tuesday morning december 1st
uh
normally
9am we have the flights to south pole
from mcmurdo where we're here
but that's really normal
anything could happen mcmurdo certainly
doesn't feel as much as south pole in
terms of isolation and in the middle of
nowhereness it's a mix between a mining
town
and a student's town or a student campus
but it you know it has a lot of
amazement when you get there for the
first time well i don't know if you can
notice but i'm actually retracing my
steps from just five minutes ago
turns out our flight is not going after
all
at least the good news that means we get
to go
on top of observation hill
and take in the
beautiful view
john what time is it let me check this
is my watch
uh yeah it's 9 20.
thank you son
so we're gonna go up
to here there
we should have a really nice view of all
of my town
and
the ice shelf
it's actually a really beautiful day
it's not always like this in mcmurdo you
can have quite overcast days although
i'm wearing this big red jacket it was
quite warm so now we're getting to the
top of observation hill
the view that we're starting is looking
pretty much north actually pretty sweet
view
sweet ass we're looking north towards
mount erebus and towards the ice shelf
so this is permanent ice that's flowing
from the continent and there's two
permanent
ski ways there there's one called
pegasus and one called willy field and
willy field is a big deal because that's
also the direction where they have the
balloon launches so they have a place
that is dedicated to launching these
long-duration balloons that
circumnavigate the whole entire
continent and supposedly if everything
goes well lands right there next to
mcmurdo again and then as we turn around
now we're looking towards the royal
society range which is a big range of
mountains that you have to cross if you
want to go towards the south pole that's
the direction of the south pole now
we're looking at the sea ice and this
sea ice will eventually melt towards the
heat of the summer in december january
and icebreakers will be able to come
through and resupply mcmurdo now we're
looking towards mcmurdo which looks like
a relatively ugly mining town all of the
buildings are different colors and now
we've turned all the way around and
we're back looking towards the north
and towards the north there's this
really big really impressive
mountain which is actually a volcano and
it's mount arabis and if you look
carefully you can see a little plume of
smoke on the top of erebus because it's
actually active and it just looks like a
big frozen volcano
wow
this is cool it's in four languages
there's actually a big cross that marks
the top of the hill and the cross
essentially commemorates the sad's
journey of sir robert falcon scots who
reached the south pole a month after
roald amundsen and unfortunately didn't
make it back so if you'd like to find
out more about antarctica in particular
some voyages in the early 1900s why not
go to my other channel objectivity there
we've done some great videos with some
great old photos black and white photos
from antarctica we'll explain this map
and we'll even show you some letters
written by captain scott
because i'm a bit strange like that is
this
i'm speculating that that might be his
thumbprint yeah well if he if he managed
to get it in the ink as he was writing
that that could easily be so this is
observation hill which is a landmark you
can see behind oh okay a whole bunch of
uh sleeping penguins there i imagine uh
yes you could put it that way