Antarctica today is a hotbed of scientific activity.
Scientists are shooting weather balloons into space, hunting for galactic particles, and
flying across the continent to chart our changing climate.
But over 60 years ago, Antarctica was a blanket of unknowns, a territory that was a siren
song for adventure junkies and pioneering scientists.
And in the midst of the Cold War, international peace was forged on the ice.
It was very, very reconnaissance.
There hadn't really been serious scientific research done across the continent.
But countries came together, we were actually able to unfreeze the international relations
between east and west.
This is David Drewry, a renowned glaciologist and former director of the Scott Polar Research
Institute.
He’s even got a mountain named after him.
As a young scientist, David participated in hundreds of groundbreaking flights across
Antarctica.
We really wanted to understand what the climate was like, as opposed to understanding how
the climate had changed.
While conducting research, David filmed his experience, and we asked him to digitize a
roll of cine film, which hasn’t seen the light of day... until now.
Those rocks those mountains, it's just one of those magical parts of the world.
At one point, Antarctica was primed for conquest , but the international community stepped
in to make the continent politically neutral.
From 1957-1958, scientists worked side by side.
We thought some of the scientists were rubbish.
Look at them, all they're doing is studying theses little sort of tiny mosses.
I mean, who could possibly get interested in that?
And they joked about, "What are they doing flying around in these airplanes?"
A lot of good hearted scientific joshing.
Thanks to friendly competition and collaboration, techniques like radio glaciology, which uses
radar to map the ice, became vetted scientific methods.
This film was the foundation of our field.
I mean, at a base-line level they were showing that you can look through four kilometers
of ice with a radar pulse, and see what the bottom of the continent looks like.
But the real breakthrough was in the recording system, invented by a radio glaciologist named
Stan Evans who flew with David.
So what Stan did was to get a camera with a piece of 35mm film that would slowly pass
over the oscilloscope, the film integrated the signal.
And with the film continuously moving across it, you built up a profile.
We'd do our activity and then, at the end of the flight, we'd come back to McMurdo.
We could socialize, get a drink.
We would go to the mess hall.
Steaks, lobster, fresh salads would be flown in from New Zealand.
We went to the Russian station at Vostok, it's the coldest place on earth.
The best thing was, a glass of vodka, nostrovia, and you're pals forever.
You have to remember just how hostile the Antarctic is.
And once you're working and doing all of these things, if anything goes wrong, it goes badly
wrong and it goes badly wrong very quickly.
But thanks to these intrepid scientists & radar profiles, a whole new world of lakes, valleys,
and mountain ranges were uncovered.
The whole object has been to build up this picture of the ice sheet and what lies beneath
it.
These techniques are still being used today, inspiring the next generation, like Dusty
Schroeder, a Stanford radio-glaciologist.
Decades after these radar films were taken, Dustin is embarking on a massive digitization
project to see if there’s new information to mine.
There were thousands of reels that we then combined together.
We bought this used Hollywood equipment off eBay, and we would splice them together and
tape them, put them onto the scanner and digitize them.
That produced about 2 million images that we're now processing through.
These radargrams are like slices of the ice sheet, and can show how an ice shelf has changed.
These two radar grams are of lake Vostok, they're the same film.
You can see the outline of the bottom of the bed of the ice sheet, you can see the lake.
This is how we knew the lake was there, this is how we knew layers were drying down and
melting was happening.
It was a huge piece of our understanding of one the largest lakes on earth.
These films are extending our record of the history of the ice sheet by almost 4 decades.
And this invaluable data can now help us better project Antarctica’s future.
Trying to predict how the ice sheets gonna behave over the next few decades is challenging,
it's one of the big tasks.
The hope with this whole collection of data is just to give a window into anywhere where
we were lucky enough to have had data collected at that period, to be able to compare how
that's changed from then to now.
I think it's fantastic that he's been able to now use different techniques to capture
all the information.
Antarctica has been, and remains an absolutely cornerstone element in understanding global
environmental processes.
So the more historic information we have, the better.