Seasickness, spotting icebergs and keeping the crew fed: Life on board an Antarctic expedition
The British research ship the RRS Sir David Attenborough has travelled through an area of Antarctica that would have been impassable 30 years ago at this time of year.
That's because the area the ship navigates with ease would have been solid ice.
No other British ship has made the journey since the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Endurance expedition, when his ship became trapped in the pack ice and sank in 1915.
Fast forward 110 years - after global warming has caused the ice to melt - and ITV News Science Correspondent Martin Stew is the only journalist on board the British ship.
From the chef keeping crew members fed to the captain keeping a lookout for icebergs, he speaks to those on board about what life is like on an Antarctic expedition.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ITV News
a day ago
- ITV News
Astronaut Jim Lovell, who led Apollo 13 moon mission, dies age 97
For all his astronomical accomplishments, it is the failed Apollo 13 mission for which James 'Jim' Lovell will always be remembered by, as ITV News Reporter Ian Woods reports. Jim Lovell, commander of the 1970 Apollo 13 mission, has died at the age of 97. The astronaut helped turn the failed moon landing into triumph by getting back to Earth safely after an oxygen tank exploded. Nasa confirmed Lovell died on Thursday in Lake Forest, Illinois. In a statement on Friday, the space agency said: 'Jim's character and steadfast courage helped our nation reach the moon and turned a potential tragedy into a success from which we learned an enormous amount. "We mourn his passing even as we celebrate his achievements.' One of Nasa's most traveled astronauts in the agency's first decade, Lovell flew four times on Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13. In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders was the first to leave Earth's orbit and the first to fly to and circle the moon. They could not land, but they put the US ahead of the Soviets in the space race. Two years later, Lovell would face his toughest mission, in April 1970 when Apollo 13's service module carrying Lovell and two others experienced a sudden oxygen tank explosion. Lovell's mission to become the fifth man to walk on the moon, soon became a rescue mission. The astronauts barely survived as they turned the module around and headed back to Earth spending four cold and clammy days in the cramped luna capsule. ''The thing that I want most people to remember is [that] in some sense, it was very much of a success,'' Lovell said during a 1994 interview. ''Not that we accomplished anything, but a success in that we demonstrated the capability of [Nasa] personnel.'' A retired Navy captain known for his calm demeanor, Lovell told a Nasa historian that his brush with death did affect him. 'I don't worry about crises any longer,' he said in 1999. Whenever he has a problem, 'I say, 'I could have been gone back in 1970. I'm still here. I'm still breathing.' So, I don't worry about crises.' And the mission's retelling in the popular 1995 movie 'Apollo 13' brought Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert renewed fame, thanks in part to Lovell's movie persona, played by film star Tom Hanks, reporting "Houston, we have a problem." Lovell recalled the oxygen tank exploding was 'the most frightening moment in this whole thing.' Then oxygen began escaping and 'we didn't have solutions to get home.' 'We knew we were in deep, deep trouble,' he told Nasa's historian. Four-fifths of the way to the moon, Nasa scrapped the mission. Suddenly, their only goal was to survive. Lovell's "Houston, we've had a problem," a variation of a comment Swigert had radioed moments before, became famous. In Hanks' version, it became "Houston, we have a problem." The loss of the opportunity to walk on the moon "is my one regret," Lovell said in a 1995 interview with The Associated Press. President Bill Clinton agreed when he awarded Lovell the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1995. "While you may have lost the moon... you gained something that is far more important perhaps: the abiding respect and gratitude of the American people," he said. In all, Lovell flew four space missions — and until the Skylab flights of the mid-1970s, he held the world record for the longest time in space with 715 hours, 4 minutes and 57 seconds. Aboard Apollo 8, Lovell described the oceans and land masses of Earth. "What I keep imagining, is if I am some lonely traveler from another planet, what I would think about the Earth at this altitude, whether I think it would be inhabited or not," he remarked. In a statement, his family hailed him as their 'hero.' 'We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humor, and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible,' his family said. 'He was truly one of a kind.'
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
The Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix review – how trees rule the world
When was the last time you stopped to say thank you to a tree? Perhaps it's something we should do more often. After all, we owe them everything, from the air we breathe to the soil beneath our feet, and far less obvious things too. We have trees to thank for the swirl of our fingerprints, our posture, and possibly even our dreams. In her new book, British tree science consultant Harriet Rix presents trees as an awesome force of nature, a force that has, over time, 'woven the world into a place of great beauty and extraordinary variety'. How have trees done this? And can they really be said to possess 'genius'? If you think of life first emerging from the sea, hundreds of millions of years ago, you might picture something like the Tiktaalik, a human-sized floppy-footed fish that hauled itself out of the shallows some time in the Late Devonian. But the evolutionary eureka moment arguably came long before that, when one lucky green alga washed up on the Cambrian shore and managed to survive the deadly UV light on land. 'Plants learning to survive and use UV light was a thunderbolt,' writes Rix. It 'allowed a whole new chemistry to emerge, root and branch, in a whole new place: dry land … Safe from predators, who for the moment were left in the sea behind them, these photosynthesising cells started on a path that led to the amazing complexity of trees.' Viewed on cosmic fast forward, as part of 'a strange, apparently accelerated world, in which continents drift around like rubber ducks, bumping into one another', trees seem almost godlike, using their biochemical wizardry to transform the Earth from a stony, storm-ravaged wasteland into a place where life could thrive. They broke barren rock into soil, canalised flood waters into rivers, pumped oxygen into the atmosphere, and turned the desert green. Element by element, trees have learned to control water, air, fire and the ground beneath us, as well as fungi, plants, animals, and even people, shaping them according to their own 'tree-ish' agenda. Some fairly knotty chunks of biochemistry and evolutionary history are smoothed by lush descriptions of contemporary habitats as Rix travels the world, from the cloud forests of La Gomera to the junipers of Balochistan. She is an intrepid and erudite guide. Despite the title, this is not a book that gives much weight to questions of tree consciousness or intelligence. It doesn't stop to consider whether our leafy friends have feelings. Rix acknowledges that the early work of Suzanne Simard – whose research into resource exchange between trees via underground mycelial networks gave rise to the concept of the wood wide web – was 'beautiful field science' and 'immensely compelling', but she gives short shrift to subsequent anthropomorphic claims that trees 'talk' or 'love' or 'mother' one another. 'Putting a nurturing mammalian face on to the giants of the forest was also a massive betrayal of the complexities of an organism that could be thousands of years old,' she writes. 'Thinking of the 5,000 years in which Methuselah [a storied bristlecone pine] has had to negotiate existence makes simple narratives about the gentle exchange of nourishing sugars seem astoundingly trite.' What, then, is the genius of trees? Rix locates it in the elegant solutions they have devised to the constantly changing riddle of life. It's a genius you can smell in the rich terpenes given off by trees to seed clouds, generating rain and expanding their own habitats. It's a genius you can taste in the sweet fruit that makes animals do trees' bidding, and arguably gave our simian ancestors their brains. It's a vast, generative genius that has nurtured our own. Our clever fingers – and fingerprints – evolved to grip their branches. Our dreams were born in the safe, fragrant nests we built in their canopies. This is why, Rix argues, we find the smell of wood so comforting, and why we like to press our noses between the pages of books. Genius is too small a word for all of this. The Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix is published by Vintage (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
The Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix review – how trees rule the world
When was the last time you stopped to say thank you to a tree? Perhaps it's something we should do more often. After all, we owe them everything, from the air we breathe to the soil beneath our feet, and far less obvious things too. We have trees to thank for the swirl of our fingerprints, our posture, and possibly even our dreams. In her new book, British tree science consultant Harriet Rix presents trees as an awesome force of nature, a force that has, over time, 'woven the world into a place of great beauty and extraordinary variety'. How have trees done this? And can they really be said to possess 'genius'? If you think of life first emerging from the sea, hundreds of millions of years ago, you might picture something like the Tiktaalik, a human-sized floppy-footed fish that hauled itself out of the shallows some time in the Late Devonian. But the evolutionary eureka moment arguably came long before that, when one lucky green alga washed up on the Cambrian shore and managed to survive the deadly UV light on land. 'Plants learning to survive and use UV light was a thunderbolt,' writes Rix. It 'allowed a whole new chemistry to emerge, root and branch, in a whole new place: dry land … Safe from predators, who for the moment were left in the sea behind them, these photosynthesising cells started on a path that led to the amazing complexity of trees.' Viewed on cosmic fast forward, as part of 'a strange, apparently accelerated world, in which continents drift around like rubber ducks, bumping into one another', trees seem almost godlike, using their biochemical wizardry to transform the Earth from a stony, storm-ravaged wasteland into a place where life could thrive. They broke barren rock into soil, canalised flood waters into rivers, pumped oxygen into the atmosphere, and turned the desert green. Element by element, trees have learned to control water, air, fire and the ground beneath us, as well as fungi, plants, animals, and even people, shaping them according to their own 'tree-ish' agenda. Some fairly knotty chunks of biochemistry and evolutionary history are smoothed by lush descriptions of contemporary habitats as Rix travels the world, from the cloud forests of La Gomera to the junipers of Balochistan. She is an intrepid and erudite guide. Despite the title, this is not a book that gives much weight to questions of tree consciousness or intelligence. It doesn't stop to consider whether our leafy friends have feelings. Rix acknowledges that the early work of Suzanne Simard – whose research into resource exchange between trees via underground mycelial networks gave rise to the concept of the wood wide web – was 'beautiful field science' and 'immensely compelling', but she gives short shrift to subsequent anthropomorphic claims that trees 'talk' or 'love' or 'mother' one another. 'Putting a nurturing mammalian face on to the giants of the forest was also a massive betrayal of the complexities of an organism that could be thousands of years old,' she writes. 'Thinking of the 5,000 years in which Methuselah [a storied bristlecone pine] has had to negotiate existence makes simple narratives about the gentle exchange of nourishing sugars seem astoundingly trite.' What, then, is the genius of trees? Rix locates it in the elegant solutions they have devised to the constantly changing riddle of life. It's a genius you can smell in the rich terpenes given off by trees to seed clouds, generating rain and expanding their own habitats. It's a genius you can taste in the sweet fruit that makes animals do trees' bidding, and arguably gave our simian ancestors their brains. It's a vast, generative genius that has nurtured our own. Our clever fingers – and fingerprints – evolved to grip their branches. Our dreams were born in the safe, fragrant nests we built in their canopies. This is why, Rix argues, we find the smell of wood so comforting, and why we like to press our noses between the pages of books. Genius is too small a word for all of this. The Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix is published by Vintage (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
