Original subtitles

This is your captain speaking from the bridge.

North Pole just ahead of us.

I ain't no professional diver,

but this don't seem like dive weather.

Hey, so how many people have you taken out to dive in this kind of weather?

Oh, you are the first one.

Oh. Ah, I'm the first.

There's no way this is a good idea.

-Okay. -Good to go?

Come on, Will. Come on, Will.

We got one shot at this.

Wow.

For 100 days,

I'm gonna cross the seven continents

and seek out some of the most extreme places on Earth...

to see our planet

as it's never been seen before.

That's insane.

I'll sail the high seas,

trek vast deserts, and scale towering forests.

I'll reach new frontiers, discover new species...

and embrace new ways of living.

To truly understand our planet,

I'm stepping into the unknown.

A journey to the edges of our world...

to see it from Pole to Pole.

Whoo!

There it is!

Antarctica.

Look at that down there.

No trees, no birds, like, nothing.

Just snow and ice.

It is a frozen continent, and nobody lives down there

except for a few explorers and scientists.

This about to be crazy.

When I was a little boy, I always wanted to be an explorer.

I had a mentor named Dr. Allen Counter.

He was a brilliant scientist and fearless explorer.

I called him the Black Indiana Jones.

And he was always going on these amazing adventures,

and he would invite me to go along.

But I never went.

I'd always tell him, "Hey, I'll catch you on the next one."

He used to say, "The answers to everything important

are out there at the edges of our world."

He passed away a few years ago.

Ever since, I've wondered what was out there

that he wanted me to discover.

I've decided to go see for myself.

I'm gonna begin my journey by trying to touch

the absolute farthest extreme,

the very bottom of the planet, the South Pole.

Dr. Counter, this one's for you.

Hey.

Oh! What's up, man?

Jeez.

-Richard. -Will, awesome to meet you.

-Pleasure, man, pleasure. -Welcome...

-Thank you. -...to the seventh continent.

Dude.

It's freezing.

And you brought good weather with you as well.

Yeah-- oh, this is good weather? Okay, cool.

Come on, let's head up to base camp.

My name's Richard Parks. I'm a polar athlete.

Over the last decade I've skied more solo,

unsupported, and unassisted miles in Antarctica

than anyone else in history.

And very proudly, I'm the first person of color

to ski solo to the geographical South Pole.

It's arguably one of the toughest...

human endeavors on the planet.

The environment doesn't support life.

I've experienced winds in excess of 70 mile an hour

and temperatures -52.

Any exposed flesh will be susceptible to frostbite...

one of the most painful injuries I've ever had.

It's a very dangerous place.

So, my job with Will is to keep him alive.

Welcome to base camp.

As you can see, we've got a bit of a thing for maps here.

Man, this is cool.

One of the most critical things when you do a map scene

is how you place your hands.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

This isn't happening fast enough. We need to get those people outta there.

All right.

Seriously though, Will,

this is the most hostile environment on the planet.

The risk to life is really serious.

There is very little margin for error.

So, we're gonna have to look after each other

and be absolutely dialed on everything we do.

All right, so I'm gonna stop fooling around.

Okay.

We're in West Antarctica at the moment.

-Mm-hmm. -And we're nestled

in the Heritage Range, part of the Ellsworth Mountains.

-Mm-hmm. -And this little cross here

marks the geographical South Pole.

And out there, that is the very, very bottom of our planet.

And how far is that?

About 700 miles from here.

Wow.

That'll be as far from anything

and everything I will have ever been in my life.

-Yeah, yeah. -Yeah.

Antarctica is bigger than America,

and the South Pole sits in the center of it.

So, first, we begin with a trek through the Ellsworth Mountains

to a remote airbase,

then fly to a vast ice sheet called the Polar Plateau...

where we'll continue on skis to the South Pole.

Apparently, this frozen continent

holds some of the planet's deepest secrets.

Why couldn't they just be in the Bahamas?

I know that you're keen to meet

the scientists that do pioneering research in Antarctica.

So, before we get to the pole, we're gonna stop here

at a tiny research outpost called Criosfera 1.

So, who's out there?

There are three Brazilian scientists out there,

who are some of the most remote people in the whole world.

And they're out there by themselves?

Yeah.

All right, so they might be a little crazy,

and we need to be prepared for that too.

All right.

So, when was the last time you skied, Will?

Uh, about a decade ago.

Okay. Well, you know what they say?

Yeah, just like riding a bike.

Hey, I got a joke for you.

How do you find Will Smith in Antarctica?

You follow the fresh prints!

First time on the continent of Antarctica.

I am now officially a polar explorer.

That's right, y'all know what it is.

-Where you headed, buddy? -Up.

I think everyone on the continent

should go through essential training.

How you feeling, Will?

So, the first leg was a chance to put Will through his paces.

I do sure hope we're going around that mountain.

Oh, jeez.

Everything in Antarctica is working against you.

And even the simplest of functions, like breathing,

is a challenge in Antarctica.

So, the air is incredibly dry out there.

So, just breathing means that we're dehydrating.

Stop and have something to drink.

You know, hydration is so important out here.

You know, Antarctica holds like 60% of the world's fresh water.

Mm-hmm.

Yet, it's the world's largest desert.

So, this is a desert.

Yep. It's nuts, isn't it?

I don't feel like I'm in a desert right now.

Different to what we imagine, isn't it?

In your mind, when you see snow, you assume water.

-Yeah, yeah. -A snow desert, that's amazing.

When I think of a desert I think of golden sands.

Intense heat.

Sun beating down.

But deserts are defined by how dry they are,

and Antarctica gets less rainfall than the Sahara.

The snow almost never melts.

So, it's both the coldest and the driest place on earth.

What do you think, Will?

Oh, man, this is spectacular.

-It's big, isn't it? -This is spectacular.

You know, most of the time I'm out here,

-I'm on my own. -I know, that's crazy.

You know, so it's so nice to have someone

to talk to that's real.

I want to know, how did you do this,

by yourself, for almost a month,

for 12 hours a day?

-Like, how? -Sixteen, actually, Will.

Oh, 16 hours?

The biggest challenge for me

has always been the kind of emotional state.

Some days would be easy, some days would be a real grind.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -And for me, it was music

that got me through that, you know, help me regulate.

Oh, wow.

So, you have an Antarctic playlist?

I do.

Actually, I've got it right here if you wanna listen to it.

Oh, absolutely.

-There you go. -What you got?

Let's see what you got. Hit me.

-♪ Baby, baby ♪ -Okay.

-♪ Baby, don't leave me ♪ -Okay, okay.

Ah, there you go.

Ahh...

♪ I've got this burning, burning yearning ♪

-♪ Feeling inside me ♪ -There you go.

Break it down.

Unh, unh!

Oh!

You know, they say, "Dance like no one's watching."

-Oh! -Whoa!

No one's watching.

Ah, I'm back!

See how easy it is, though, to feel so happy?

Yeah, man.

Antarctica is unlike anything I have ever seen.

The beauty and sheer ferocity of the landscape,

it's otherworldly.

You can be walking on ice that's like three miles thick.

The snowflakes sparkle like diamonds.

And in places, it feels like the ground could just swallow you up whole.

Oh, my God.

It's impressive, isn't it?

-Wow. -Yeah.

We're gonna rendezvous with the plane the other side of those mountains.

But first, we gotta climb this ice wall.

- Really? - Yeah.

That's tall.

Yeah, it's big.

We're gonna climb it straight up there.

What are you thinking?

Yeah, I'm thinking I don't like that at all.

-I wanna test you, Will. -Mm-hmm.

I want you going into the next stage of this expedition hardened and ready.

Okay.

It'll be scary though.

Show me the way.

Awesome. See you at the top.

All right.

All right.

The climb is about 300 vertical feet

of hard ice.

And that's quite scary because, you know,

you're on a slippery slope.

There you go, Rich, good job.

Thanks, Will.

Whoa!

You don't want to take a fall off a 300-foot ice wall.

Whoo!

Okay, now it's your turn, Will!

I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.

Now, it's your turn!

Okay!

We had had virtually no wind, bluebird skies.

But the weather can be unpredictable and incredibly volatile.

And things can escalate and go wrong very, very quickly.

Will! Let's get moving, mate.

You know the wind is blowing now too, right?

There was no wind when you went, Rich.

Everybody knows the wind blows in the afternoon.

I'm coming!

Will! The wind's picking up!

Oh, my God.

It's like a frickin' hurricane.

Oh, jeez!

I'm gonna sit down for a couple minutes. The wind is blowing in my face.

I don't quit a lot.

I generally don't, you know, give up.

The wind is-- it's cutting like a knife.

I really can't feel my lips.

But in Antarctica, you have that moment where you're like,

"Ooh, mother nature's actually in charge."

Ah!

My guy!

-Awesome work! -Ahh!

-Yeah. -Awesome work.

Before we go deeper into the continent,

I needed something to push Will.

It was terrible down there, but I love that!

And Will's reaction to it...

was more than I expected.

Do I have explorer beard? I feel like I have explorer beard.

A little bit?

Whew!

It's a rough environment out there.

I just keep asking myself, like, how did you end up here?

It's hard out here.

You know, the self-doubt that goes through your mind

is torturous, right?

There's always a moment where you get asked...

a deeper question, and you just get asked the question,

you know, what is your will to continue?

Um...

You-- sorry-- where...

I felt like you were about to go someplace,

and you decided not to.

Um...

As a younger man, I used to be a professional athlete.

I played rugby for a living.

Played for Wales, won trophies with Pontypridd, then Leeds.

But I injured my shoulder.

Basically, tore the cartilage out of my right shoulder,

and doctor said that I would never play again.

And it sent me into a period of depression,

and you know, I...

But I still find it difficult to talk about,

but I-- I thought the worst thoughts.

Uh...

We maybe should have put something stronger

in these, should we?

From the moment I set foot on this continent,

it... it took hold of me.

It was my way out of a dark hole.

I deeply understand that.

I've had different types of experience to lead me to that place

where you're in the center of the storm.

Hmm.

I've had a couple of really big storms this past, you know, couple of years,

and people feel like they will be destroyed by the storm.

It's in those moments of adversity that we kind of find out who we are.

-The key is keep moving. -Mm-hmm.

It's keep moving forward into it.

Richard has walked a journey that most of us

will never venture.

He's earned his wisdom through adversity.

And it made me wonder, what's out there waiting for me to discover?

♪ Oh, Father, tell me ♪

♪ Do we get what we deserve ♪

♪ Oh, we get what we deserve ♪

♪ And way down we go, go, go, go, go ♪

♪ Way down we go, go, go... ♪

How much further?

We're not far now. How you doing?

Yeah, I'm good, I'm good.

♪ Way down we go ♪

There it is.

♪ Oh, you let your feet run wild ♪

My mentor Dr. Counter used to say,

“To truly understand our world,

we must be willing to step into the unknown."

Well, you can't get more out there than where we're going next...

to meet three scientists...

who are some of the most remote people on Earth.

I think we've just flown into airspace

over the Polar Plateau.

It looks infinite. It just goes on forever.

-It's incredible. -Yo, man.

The Polar Plateau, this huge glacial ice sheet

as big as Australia,

it's where the coldest temperature on the planet

has been recorded, close to -100 degrees Celsius.

That's ice on the inside of the window.

Richard, he didn't write anything on his window

'cause he's mature.

Landing lights are on. We're good to go.

All right, here we go.

There you go, Will.

-Yo. -Have you seen that?

A lot of what you're looking at

has probably never been touched by a human.

Oh, my God.

This feels like landing on another planet.

There's nothing.

I know, its wild.

What kind of secrets are gonna be out here?

What's our evacuation plan if they start trippin'?

You're okay. Yeah.

All right.

There's... nobody.

Nothing.

It's a full horror movie set-up.

It's the Black dude in the horror movie, that's exactly what's about to happen.

Brasilia!

All right.

All right, there it is!

Criosfera 1.

This dude better have some real secrets.

His name better be Obi-Wan, Yoda, Morpheus,

Gandalf, Oracle the Third.

This is crazy.

I can put a foot on the ladder,

and then, other foot on there.

-Hello! -Jeez!

How are you, sir?

Yeah, great!

Oh, man.

Sir Heitor. Absolute pleasure.

Good to have you come.

-Very happy to be here. -Welcome to Criosfera 1.

Thank you. Thank you.

So, what is this place?

This is Criosfera 1, a research station.

We are researching the climate of Antarctica.

We measure the atmosphere.

Why all the way out here?

Like, there's nothing for a long way!

It is very important to understand what is going on here.

Yeah.

Because everything that happens globally

produces a trace that comes to Antarctica.

Wow.

Gases produced naturally and by humans

make their way to Antarctica through the atmosphere.

And the amazing thing is,

traces of those gases are captured in the ice

as it forms over time.

And in the ice we've found

a record of the history of this planet

for the last nearly one million years.

All right, so, this is crazy.

So, you can track global history through the layers...

Of snow and ice.

-Of snow and ice. -That's true.

How do you do it, though?

You have to look to see the secrets of nature

where it is not easy to find.

Trapped within the ice are tiny bubbles of air

that contain samples of the Earth's atmosphere

going back nearly a million years.

And the deeper you dig through the layers of ice

the further you look back in time.

We can tell when a volcano erupted.

When humans started to farm the Earth.

And even

when we detonated the first atomic bomb.

So, it's like the rings of a tree.

-It's like a layer cake. -Yeah.

You could see when the internal combustion engine came on.

You can see the proliferation of coal?

Yeah, for sure.

There is all the imprints there.

Wow.

Antarctica is a book, a history book.

If we study the climate of the past

we could understand better

what will happen in the future.

That's beautiful.

All this time, I was seeing the ice as the obstacle.

Something to ski across, climb, conquer.

But it turns out, right under my feet

was the history of our planet frozen in time.

The ice is the hard drive of the Earth and of us.

So, how many years have you been doing this?

I've been working in Antarctica for 35 years.

How do you do it, though?

Like, all the way out here

detached from the entire world?

We have very hard days.

It is not simple.

We just try to do our best.

I grew up in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro.

When I arrived in Antarctica, I had never seen snow before.

And the wind was absolutely freezing.

But the hardest part, it is not the climate.

For me, it is the people that you leave behind.

I have two sons.

My mother, she is 99 years old.

So, it is very hard to be away from them.

But we know that we are doing something good for everybody.

That's good. Obrigado, obrigado.

Obrigado.

- Cheers. - Cheers.

You know, I just think that we should all work together.

One more?

Mm!

So, I get how Antarctica can help you study the past.

But you mentioned the future.

What have you discovered? What has come out of the research?

Well...

We have some evidence.

There is a very interesting phenomena

that is named atmospheric rivers.

Atmospheric rivers?

-Rivers, yes. -Mm-hmm.

You can imagine the river in the sky.

In South America, we have been aware of

the rivers in the sky for many years.

They are formed when huge volumes of moisture

are released by the Amazon forest.

And then it is transported into the atmosphere

to form a vast flowing column of water vapor in the sky.

What does that have to do with Antarctica?

We discovered that rivers in the sky reach Antarctica.

Oh, wow.

It crosses the Atlantic Ocean

and got to Antarctica.

So, the largest freshwater rivers on Earth

are actually in the sky.

They can be thousands of miles long

and carry 15 times more than the Mississippi River!

The ones Heitor discovered are coming all the way into Antarctica.

But when a river of warm moist air

arrives in a frozen desert...

you can imagine you got a problem on your hands.

All that history in the ice...

dropped into the ocean.

And there are much bigger consequences for our planet.

We are going to a future

of probably a collapse of the West Antarctica.

So this is millions of people around the world

that will suffer this influence of the sea level rising.

But here we can provide

better climate models

that should predict better for future generations.

The idea of how interconnected everything is,

it's landing in a way that it's never landed before.

The planet needs to be cared for if we want to be here.

Yeah, for sure.

What's really amazing to me

is that Heitor has worked out here for 35 years

in this barren place, with nobody around...

but what he's found is something that could benefit all of us.

I'm starting to understand what Dr. Counter meant.

You really have to get out there to find the answers to what's important.

We are gonna start to make our way towards the pole,

and it's gonna be colder.

Um...

I don't like that.

But I am going to do everything I have to do

to not sound weak in front of Rich.

'Cause he's hardcore.

We are headed to the South Pole.

It is -37 windchill.

It is freezing!

Oh, my goodness.

A whole other planet out here.

It's like the surface of the moon.

The Polar Plateau.

It's like, flat...

and endless...

and there's no smells,

no sounds.

Only the noise that you're making.

Hey, Will!

Everything looks exactly the same.

It feels like we're going around in circles.

The sensory deprivation

can definitely make you go crazy.

All right, Richard...

how much farther?

About seven miles.

Okay.

I'm starting to believe, maybe there is no South Pole.

It's horrific out here.

I can't feel my lips.

Richard be leaving me anyway.

Oh. Oh!

Damn skis.

All right, Richard.

Richard, where's the pole?

- How you doing? - Huh?

How you doing?

It could be forever.

This is as far away from away as I have ever been.

I'm gonna look after you. You're okay.

You're okay, we're gonna look after each other.

All right, we're good? All right.

- Yeah. - So, I guess

we're gonna keep going.

Let's get moving.

Let's go.

I guess my biggest worry...

in Antarctica...

was that I was gonna die...

...and not make it home.

But Dr. Counter used to say,

"If you're not scared, you're not living."

There it is. There it is!

You made it, Will!

We're here! We have arrived!

Richard, you found it!

You found the South Pole!

Oh yeah!

A couple hundred meters away.

The South Pole, baby!

You know, I don't know how many times people

have asked me, "What do you miss on expeditions?"

It's never anything material. It's always people.

Jada. Riri. Trey.

Jaden, Willow.

Mom-Mom, Gee-Gee...

your baby's about to touch the South Pole!

And given who he is,

I imagine he hardly ever has any opportunity to feel isolation.

I'm stood at the bottom of the entire Earth.

This is for you, Dr. Counter.

You're at the end of your journey.

-You got here. -Thank you, man.

This is really just the beginning, though. This is Pole to Pole.

So, this is just the start.

So, which... which way do I go for the North Pole?

Anywhere we move is north right now.

Oh, that's right. Any direction is north.

♪ Lil Baby on the scene, watch me work and watch me go ♪

♪ I'm so fresh and I'm so clean ♪

♪ Dragging bags up out the store ♪

You know, when I first got here,

I was thinking of it as a lifeless place, you know?

But now, I kinda see, this ice world

is central to life as we know it.

I love Earth.

I love living here.

And there's so many more extreme places out there to explore.

I'm gonna look for secrets in the absolute opposite extreme.

♪ Ay, watch me do it, watch me do it right ♪

This bustling little town in the Andes...

is where I'm catchin' a ride

to a place with more life than anywhere else on the planet,

the Amazon.

♪ Off the top like it was toupee ♪

Hola, hola.

Ra-ra-ra-ra!

Here we go!

♪ Ay, watch me do it, watch me do it right ♪

Over on the right! There it is!