone else expecting something more scientific? Because plywood's easy to get out and easy to retrieve and it's flexible enough. It doesn't break like plastic does when it's cold. You said that you see the life in the winter when the visibility is good. Can you describe the kinds of life you see and the differences between the north and south?

One of the great things that gets me excited about life in the polar regions is that some of it gets really big. So, and I did bring a couple of examples. that I have in my box. We all know woodlice, yeah? That's a group of animals called isopods. Well, in the oceans, there are lots of isotopods, and they get bigger as he gets colder.

And this is one that you would find in the Arctic. It looks like something from Star Wars that would kill you. You should edit this, so it's the end of the show, and everyone went, and this we found, everyone went, ooh, and then it just stops. And that's the end. A scream. It's alive.

But he's got into my mouth. So if a lobster and a woodlouse had too much sambouca and got it on, that would be their kid. So they get up to 10 centimetres, four inches long. They are hundreds of times bigger than the biggest isopods that we have around our coasts. And Felicity, earlier, didn't you say that they jump at you? Yeah, so when I was stationed at rather a research station, which is a British Antarctic survey research base, on the Antarctic Peninsula, there was a marine biology building that had these big aquariums. And part of the wintering job that you had to do was that you had to do night watch.

One of the jobs that we had to do was sent to us by Lloyd. It was like, you need to check my aquariums to make sure that, you know, all the little beasties that we've collected are all doing all right. So middle of the night, I've been on my own all night, in the dark, in an Antarctic research station, looking like a 70s horror movie set. And so I let myself into this dark aquarium lab, and it's all up, apart from the red floodlights. So it looks like that scene from Alien, right,

where there's something scuttling underneath all the lab desks. And I noticed that one of the covers that were over the top of the aquarium had been left partly off. And the reason those covers were on the aquarium is because those little woodlouse creatures like to jump out of the tanks to anyone that's passing by. And if they land on you, they stick to you.

You can't get them off very easily. So I was seeing that, oh no, I've got to go and put that cover back on the aquarium and these things are going to jump out of me in the dark in this red light. But I managed to get them on and I didn't get attacked by a woodlouse. I'm one question. Does emodium freeze? Because I would need a lot of it to survive that scenario. Oh, no, you wouldn't.

Honestly, it would be. Who was that guy, do you remember, when we went to the Adventurers club? The Explorers Club. The Explorers Club. That was it. And he, when he got trapped underground, realized that because sometimes dog excrement, you could actually turn into a pick because it would freeze hard. So he did a big poo and then chipped his way out with his own extrament. And he also lost a leg and ate some of his own leg. I'll stick with emodium. It sounds more convenient. So to come back to the large animals,

the real big story here is not the isopods. It's these guys. So listeners, it's like a star-shaped spider-esque daddy long-leg thing, but it's the size of two adult hands, very thin legs. It's a massive spider. Sorry to be pedantic, but how many legs does it have? It's more like a living asterisk,

so you can all count, can you? It's got ten legs. So, taxonomically, is it a spider? No, in taxonomically, it's... Indeed, Paulus. However, there's a big story to this as well. 95% of sea spiders in the world have eight legs.

But in the Antarctic, you get 10-legged species and 12-legged species. And the biggest ones are three times as big as this. They're 60 to 70 centimetres across. And they are 5,000 times bigger than the biggest sea spiders that we get in temperate latitude. Not poisonous, not bitey? Well, they move very slowly.

And if you were to put your hand underneath its mouth and hold it there for three or four hours, you might get bitten. You've done that, haven't you? Week five of the expedition. So why, because many people have heard of island giganticism? What is it about the ocean, the Arctic oceans that leads to this size? So the polar oceans are different in many ways from the oceans elsewhere in the world.

If you go into the high polar oceans, the sea temperature is permanently below zero degrees. And that has extra characteristics. One is the amount of oxygen you can squeeze into water increases. as you cool it down. And that's in simple terms, it's because the molecules in the water move more slowly, the gaps get bigger and you can force more in between the gaps.

And there's nearly twice as much oxygen in seawater at the polar regions as the tropics. So, one, more oxygen to feed the tissues. Two, these are all cold-blooded animals. And that means their body temperatures are the same as the environment. And because their body temperatures are below, zero, their respiration rates, their amount of energy they need to keep their bodies going,

is 25 to 30 times less than at the tropics. So there's more oxygen, twice as much, 25 times slower rate of use. Two times 25 is 50. You have a massive increased path length for supplying your tissues, which means you can grow more tissues. You mentioned just that the body temperature is the same temperature as the ocean as the water. And you said below freezing. Yeah. So why doesn't it freeze? So this is one of my lectures to undergraduates

that takes about an hour. So if you're all sitting comfortably... Well done, Brian. So if you look at living cells, they have to stay liquid. And there are various ways that you can keep that cytoplasm, that cellular content liquid. One is you can use antifreezes.

And fish in the polar regions produce protein antifreezes and glycoprotein antifreeze. So they make proteins that basically when an ice crystal starts to form, they stick to the front of the ice crystal like cling film and stop more water coming on. Then they can use a whole range of things, things like glycerol and things like glucose, to change the point at which that liquid would freeze. In the same way that we can put salt into water and lower the freezing points. Vodka in the freezer, something in the freezer. Vodka in the freezer, yeah, yeah.

So if you drink a lot of vodka, you'd have to go to a lower temperature before you froze, which I guess a lot of people in Newcastle on a Saturday night do is an attorney. So you can do all of that. But then they can also control the amount of water in their cells. And when it comes to wintertime in the Arctic, the different ways that animals survive the cold is absolutely mind-boggling. If you go and look in Canada at the red bark beetle, it has larvae. That starts off using glycerol, and it goes down to about minus 20 with glycerol.

Then it pumps the water out of its cells, so there's less chance of water molecules sticking together. It gets down below minus 40. And then when it gets down below minus 40 towards minus 50, it vitrifies. And the problem with freezing is the ice crystals break your cells open and kill you. But if you vitrify, you turn into glass, and there are no ice crystals. And those bark beetle larvae have been taken down to minuses. 150 and survive. Can I ask a question? Is it aging still at this point? Or is it in stasis? So if it was to stay frozen, it was to defrost 300 years later, would it be the same age as when it froze?

So really, really, really good area of research. It is in stasis. And is it possible we could ever use this technology to stop human ageing so we could travel to distant stars and things like that? So cryogenesis, yes, that is possible. In the 1950s, there was a lot of work done on freezing mammals and they were able to freeze mice and they couldn't do it with rabbits and the problem is not with freezing them the problem's warming them up because if everything does not warm up at the same rate and something goes liquid while something else is solid your animal is not going to function and that was the research that led to the invention of microwave ovens so they microwave them to warm them up

That's a downside That wasn't going to Where's NAND? She's on DeFrost, shall we ten minutes? This has changed a lot of people's Christmas lunch. Absolutely fascinating. We've spoken about the life that we see underwater. So in terms of the life that you've seen on your expeditions, what's the variety of animals that you see on the surface?

Yeah, I mean, this is the wonderful thing about going to the North Pole versus going to the South Pole and one of the defining characteristics of the Antarctic Plateau in the centre of Antarctica is the absence of life. I mean, there's no wildlife there. There's no penguins or seals or birds or anything like that. But when you are up in the north, you are surrounded by life,

even if you're right up there in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. And it's not just that you see it, it's that you can feel it all around you from the presence of the big predators, the polar bears, right down to when a big chunk of ice turns over and there's lots of algae and even fish using the algae, I remember being startled by a lemming in my tent when I was...

That'd make you fall off the cliff, did it? That'd be the most ironic day in history. And you're thinking, how does this tiny little thing, you know, manage to survive all the way out here? It's really incredible. Everyone has a polar bear story. Surely every explorer has a polar best story. I've actually narrowed that down.

Everyone has... No, actually, I shouldn't be a bit more. I just wondered, in terms of jeopardy, because you're also find they're big predators. So what's your big predator story? Oh, gosh. Well, I mean, the closest encounter I've had with a polar bear, luckily I was on a snow machine.

So I was driving by myself on a snow machine, past a big area of ice rub off. So that's a machine that goes on snow, not a machine that makes snow. Yeah, a snowmobile, a scadoo, whatever you want to call it. and I was keeping an eye on the ice rubble because that's where the polar bears kind of like to hang out

and I came over a rise to find one sort of stood pretty much right in front of me I was close enough to really see the sort of definition of its muscles I mean these are frightening animals and the number of people that said oh I really want to see a polar bear and it's like you really don't

and so luckily I was on a snowmobile and I knew that I was in a an area where the locals hunted them on snow machines. So I was able just to rev the engine a bit and it got up on its back legs, took a big sniff and, you know, my heart was sort of in my mouth as it's doing this and then it just took off and ran. So I didn't have to even get the rifle off my back. It was a bit warm after that encounter, wasn't it? If you go and work in Svalbard and you go to the UK station in Svalbard, the first thing they do on the first day is they give you a 0.3,000.

75 rifle. And that has bullets that are bigger than anything you've seen in a rifle before. They train you how to shoot it and they give you thunder flashes. So if the polar bear starts coming toward you, you're supposed to throw the thunder flashes between you and the polar bear

and the bangs make it go away. And then they say, if that doesn't happen, then you have a rifle if you can't get away from it in time. And if it worse comes to worse, you have to shoot the polar bear. Now, you're on Norwegian territory and the law says you are not allowed to shoot a polar bear

unless it is less than 10 metres away from you. And a full-size polar bear does 11 meters per second. And then they say the last time one of these was killed, it took three bullets to kill it. So the best advice is if it starts stalking you, get out of three. the way really quickly. Yeah, so if you come across a bear when you're on an expedition, the only responsible thing to do is to get yourself out of there.

Because we are intruders in their territory. My life is less valuable than the bears in that scenario, is what you're telling me. Yes. They are nine feet tall and they are heavier than any two people that you know. So they are massive animals.

Do you ever walk into the kitchen and think, what am I doing here? Or you put your phone down a moment ago, and then it's like... Where is that? New episodes of Science Versus are out now, and in one of them, we're looking into the science of memory, and how you can improve yours. Plus, does the full moon make us go crazy,

how you can reach your goals, the secrets to being happy, and so much more. Just search for Science Versus, that's ScienceVS. Now, we're going to do, because you, I believe, this is true, so you have in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most polar bears shot. No, God, no, we have to hear that. No, you're in the Guinness Book of Records for the most northern-most cocktail party. Yes, that is a Guinness World Records that I currently hold.

So I was on an expedition, and we were right up at 78 degrees north. And so, you know, as you imagine, like polar explorers are in a tent, and all the polar gear with skis and everything else. But in order for it to be considered a cocktail party by the Guinness Book of Record, there's a very specific set of criteria that you have to follow. There has to be at least five people, tick, we were a five-person team.

You have to be in proper cocktail attire. So that is a dress for women. I mean, you know, the Guinness World Records have got something to answer about. And if you're a man, it's a proper lounge suit or a lounge dress, cocktail dress. You have to have music playing. You have to have a table with a tablecloth.

I'm already thinking most of the parties I've ever been to in my life are already not considered a cocktail party by this. You have to have at least three different types of cocktails and you have to have two different types of canopae, one sweet and one savoury. Oh, and it has to last for at least 15 minutes. We had to sort of drink it quickly

before it froze into a sort of bicycle in the bottom of the glass. Of course, it goes straight to your head. How did you defrost the canopays? Oh, I knew you were going to ask that. So the cocktails were ready mixed, and we took them in like these little packages. We had to defrost those by sort of putting them down our fronts. I knew it.

The warmest part. So I want to say, you know, under your armpit is one of the warmest pits and down your pants, whatever. But they were all in class. So that was fine, but the canapes, yeah, our canapes, we had to get inventive using the rations that we had. We're going to now try and create Aurora-based cocktails using a UV light. So what we've got in these glasses here is a gin and tonic. Just to say, because I arrived quite late for this recording.

I have no idea what's going on. Oh, neither do I. Is there some context about why you've got a UV light and some gin? Do you know what, Brian? never complained before when we've found reasons that we can have alcohol in which appear to be tax deductible. So I have a vague memory of something now in some

production meeting a while ago. So this is... So this is... So that there, using a small amount of blue liqueur-style drink, Anna Barocca and a UV light, all of those things you probably receive for Christmas. So just to recap, so this is an elaborate introduction

to the Aurora Borealis. Yeah, what is happening in the atmosphere that creates that kind of, that's the green of the aurora boreals? Yeah, so if we rewind a bit to what the aurora is, so if you imagine the Earth is a big bar magnet, and we have this big magnetic field that spreads all the way around the globe,

and that creates this sort of area of space around the planet called the magnetosphere, and then you have the sun in the middle of the solar system that is constantly sort of emitting this wind of charged particles. So it's this huge amount of charged particles that are cascading from the sun outwards across the whole solar system. And instead of hitting the earth, it hits the magnetosphere. And because these particles are charged, they react with that magnetic field that surrounds the planet. So it acts as a sort of shield. It protects us from the solar wind from all this

radiation. But some of those charged particles sort of get trapped inside the magnetic field of the earth. And if you can imagine sort of around the poles, let's focus on the North Pole, around the North Pole, where the magnetic field lines are sort of going into the top of the planet, all these charged particles that are spinning around all these magnetic field lines are being dragged down towards the surface of the planet around the North Pole. And where those charged particles start getting dragged through the atmosphere, that it starts interacting with other particles that are in the atmosphere. So things like oxygen and nitrogen predominantly.

And so when a charged particle starts interacting with some oxygen, it will start getting really excited and emitting light as photons. And we see that light as green if it's interacting with oxygen. but we'll see it as different colours depending on which gas it's interacting with. And there's so much a part of the Arctic, of the experience, the aurora both north and south. So they've become part of the mythology in the Northern Lights,

part of the cultures of the Arctic. Hugely. The first time I saw the Northern Lights, I knew about the science. I knew how they were caused, according to European science. We have the explanation. And yet sitting there, watching this phenomenon for the first time,

that seemed like the least likely explanation. Magic seemed like a lot more realistic explanation of what I was seeing. I think it's important to say that this is a lot of people's beliefs, and I in no way am sort of sneering or laughing at that because the first time I saw it, that was what I saw. I saw spirits moving across a bridge to another world. And it's reflected in a lot of different cultures. So one of the loveliest stories I heard was actually from First Nation tribes and north of the Great Plains.

And they had a folkloric hero, a mythical hero, almost like a godlike figure, who once he'd finished creating the world, they believed travelled north. and so that he could send a message back to his people that he hadn't forgotten them, he would light a massive fire and this is what the Northern Lights was as a reflection of this massive fire and whenever I see the Northern Lights now

I kind of, that story springs into mind because it really does feel like you're seeing something that connects you not only to people around the world but also connects you to like the solar system and everything beyond that. You know, this is created by something that's come from the sun. It's really incredible. Is it a very, very different experience, being in the Northern Arctic, where you have all

these rich cultural stories, and then the Antarctic, where there's essentially nobody other than scientists? Well, it is massively different because the north is an ocean and the south is a massive continent, a continent twice the size of Australia. And it contains... It's rock underneath it, yeah. And there's no rock at the surface. in the north, it's an ocean. And the Antarctic contains about three quarters of the world's fresh water. So the amount of ice in the Antarctic is absolutely unreal. It's an area the size of Europe that's two miles thick. I'd like to ask about the impact of a climate change on these areas in the Arctic and the Antarctic. So what are we seeing change over the years and decades

that you've visited? So the biggest change, I think, is the loss of ice. So in the Arctic in the 1970s we had 15,000 square kilometres of sea ice and now we've got five and the predictions are that by 2050 in the summer that minimum extent and that's the minimum extent of ice in the Arctic will have gone and it'll be open water in the Arctic so people will be able to sail ships through the Arctic you mentioned earlier the ice turns over and it's green and it's thick green and huge numbers of species live on the underside of that ice including the early life stages of things like polar cod. And lots of organisms depend on that ice for their life cycles.

So the effect on the ecosystem is massive. And all the timings change. And the ability of animals to raise themselves efficiently or even at all becomes a really difficult problem. And we know there are tipping points in the environment. We know there are tipping points, not just in the environment, but in ecosystems. And we, in the polar regions, we don't know. how much we can lose from an ecosystem before it collapses.

Felicity, how does that change in terms of your experience now when you go out and knowing this fragility? How different is it for you? It's really emotionally, I suppose. It's really odd because if you're in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, you know how fragile this environment is. And yet when you're there seeing big blocks of ice, you know, coming up one over the other and size of apartment blocks being just tossed over, you know, it feels anything but fragile when you're in that moment. But it's not just the amount of ice being so much less. It's the fact that what is there now is thinner, newer and less stable than it's ever been before. Whereas, say, in 1969, when Sir Wally Herbert crossed the Arctic Ocean

and became the first team of people to undisputedly get to the top of our planet, get to the North Pole. But, you know, that journey is no longer possible because they did it when there was lots of what we call multi-year ice. So this is the thick stuff. It can be three metres or more. And it's really stable, really strong, and it holds the pack ice together. The last time a polar explorer went from land to the North Pole

across the Arctic Ocean was in 2014. It's not been possible to do it since then. So now it's only possible to do partial journeys to the North Pole. Russell, what are your final thoughts on everything that you've heard today? I always get invited on this program, and I never know anything about the subject. I'm sort of like a student. I have actually seen the Northern Lights,

and I have actually been to the Arctic Circle for a project I was filming. It was a sort of comedy survival program. So I've seen this majestic spectacle. And I was honored, I was invited by the Sami of the people in the northern part of, I think we were in Norway, the Sami. And I went into something called a Lavu, which is their conical-shaped traditional hut. I was invited for dinner. And in this program, I had two YouTubers with me called Rose and Rosie, and they've been

stressing all trip because they were vegetarians. And this, I don't think even word even exists in their language. Eventually we had to try to explain to these type of people what vegetarian was. And when we got there, obviously I eat anything because I'm a moron from a council estate. And when I got there, dinner, you couldn't have done a more comically shocking snack for vegans. It was a boiled reindeer's head, which was out, and everyone was, like, happily picking the bits of meat off. I mean, it just tasted like meat. It just looked, obviously, the eye holes and everything, at these girls were starting to cry and panicking, you know, and the producer's like, is okay, yeah.

And he went, and he was, the translator said, don't worry, he's got something with. without meat for you to. And it was a pancake made from blood. It was delicious. But yeah, I've been there. It's like another planet. It's hard to explain if you haven't done it. The more that we express,

the fascination, the beauty, the curiosity and how much you can fall in love with the possibilities that are there, then the more I think we strive to try and preserve what is there as well. Experiencing what the world has out there it's just way more intense than anything that you can get within a city. And I would say the Northern Lights, the Southern Lights,

that's one of a whole plethora of things and experiences that most people don't get. But if you have experienced them, they become a substantial part of the way you function and the way you live. And it has effects that go beyond what you can get by understanding what it is. Well, we also asked to our audience, By the way, I just tell you, you know the guy I told you about who had one leg who did a poo and then used it as a pickax?

Peter Freikin. Anyway, so we always ask the audience a question because we have the most intelligent audience of any Radio 4 show. And I don't care what you say, Gardner's Question Time. I'll meet you out of the back of the allotments and take you on. With a poo shovel, with a poo shakeout. Is that a poo knife? Call that a poo knife? This is a poo knife.

Where's your talk? It's a very strange remake of Crocodile Dundee. That's not a poo. This is a pooh. So the We have lost audience, if you were going to make a snowman resembling anyone, who would it be

and why? Is that the first one you got? No, it's Hugh Jackman, I think this should be, isn't it? Do you know why? You need to give us more clues. Hugh Jackman, what films has he been in? Wolverine. Yeah. By the way, if you ever want to be a Wolverine at home, just put potato-gratist snowman on a...

The greatest snowman. Yeah. Brian Cox. building a snowman of himself because things can only get meta. Well done. Well done. I think I'll beat that. I'll beat that. Oh, come on, then.

It's not Brian Cox-based. I know you like them to be based on YouTube, but this isn't. I'd build a really big one with a six-pack. It would be the abdominal snowman. Okay, then, well, thank you very much to our wonderful panel. Felicity, Aston, Lloyd Peck and Russell Kay. Next week, it's where it's 2026. and we're going to be taking a bit of a break so Brian can tour the world and I can watch every episode of the professionals on daytime TV

because I've always seen myself as a bit of a Martin Shorty or Lewis Collins. I think he's more cowley, don't you? Yeah, I think of a woolly jumper and an ice-old. He doesn't have a woolly jump, we've got tweedy jackets, like you've never seen the show. Tweety jacket and a scotch and a jag. That's what I see you. Oh, okay, well, thanks very much.

That's all the daily, isn't. Anyway, as we're having a bit of a break, this week's homework is a 500-word. essay on how Archimedia's principles affect the flotation of Brian's ivory bath ducks or for the more adventurous among you using balsa wood, paper straws, three glass marbles and one item of your own choosing make a perpetual motion machine and send it to BBC TV centre Wood Lane. I'm sorry but we're unable to

return your perpetual motion machines if you return them back again and so on and so on and so on. Bye! Bye! Turned out to travel in the infinite monkey cage. Turned that nice again. Political language can seem archaic. It's like the light from one of those stars that actually died. Sometimes bamboozling. It's a theme park with a five-foot log flume from one thought to another.

And very often, beyond words. I don't mean how to describe the language I use. I'm a man to unity. I'm all reset and turbocharged to stress, test to destruction, used and abused buzzwords and phrases from the world of politics. I come with a dazzling array of guest presenters and I'll be exploring the verbal tricks of the political trade, the intentions behind them and the effect they have on all of us. The new series of Strong Message Here with me, Amanda Yonucci from BBC Radio 4.

Listen now on BBC Science. Do you ever walk into the kitchen and think, what am I doing here? Or you put your phone down a moment ago and then it's... It's like... Where is that? New episodes of Science Verses are out now, and in one of them, we're looking into the science of memory

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