Endurance: Surviving Antarctica | Interview with Chris Turney | 6
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From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel and this is Against the Odds.

Over the last five episodes, we've told the story of two different expeditions on the Antarctic continent: Ernest Shackleton's Endurance Expedition and Henry Worsley's journey to try and reach the South Pole. Today, we're talking to Chris Turney, a scientist, explorer, and the author of 1912, the year the world discovered Antarctica. He has not only read pretty much everything written by Shackleton and his crew, but he's also been to Antarctica.

His book, Iced In, is his own harrowing story about when his scientific ship was trapped on the ice in Antarctica. Chris is also the director of the Earth and Sustainability Science Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Chris, I'm so excited to talk to you today. Oh, it's great to be speaking to you. I've really enjoyed the series. I've been so fascinated with this story and learning about Ernest Shackleton and what he went through, not just on the Endurance, but his two missions before. And you are one of the experts. I want to talk to you about your own adventures on the ice, which is so crazy. But first, I want to know more about Shackleton. You know so much about his expeditions.

When did you first hear of Ernest Shackleton and what interested you about him? Oh, look, I think Shackleton for me was really started when I was a child. And I think for many people, it was seeing the incredible photos from the expedition. And there's one that I remember particularly just stood out. And it was this extraordinary image of the endurance locked up in the sea ice against a pitch dark night.

in that freezing winter night, just sort of defiant against the pack ice. And it was, of course, a photo taken by Frank Hurley. And it just captured a whole range of those amazing emotions being down in Antarctica without even having been there. You know, the danger, the sense of isolation,

And as a young boy, I was just like, wow, what is that? It's a place so far away and unknown. When you're a kid, you're like, wow, someday I hope to get to Antarctica and experience this beauty, this intensity. I think it captures it so much from so many of us. You know, we've never been there. Most of us have never been there. And yet you can be there through these incredible photos. Amazing. I love that.

I think the story of the endurance is probably one of the most heroic against the odds stories in history. How many days was he out there on the ice? Oh, you could not make this up. You really couldn't. It was just...

amazing to think they were actually trapped in the ice for 452 days oh wow that's just extraordinary that's 15 months we had two Christmases in the ice wow and at one level that sounds harrowing in its own right but just try to imagine what that was like a century ago that was

That was off the map. That was the awarding equivalent of space travel. If you opened an atmosphere just over a century ago, the bottom third of the southern hemisphere was just blank. I mean, it's like a junk, just this unexplored region. No one's going to come and get you. No one knows where you are. And here they are out there, trapped and really just completely reliant to one another to get home safe.

And you find out at that point whether you work well with others or whether you don't. There's no, oh, so-and-so is not behaving themselves. You are completely reliant on decisions that were made like a month, a year and a half, two years before the events take place. And of course, for Shackleton...

But that selection of the men was so important and it was directed a huge amount by his experiences in Antarctica with his two other expeditions. And those experiences about what sort of people get on together, it's a bit of a dark art, you know, about how people will get together, how they'll cope with one another, that range of skills.

And Shackleton was just a master at putting these teams together. Yeah, he seemed to be such a calm and positive leader, which says so much, truly, about leading such an expedition. Can you talk about those first two? What do you think he learned?

Well, I think one of the key things here is the fact that actually you've got to be positive. Even today, you don't have to be trapped in your eyes to get a sense of that. Hearing people are always negative. It's poison, right? You can't have those people in your head. And when you're in a dangerous situation, the implication that they might not survive or something might be delayed is enough to put some people at risk.

So having people who can keep one another entertained, the comedians, the serious people, the organisers,

That's an incredible mix to bring together with then all the skills that you need to actually survive down there as well. Let's talk a little about the heroic age of exploration. When was that and what does it mean? It's so hard to imagine because we open the atlases now. You see Antarctica, there's satellite images. You get these beautiful movies. And at one level, it seems so real and close, but another way, it seems so alien.

But over a century ago, there was really very little known about it. And there were arguments about whether there was one continent, was there even a continent at all? And so in the late 19th century, these expeditions started coming down. They were a combination of governments or just complete eccentrics who just decided they were going to go down and try to make sense of what was down there and maybe get a name for themselves, claim a bit of land for their country, etc.

find out the scientific uh uh uh what white matters scientifically and uh and shackleton was one of these groups with the amazing uh with scott with the amazing arminson as well the norwegian explorer sir douglas mawson from australia uh nobu shirazi from japan there are all these amazing people who went down

in about a 20, 30 year period. And they all knew each other or knew of each other. It was an amazing time, just this really intense, you know, you get those moments in history where something happens and half a dozen characters in history all know each other. And then it's just a once in a ever opportunity and then nothing ever happens like it again. And they were all going down there trying to find out what this place was, what was off the map.

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As you said, there were so many explorers during that time. Robert Scott, who died trying to reach the pole. Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer who was actually the first to reach the South Pole. But Shackleton really stands out.

Why do you think that is? Why do you think Shackleton's endurance mission still captivates the public? I think it's really survival against impossible odds. This is such an extraordinary story. It keeps getting worse. It's on steroids. This story just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And he just meets each challenge face on and takes his men with him as well. It's not something like he's gone rogue.

He takes everyone with him and they survive. And I think that optimism, the hope, the self-belief without being arrogant with it, those are ideals that really resonate today. And particularly, you know, actually, I think arguably we need a more than ever now. So the South Pole had been reached. What was Shackleton's inspiration to go back?

Yeah, well, I mean, gosh, he got tantalisingly close. I mean, here we are. In the Nimrod expedition, he was 97 miles short of his goal. And then he came out in 1909 and then

Just a few years later, Armisen and Scott both get there within a month of each other. So with Armisen and Scott getting to the South Pole, the question was, what was down there? And so the big challenge was to try to cross that space. And that was Shackleton's Endurance Expedition in a nutshell, to cross from one end to the other and actually find out what's out there. And so

One of the big challenges was actually getting down and actually reporting back to the world what lay down there. And that was what Shackleton's dream was to actually achieve. Could he come back and actually reveal what was effectively an entirely new continent to the planet? I mean, that's amazing, right? I mean, this is just over a century ago and the whole continent was being discovered. Wow. That's just incredible. It is. It's remarkable.

I'm curious, what were they facing out there each day from sunup to sundown? Oh, gosh, where do you start? I mean, it's dizzying what they had to face, isn't it? I mean, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. And it's almost something that you actually just expect after a while. And you just go with it. You have to go with it. You can't be too rigid.

I mean, this is something where everything seemed to go wrong. I mean, they headed into the Weddell Sea at the bottom end of the Atlantic in the Endurance. They knew there was a lot of sea ice from the whalers in South Georgia and Griffican. And it just went from bad to worse. And there was a big storm and they got swept into the sea ice.

And then they were trapped. And no matter what they tried to do, they just couldn't get out. And at first they were surviving on the ship. And it would freeze overnight, of course. But then when they were trapped in the ice and then the endurance sank and, oh, you read Shackleton's diaries, he just says, I can't write about it anymore. I mean, that whole thing of his hopes, his dreams, his future, the chances that people die were all bound up in that boat. And there it is just disappearing into thin air.

into the deeps. I mean, that's just, you just feel for the man and you think, oh my gosh. And at that moment, he just turns to the men and recognises they're thinking that and some, and he just says, well, now we just get out of here.

we just go home. It's just like, and all the diaries say, oh my gosh, we're going home. And it's that whole sense of being proactive and wanting to do something about it. But of course it was months and months they were trapped in there. I mean, you've got the ever-shifting sea ice, the cracks in the ice. There were several times where it looked like the camp was about to get crushed.

So Shackleton had all the supplies on the boats in case they get out, they have to move suddenly, but he knows they're going to die if that happens because they're nowhere near to being able to get everyone away safely. So you've got this constant risk of wildlife. You've got the sea leopards, which we looked at. And of course, you've got, less politically correct now, the killer whales or the orcas prowling around, looking for them, confusing them for penguins. And then, of course, the other side is that actually,

he's got to manage the men and there's something i know we'll talk a lot more about but that whole sense of keeping them optimistic and positive and actually sometimes not even catching enough wildlife as food because the sheer act of just doing that and laying down lots of supplies implies that you're going to be there a long time and someone giving up and so that's a fun juggle as well they might all starve to death but in the short term if they lose hope they're going to die anyway so

oh, the man must have aged terribly. What he went through was just extraordinary. The burden. Wow. I know from his journal, he was always worried about the men's spirits. And what do you think the biggest struggle was for them? Was it all those ailments or was it that mental toughness that they all had to kind of try and work through? I think that mental toughness

aspect of it the mental health issue is probably the biggest challenge of it all i mean we just talked about all these incredible challenges of sea ice or wildlife or weather conditions but the actual dealing with human beings in this remote isolated environment who are fundamentally scared witless

And then how you manage that, that's extremely difficult. We've all been in situations at home where you're in a social environment and someone's in a bad place or things aren't working quite right. People start chatting away, maybe a worst case interpretation is made and suddenly you start getting splits within the group. I mean, that's at work or business or at home or whatever. Now amplify that and some in Antarctica.

And you've got the challenge that if this group breaks apart, they're all going to die. There's only limited resources. You can't start fighting over things. There has to be a single point. You're kind of a committee. You've got to have someone who's making decisions. People fundamentally trusting. There's lots of everyone happy and you can't afford for them to collapse and start fighting and arguing or whatever.

But I think that diary entry is a way of almost grounding him, actually dealing with the fact that he's got to keep focus on that above everything else. So is there anything that stands out to you about any of the entries? I mean, the incredible thing was actually the men kept diaries. They were actually, it was actually part of Shackleton's strategy, I think, for keeping them busy. But also he wanted it to write the book.

And the amazing thing is when you look at these diaries and you see them, that the overriding impression you get, beyond all the extraordinary awful things that they endured, was that they seemed to be genuinely happy. That's incredible, isn't it? They could die at any moment and they all seem happy. There's this wonderful scene where one of the expedition doctors, Macklin, he's on a sledging trip with one of the sailors called Cheetham.

And this is when the endurance is trapped in the, in the eyes. Um,

And he asks the doctor, he says, oh, do you think they're better off than the king? And the doctor looks at him quizzically and Cheatham turns around to him and says, well, I'm happy, doctor, and you're happy. And here we are sitting on a sledge driving smoothly home and looking at the wonders of the world. It goes into your soul, like, don't it, doctor? The king with all his might and all his power couldn't come here and enjoy what I'm enjoying.

That's just inspirational. You know, this sense of, this is amazing. We're here. We could die tomorrow, but that's okay. This is incredible. I mean, wow. Yeah, that is incredible how they can be that optimistic given the circumstances.

Obviously, every great leader has confidants and people who help them. Shackleton had three. There was Frank Worsley, his captain, Frank Wilde, who had been with him on all three of his expeditions. Can we talk a little bit about the relationships he had with each one? What was Frank Worsley like? He was, of course, a distant relative of Henry Worsley, whose story we also told.

Yes, that's right. Frank Worsley was a New Zealand skipper. He was naturally a bit of a joker, I think. He wasn't quite such a great leader as Shackleton, but he was someone who was generally good fun to be around, but an incredible navigator, as we see through the story. And complete chance that Shackleton had him on the expedition. The story goes that Worsley was...

Had a dream the night before he met Shackleton that he was going down one of the streets in London, ducking and diving between the icebergs, and then sees the advert on the doorway and steps in and offers his services. I mean, that's an extraordinary chance encounter. So Frank Worsley was just this man that ended up becoming absolutely critical to the men's survival. And who would have anticipated just how important he was?

Wow. And let's talk about Frank Wilde a little bit. What was he like and what role did he play in Shackleton's journey? Frank Wilde is one of the great unsung heroes of a heroic era. This was a man who just isn't really known nearly enough for what he did. He actually had known Shackleton the longest. He was with Shackleton on Scott's expedition, the Discovery expedition, when they first went south. And they just got on really well.

And so when Shackleton decided he was going to go down on an in-broad expedition and Shackleton recognised this incredibly strong, reliable, relatively short man, but just kept going and took him to the pole or to 97 miles of it.

And Frank Wilde was arguably the person that Shackleton relied on the most, who spoke to him the most. But then almost as soon as Wilde comes out from the Nimrod expedition, he heads south again on this other expedition with Sir Douglas Mawson and goes down there to Antarctica for another year and then comes out and then goes south with Shackleton. And he was backwards and forwards the whole time. It was absolutely amazing.

And so Frank Wilde was the one person that Shackleton knew he could trust to try to keep the men together on Elephant Island. He was just there. He was almost like the rock that Shackleton relied upon. Incredible man.

Oh, wow. And finally, there's Frank Hurley, who we didn't talk about a lot in the series, but Shackleton had an immense respect for him. First, let's just talk about the incredible feat he accomplished in documenting that journey in photos and film from 1914 through 1916. What kind of equipment did he bring and what images did he capture?

Yeah, Hurley was a rising star. He'd actually been south on that Australian Antarctic expedition, the one with Sir Douglas Balls, and the same one that Frank Wilde went on.

And he created this incredible documentary film called The Home of a Blizzard. And as a result, it made a lot of money. And Shackleton's expeditions were always on the smell of an oily rag. And selling a documentary or a movie was one way of recouping some of the costs. I mean, you're talking millions of dollars in equivalent money today.

Shackleton really wanted Hurley and Hurley was dedicated to the art. I mean, he would hang off the top of ships' masts and get that photo that was so desperately needed, would take the movies but were required to capture that

being there, that real sense of being there. And the technology was really, I mean, it's really early stuff. Most of the photos he took were what we call glass plates, which seems incredible now. I've had a bit of a play myself with them over the times. And, you know, you'd have a camera like a Kodak Eastman and you'd have a plate that would be six by seven, something like that. And it was just like a sheet of glass for a window.

and painted on the side was the chemicals. And you could only take two shots at a time. You had to go into your sleeping bag or whatever in darkness to change them and wrap them up again before they got exposed to the light.

And he took most of his photos with these glass plates, these Kodak cameras, what we call sort of probably medium format today. And they're incredibly heavy. And there's this wonderful scene where they've left these photos of glass plates on the Endurance and they were sealed in these boxes and the ship's going down or just about to go down.

Hurley insists on going back to get them. He basically said, we just have to get these back because they tell our story. And he plunges naked from the waist up into this freezing water to pull out these boxes, these crates of photos, and brings them back to Shackleton.

And there's something like 400 of these glass shots. And Shackleton knows that weight is absolute premium. If they're going to drag boats across the ice, they've got to keep the weight to a bare minimum. And so there's this fantastic scene where they're sitting down together and they're just looking at photos together because he's developed them and deciding which ones are going to keep.

And then those ones they're not going to keep. Shackleton smashes them in front of her. Wow. Because he knows. He's Australian. He was just so determined. When you're hiring, time is of the essence. That's why more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide use Indeed to find exceptional talent fast. Indeed's powerful matching engine works quickly. So quickly that according to Indeed data worldwide, every minute 23 hires are made on Indeed.

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Shackleton's got to keep the men busy, they've got to be trying to find a way home and can't just ruminate on the awful situation they find themselves in. So when the ship goes down, when the insurance goes down, he decides they're going to try to drag the boats to land. And part of it was an act of keeping the men busy, but there's also a hope that they might actually be able to find a way through. Now, when you imagine sea ice,

if people can imagine that, it's not just like an ice rink at all, where it's all flat. This is ice which is moving around the currents, the winds, it's rafting up on top of each other. Sometimes it looks almost like a bombed out city. It's just a mess. And you're trying to find a route through this and it's moving at the same time. And Chipie McNish was the carpenter, who was a wee bit older than the rest of the men.

And basically he called what everyone else knew, which was it was hopeless. And he was just exhausted. And the men were sinking into the snow down to their hips. They were sodden. They were freezing or starving. And they were barely moving a couple of miles a day. And they had to make eight plus miles a day if it had any chance at all. And they were exhausted. And they'd done it for a few days. And basically, Chippy McNeesh effectively just says, I've had enough.

I'm not doing this. I'm stopping. This is crazy. And he complains to Worsley and Worsley doesn't know what to do with it. And basically Worsley goes and finds Shackleton and Shackleton hauls him over coals. You know, this is, we can't do this. If people start challenging his authority, there's no chance they're going to get out of this alive. But at the same time, Shackleton knows they ain't going anywhere fast. They can't keep doing this.

but he can't let Chippy seem to be calling the shots and basically reads out the riot act. And effectively, Chippy's argument is, look, the ship's gone. I signed up to be on the ship. The ship's gone. So therefore, I don't need to take your orders anymore. And Shackleton, again, had kind of anticipated that there might be a risk of this, that actually he would need men

off the boat. I don't think he anticipated sinking, you know, but if you're on shore in Antarctica, you need the men who are on the ship. And so I'd written this clause into the contract and very publicly read out to everyone

that they were still under his orders and were his orders. They would be paid because there were a lot of rumours in the diaries about all the brief moments where they're saying, are we getting paid for all this? I mean, people are worried about that and thinking about that. Even though we might die, am I getting paid? Not in this kind of rubbish situation, I'm not even getting paid.

Exactly. I could feel him on that, too. I think everyone can a little bit. And Shackleton calls him out on it and publicly rebukes him. And then privately, there's some suggestions, privately he pulled him aside and threatened to shoot him if he didn't actually get it to life. Wow, I didn't know that. And Chippy never crossed him again after that, so I suspect there's an element of truth in that. But he was an amazing carpenter, and to be honest, again,

And the diaries and entries afterwards and the books all sing their praises about how amazing he was as a carpenter. But Shackleton never forgave him. And at the time, he actually says, I can never forgive him for what he did. He saw it as one of his biggest, if not the biggest threat. And at the end, most of the men were given what they called an Antarctic medal for their survival. And Chippy, in spite of all he'd done,

didn't get the Antarctic medal. That was one that just didn't get it. So Shackleton saw it as a real risk. Wow. Interesting. I didn't know that. That's super interesting. Can we also talk about the Drake's Passage?

Oh, God. Oh, my God. I think you've been there, haven't you? You've been across it. I have a little... In a tour boat kind of ship, but nothing that can compare to what I'm sure you and obviously what they've been through. We went through like a Category 10 storm. It was 60 mile per hour winds and 30 foot waves. And it was pretty...

It was pretty scary. So, yeah, I'm curious to hear your take on this. Oh, I'm on the Drake's Passage. I won't say I'm envious. I've never done the Drake's Passage. I've flown over it. I've skirted the edge of the boat. Well, I went to South Georgia a few years back, but that was rough enough for me. So now it's famous. There's this fantastic old sealer's saying that below 40 degrees, there is no law. Below 50 degrees, there is no God.

It's just this incredible, evocative image because it's so wild. I mean, it's where the westerly winds, that's the centre of these powerful winds, are blowing around Antarctica almost continuously. And they're furious. They call it the Furious Fifties. And it's basically because the continent is surrounded by ocean. There's almost no land at all to stop the wind.

the winds picking up speed and momentum. And so as a result, we're about 40% faster, stronger than they are in their equivalents in the Northern Hemispheres. They're really powerful. But there's one point at which the land pinches in, and it's the so-called Drake Passage. It's between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula, the finger coming up from the Antarctic. And there the oceans are really hemmed in, and the winds are

turn what might be a wild ocean into something like the Tempest almost all the time. You just don't know what you're going to find there. But of course, in Shackleton's, they get to Elephant Island. It's 60 miles from where they break off the sea. They're going backwards and forwards. Everyone's dehydrated, near frozen. They've had killer whales chasing after them. They lose sight and contact with one another. They finally get onto this island, which is

I mean, I think it was like 100 years since anyone had ever attempted to land there because there's almost no natural landing places.

And Shackleton just realises there's no chance anyone's going to find them there. They're on the edge of a known world. They know that some whalers and sealers have been through there, but they're not going to go through. There's no base or anything. The only way they're going to get help and survive is if a ship is brought to them specifically. And so Shackleton makes that decision. He has to get in a small boat with James Caird and sail to South Georgia across the Drake Passage.

But the problem is that's into the winds. You're not going to get across there. There's just no chance, not on a small boat. And so Shackleton makes that decision that actually South Georgia, where they left from 15 months ago, is the best chance. That's an 800-mile journey. So they've added another 300 miles and they're going in a 22-foot boat, which is extraordinary. No one's ever attempted anything like that. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, that sounds made of wood. Like, I can't even imagine. I mean, 22 feet made of wood and, you know, all these waves and everything they could experience. Men packed in from end to end and there were six of them on there for how many days? Yeah, it was 16 days. And again, Chip and McNeish, amazing carpenter, sealed it up. They had fabric to cover over. There were six of them in the end.

free on, free off. And they had to sleep in there. They had to bail water and chip off ice. And of course, the key thing here, Cassie, and it's just amazing when you think about it, they've gone for this tiny dot at the end of a peninsula. They're going to another tiny dot in the South Atlantic, 800 miles away. And if they miss it, they're gone.

No one will ever know what happened to him. There's plenty of stories of expeditions where people have done that, where he just disappeared. And of course, it's this wildest, windiest ocean in the world. It's cloudy most of the time because you've got these amazing low-pressure systems coming through. And he still manages to navigate them to the South Georgia through these storms and waves and everything else. There's an extraordinary amount of seamer ships

to save them. And meanwhile, they're being buffeted by winds and all, and this amazing, huge wave that nearly destroys them. And it's just incredible that they actually managed to do that. It's an amazing journey. It's so right. Chris, I want to know more about your story and your journey to Antarctica. What inspired you to want to go to the continent and what was the mission?

Well, I've been lucky. I've been down to the Antarctic about seven times, Cassie. Oh, wow. And I'm a scientist. I'm so fortunate in my job. It's just amazing to be able to, a privilege to be down there. What we're trying to do is actually get a better handle of where the planet is heading. And Antarctica is...

a huge play in the global climate system. And one of the big questions has to be about how it will respond to future climate change. The world is warming. We know about more carbon, the atmosphere is warming our planet.

But there are feedbacks in the Earth system where what's warming or changes can be amplified massively. So you don't need to change the Antarctic much to get a massive feedback, and suddenly you could be dealing with huge amounts of global sea level rise, plus the fact of what impact it has on the climate, you know,

the amazing wildlife down there. When we talk about the historic record in many parts of Antarctica, it's only a few decades. That's it. That's absolutely it. And yet we're going off the scale of anything humanity has ever experienced before. So, I mean, Shackleton's expeditions are actually some of the really key data sets because they were down there for so long. They actually give us a window into what the climate and conditions were like down there.

And so you have to actually go to those other locations to actually get the data you need and extend that observational record so that you can actually get an insight into what's happening down there and what might happen in the future. And several years ago, we did take an expedition down a privately funded one to actually explore what was happening off the East Antarctic. So further around

south of Australia to actually explore what the environment was doing. It was privately funded but we were down there, we were trying to get observations and we had all the state-of-the-art technology, the support, the weather forecast, the satellite imagery and there was a storm out at sea and unfortunately the sea ice broke out and trapped the ship and we were trapped for 10 days. I mean

Expeditions get this quite a lot. There are many times when you get trapped, but it was a sobering experience. It's a reminder of just how dangerous the Antarctic is. You try to manage risk,

But the points at which you suddenly realise, oh my gosh, you know, we're in a similar situation. Nothing like Shackleton at all. Far from it, far from it. I think it just made me more in awe of what an amazing leader he was to deal with that. But I was very fortunate. We had an amazing team, an absolutely brilliant team. We just pulled together and looked after each other. You know, just remembering the sort of

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Unfortunately, I'm not a math or science person, but I ended up traveling the world instead. But I am actually curious, why do Shackleton's expeditions matter to Antarctica and climate research? Our relationship with Antarctica is so short. You know, we're talking a century at most. And it's just it's broken up. You know, you have Shackleton down there for a few years and no one visits for another couple of decades.

And then in the mid-50s, a whole load of research bases put up across Antarctica. But that was only some parts. And then we had the satellites put up, thankfully, from the late 70s. And they've been monitoring the state of the planet since. And so these short, small windows at Shackleton and Scott and Armisen and others and Mawson give us a real insight into what was happening in Antarctica during those precious moments before Earth.

human impacts on climate really were happening. And as a result, they can give us a baseline to actually say, well, okay, this is what the natural conditions are like, to then actually advance where the projections are going, where these climate forecasts are going, what response the Antarctic might have. And that was the amazing thing. Shackleton had this incredible climate data set. And that's helping us a lot already today. I mean, it's a goldmine for science.

Wow. It's unbelievable. And it's so great that his expedition did shape how you're able to study and research climate change and climate science on Antarctica. You were one of our consultants on the series, and some of the pictures you painted of Antarctica and its beauty really stood out. What does it sound like, feel like, look like down there? Oh, eight.

It's extraordinary, Cassie. I mean, when I first went down, I think this is one of the differences as well with when Shackleton went down. You know, they'd go down the boat and they'd go for several weeks and they'd go through the furious 50s and they'd go beyond where God was and they were absolutely on their own. But they also acclimatised and they saw this amazing change in the seascape, in the ice scape, the wildlife.

When I first went down in 2010, we flew down, but you had to get in all your kit. And so you're in 14 degrees. You've got heavy duvet jacket, hats, frost, seriously, big snow boots, the whole flop, ready to go. And then four and a half hours later, you're on the ice. And oh my gosh, is that a blitz in the senses. You're not on the coast. You just step out into this brilliant sunshine. It's otherworldly.

the frigid air almost takes your breath away. You know, it's just like, you can't take big, deep breaths because you can't suck in all that cold air. So it's short breaths. But at the same time, you naturally just want to keep gasping. Every viewer is like, oh my gosh. And you find you're becoming a terrible tourist and wouldn't take photos of everything and just extraordinary. So,

So you want to make sure that your first step on the Antarctic isn't a slip and a broken pelvis and you're straight back up again. So everyone walks very gingerly. So you can't be too excited. You just walk out gingerly onto the ice and it's cracking under your feet. It's just this extraordinary... Everything's heightened.

So when it's blowing a wind, you're just, oh my gosh, you want to get low, you want to protect yourself, get into shelter as quickly as possible with your team. But it's 24-hour daylight as well. So for those people who have maybe experienced in the Arctic or some of the listeners maybe in the Arctic or been up in Alaska, you know what 24-hour daylight is like in the summertime.

For those of us who have lived at lower latitudes, it's a hell of a shock. And your body just keeps, you just, it's like having coffee all the time. You just want to keep working. It's so exciting. And this is the amazing thing I think about Antarctica. And it's a little link back to the heroic eras. There was still place in Antarctica.

where no one's been or a view that no one has ever seen before von shackleton talks about that actually it's being credible that you're you're seeing something that no one has ever seen and and if you're out there when especially from the coast where there's no wildlife the silence is extraordinary when i give talks to school kids and we often do this exercise and tell everyone to close their eyes and just try to keep complete silence and of course inevitably they end up starting to

cough and splutter and then maybe start poking each other or whatever and then suddenly you hear the air conditioning in the background or then a vehicle or lorry goes past. It's really hard to be silent but there there's nothing. When the wind's not blowing it's almost Martian. Not that we've ever been to Mars but it's almost Martian and just that extraordinary I mean it'd be amazing to compare the two really when you think about it. It's that extreme environment where you go on top of a hillside or a mountain and

It's some broken rocks, a little bit of snow. You're collecting samples, trying to work out when the ice last flew over this area. And you maybe knock a stone and it just echoes. And you might realize then, oh my God, there's not a living soul within 100 kilometers or miles away from where you are.

And that sense of isolation and the silence, it's extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary. People often describe it as deafening. I think that really captures it. How hard is it to recreate the original expedition today, given that there is better equipment available? I'm curious. I mean, the Antarctic conditions are changing, but the Arctic, you can't even reproduce the original expeditions now because the sea ice has disappeared so dramatically with warming.

The environmental disaster that's happening in the Arctic is just horrifying. You can't actually recreate those original trips, you know, people crossing from one end of the Arctic to the other on sea ice. The sea ice isn't there. You can't get across before it's melted now. It's just extraordinary what you're seeing today. It's really heartbreaking. Some of the expeditioners who go down or go up to the Arctic in particular are highlighting particularly, you know, those impacts and changes because it's so different to what those original guys did.

It's really sobering what you can see. And that's the amazing thing about the polar regions. They really are the pulse of a planet. You actually get a sense of just how healthy the planet is. It's not good, unfortunately. We need to change.

I love how you say the pulse of the planet. I've never heard that before, but it makes total sense. And it's changed so much in just such a short period of time. Maybe we covered this, but I'm wondering what you think made Shackleton such a great leader. I mean, there have been a lot of articles written about him breaking down what he did in a crisis that people still study to this day. What lessons do you think Shackleton's experiences and leadership have done for today? Yeah.

Yeah, it's a really interesting point. He commented to someone once that he wanted to write a book about the mental side of leadership, what we'd probably call the strategic planning of leadership today. And he never wrote that. And as you say, Gatsby, people have, historians and leadership gurus have analysed

what Shackleton did. There's actually a beautiful book called Shackleton's Way, which actually gives some sort of real insights into what the great man did and how you can relate that to everyday life, particularly in business.

And I think that's actually a really important point is you'd have to be trapped in the ice to take on board some of those leadership experiences or shackleton about how you manage difficult situations, keeping the optimism, having something to look forward to, having a destination in play that keeps the team focused and to inspire along the way. Have a bit of fun as well. You know, it's not all serious. You know, looking out for everyone. There's no shame in that. It's actually really important.

And I think as a result, even more so than ever with this dreadful pandemic, Shackleton's incredible. He's a real source of inspiration. And hopefully people listening to the podcast will maybe go and have a more look at just what he did. But this is a man who absolutely got everyone home alive. 28 men trapped in the ice for 15 months against all the odds.

Some of it was decisions made years or months or years before he left. Other decisions are on the way and how he worked with people, how he brought out the best in people, how he anticipated how things

Things won't necessarily go to plan. If things go wrong, don't sweat it. Don't keep looking back. I think we often all do this where you think, oh, I wish that hadn't happened. Shackleton's philosophy was, it's what's done. There's no point in reflecting on it now. We're just going to deal with the situation in hand. It's a really healthy way of thinking about the world, the life, and how it can relate back, equally relevant to today, now, moving forward. As people move out of

in different environments and landscapes, how they deal with their lives. I think Shepard is just an inspiration at so many different levels. I just hope the podcast series has really helped bring other life to people. Yeah, me too. And this has been incredible to speak with you and hear your story and your take on all this. So thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Oh, it's been great chatting. Thanks so much for your time, Cassie, honestly.

If you'd like to learn more about this event, we recommend the books Endurance, Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing, South by Sir Ernest Shackleton himself, and In Shackleton's Footsteps by Henry Worsley. Henry Worsley and his team also created the Shackleton Foundation to support inspirational leaders looking to help disadvantaged young people. For more information, go to www.shackletonfoundation.org.

I'm your host, Cassie DePeckel. Brian White is our associate producer. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis. For Wondery.

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