Original subtitles

Antarctica: the most undiscovered continent on Earth,

and for very good reasons.

Freezing temperatures and deadly storms have defeated

many explorers and scientists

seeking to understand this mysterious land

on which man has never lived.

Today, they know enough to survive

this beautiful, though hostile place,

but events are now unfolding here

that may spell disaster for the rest of the world.

What we find here today is unnerving.

Glaciers are melting rapidly into the ocean,

threatening to flood the world's coastlines.

Penguins are walking off to their death in inexplicable

"Suicide Marches".

Seals are struck blind by ultraviolet rays.

Starfish are unable to reproduce

and the continent's largest land animal,

a creature smaller than a common housefly,

is facing possible extinction.

And now, on newly-exposed rocky landscapes,

seeing sunlight for the very first time,

green vegetation is thriving in the world's largest desert.

Has an irreversible environmental change begun here?

Or can we - as a global community - work together,

to save our planet as well as ourselves?

This is - The Antarctica Challenge.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

global temperatures have been increasing steadily for the past 1 00 years,

with seven of the eight warmest years on record occurring since 2001 .

The most dramatic rise has been here, in Antarctica,

as scientists from every discipline search for clues,

and hopefully answers.

Warming temperatures here mean melting ice

and that means flooding for the rest of the world.

Dr. Julian Scott, a geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey,

believes we have to prepare for this catastrophe today.

Adding the water to the ocean will cause more flooding

and we'll need to put up more flood defenses

and build our cities in a different way because of it.

Pine Island is one of Antarctica's largest glaciers.

Over 250 kilometers long

approximately the distance between New York City and Boston

and two kilometers thick,

it is the greatest contributor of ice flow into the ocean

of any ice drainage basin in the world.

In this time-lapse photography of a melting glacier,

we can see just how quickly large areas of ice

can move from their rocky shores to the sea.

Through his extensive study,

Dr. Scott has found that Pine Island Glacier alone

is currently adding 46 gigatons of fresh water

to the world's sea level every year.

The main reason the glacier is increasing its speed at the moment

is thought by most scientists working on the area

to be due to warm ocean water.

Now this isn't necessarily water

that's been affected by atmospheric changes in recent history.

This is deep ocean water off the edge of the continental shelf

that is somehow being pushed up onto the continental shelf

by the wind patterns, and the pressure systems in Antarctica.

And shifting warm water right to the area of this glacier where it starts to float.

Now this is thinning this area of the glacier,

and by thinning this floating portion of the glacier,

this causes a reduction in the pressure

which means there's less holding the glacier back

which means it can speed up.

Another cause of the faster-moving ice

is the warming of the newly exposed rock

that extends beneath the ice.

As the sun warms this bare rock,

it creates an endothermic reaction

that heats the rock bed and melts the ice from underneath.

Antarctica holds 70 per cent

of the world's fresh water in its ice.

According to NASA,

if the land ice of the west coast of the continent alone were to melt,

the world's sea level would rise 18 to 20 feet.

This would result in massive flooding around the world

as well as increased weight and pressure on the world's seabed.

This, in turn, could provide severe stress on oceanic fault lines

resulting in earthquakes and tsunamis.

Even the ozone hole

may be contributing to this problem by the way

it has changed weather patterns here.

Now one theory that's been suggested

is it actually could be anthropogenic,

but due to the ozone hole over Antarctica

which has been shown to change the weather systems around Antarctica,

or we could be seeing El Nino-type effects

in the southern weather systems

that the wind is driving this ocean water

up to the front of the glacier.

It's a huge ice sheet

grounded largely below sea level

which is why we are concerned about it.

But the ice is very thick and extends way above sea level,

so obviously if we were to lose it,

it would contribute to the global sea levels.

And in fact, the whole of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

could contribute up to five meters.

And the Amundsen Sea area,

where Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers are,

that have both been noted to be speeding up recently

that could contribute around one and a half meters to global sea level.

Dr. Scott is one of many scientists

dedicated to studying Antarctica.

He spends long periods of study in the field,

but returns home to analyze his findings.

His headquarters are located here,

half a world away,

in the historic university town of Cambridge, England.

His research, along with others at the British Antarctic Survey,

pays tribute to the first scientific expeditions

in Antarctica 1 00 years ago.

While many ships and lives

were lost in those early days by explorers the world over,

it was one British explorer

who is perhaps best known for paving the way

for scientific study here today: Sir Ernest Shackleton.

In 1 909, he led one

of the very first scientific expeditions to Antarctica.

Ernest Shackleton really filled

the old dictionary definition of an explorer:

one who explores to discover new lands.

There are very few new lands left to discover

under the sea, possibly and of course in space in the future.

But for scientists there are always new lands

and they never stop discovering.

Well during the early expeditions,

polar science was really a matter of observation

more than very precise science.

I mean they didn't have the gear.

A lot of scientific research was accomplished

during the Nimrod Expedition.

And they did accomplish some notable firsts.

They did discover that the south,

the south magnetic pole which is not a fixed point

but moves about, about six miles a year.

That was enough for Shackleton to secure a second expedition.

However, this time, it didn't turn out as expected.

When the ship became trapped in the ice,

it was hoped that she would rise above it

and be able to be floated once more,

but instead she was slowly crushed.

They watched with horror as, as, as this took place.

Eventually the mast came down.

And though, you can see the little group,

rather desolate on the ice, their home

because the ship is always a sailor's home - gone.

They were in a very dangerous situation.

No one knew where they were.

Shackleton and his crew were left stranded,

and fighting for their lives, for over a year and a half.

Amazingly, Shackleton led his Endurance crew

back to safety without losing one life.

Their incredible story of survival is commemorated

by one of Antarctica's very few museums.

With many of their supplies still on its shelves,

this unique museum

provides an eerie reminder of

how difficult survival is in this harsh land.

A struggle which helped give inspiration to an international treaty fifty years later.

For the first time in human history,

twelve nations were able to agree

to administer an entire continent.

Signed on December 1 , 1 959, the "Antarctica Treaty"

bans any military activity

and restricts any human occupation solely to scientific study.

Never before has the world come together

to jointly govern a continent,

rather than fight over its ownership.

Today, there are 47 nations ensuring the "peaceful use"

of Antarctica strictly for scientific research.

One of the more recent countries to sign the Treaty is Ukraine.

Dr. Yeugeny Karyagin is a Seismologist from Ukraine.

His country joined the treaty in 1 992

and took over Great Britain's Faraday Research Station,

renaming it Vernadsky Station.

He believes that the melting fresh water

is contributing to the further melting of the ice

in a very unusual way.

Dr. Karyagin warns that the increased precipitation

will accelerate the melting of the glacier ice,

compounding and accelerating the process,

as more fresh water from the melting land ice

dilutes the salt-water of the Antarctic Ocean.

Since fresh water evaporates faster than salt water,

there will be a lot more rain and snow here.

Over the past 20 years,

the continent of Antarctica has diminished in size dramatically,

shrinking the ice fields at an alarming rate.

How much further can Antarctica shrink

before its melting ice floods the world?

Dr. Karyagin is measuring this melting every day

through a series of seismology tests

designed to record shifts in glacial movement.

Dr. Karyagin has been recording vibrations from nearby glaciers.

He claims that the increased frequency of seismic signals

tells him that the climate is warming.

If he's right,

more glaciers will soon resemble this one,

diluting the sea with fresh ice water at unprecedented speeds.

At this continued rate it could mean

catastrophic flooding for most of the coastal towns

and cities of the planet.

Are we too late?

Is there anything we can do now to slow,

and perhaps even reverse,

this continent's warming to prevent world flooding?

Most scientists predict that

the world's coastal towns and cities

will be hit the hardest by the rising sea levels

and the ensuing hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

Coastal cities that are the centre of life to millions are at peril.

Cities like San Francisco.

This picturesque coastal city in California

is the occasional home of renowned environmentalist

and penguin specialist, Dr. David Ainley,

who, after spending more than 30 years in the field in Antarctica,

has likely spent more time there than here.

His contribution to scientific study in Antarctica is so significant

a mountain there has been named after him - Ainley's Peak.

He believes that cities

like his will soon have some serious environmental issues to deal with.

I think we're going to see some major problems.

We are too late by 20 years and it's really serious.

Anybody that lives on the coast is going to be having problems.

It doesn't take much of a rise in sea level,

just an inch and that's huge

when you get a storm surge you know,

from a nor'easter or a hurricane or that sort of thing.

You know foreclosures are happening on beachfront.

That's probably a good thing

because those properties are history anyway.

And while today's Antarctic scientists

are suggesting we need to relocate to higher ground,

the penguins here are already being forced to do the same thing.

There are up to seven species of penguins that might occur in the Antarctic.

Four of those are relatively common

and if we start from the largest - the Emperor Penguin

it's the one that is least tolerant to temperature changes.

It's the one that nests the furthest south,

the one that nests in the coldest climates.

Next would be the Adelie penguin.

They're very much dependant

on ice floes and the near-ice conditions for hunting,

so they again would be very much affected

by rising temperature changes.

The Chinstrap penguin is somewhere in between.

It is more adaptive.

It will move further north and further south than some of the other ones.

But the one behind me, the Gentoo,

is probably the most adaptive.

It's the one that might be the super penguin of the Antarctic eventually.

As well, warming waters are responsible for a drastic decline

in the penguins' sole food source, the krill.

Krill are small shrimp-like marine crustaceans.

They're the primary food supply of penguins and all other Antarctic animal life.

They travel in schools of millions and

are very sensitive to water temperature.

A rise in temperature of even half a degree

hinders their ability to reproduce,

seriously impacting the penguins here.

Compounding this problem is that more whales

are entering these waters now that they have become warmer.

In one gulp, these whales can consume a quantity of krill

that would otherwise feed 2,000 penguins.

If the krill move out of the area entirely,

these penguins will have to find another food source

and most of them won't be able to.

When krill's available all of the species of smaller penguins here

the Adelie, the Chinstrap and the Gentoo

will eat them almost exclusively.

It's only when the krill is in diminishing numbers

that they would turn to other species.

Well, if there's no food,

there's no birds, pretty simple.

As the food resources change,

it's only the species that are able to adapt that are going to survive.

The other species, such as the Adelie,

the Emperor, will have to either stay south

or move south into the colder waters

and try to catch the krill that are still there.

Over the past 25 years,

the population of the Adelie penguins here in the Antarctic Peninsula

has dropped by 50 per cent,

while the Chinstrap numbers

have fallen by as much as 65 per cent,

but the most noticeable relocation recently

has been among the Gentoos.

The biggest change that's occurred here

is the movement of the Gentoo.

They're moving further south.

They're moving south in greater numbers.

They're moving higher up onto the slopes.

When you have small numbers of them,

they will nest in near-shore areas.

As the population increases in a preferred nesting locale,

they'll move upslope.

So we have the penguins behind me.

We have penguins on a higher slope to the right,

and then sometimes we'll get penguins even higher up on the slope behind.

So while it looks as though the Gentoo is poised

to take over the warming west coast of Antarctica,

the retreating penguin species

are moving to the colder climates down the coast,

and individual penguins have begun

wandering off to certain death

a phenomenon only recently observed in the past five years.

Viewed by many as "suicide marches",

lone penguins have been observed to leave their colony,

walk away from the sea,

and venture deep into the continent, never to return.

Penguin scientist Dr. David Ainley

has been studying penguin behavior for 40 years,

most of those years in the field in Antarctica.

His theory is that these so-called suicidal penguins

are actually pioneers, a kind of "noble explorer"

who ventures out on his own

to find a new home for his colony.

We have these individual penguins that purportedly

are committing suicide by walking away from the sea,

into the interior of the Antarctic, kind of like Scott did.

When these populations expand,

it's because of pioneers that find new places.

They go off and disappear and nobody hears

about 'em anymore unless they have good publicists.

This unusual behavior was first noted

when an iceberg measuring 97 nautical miles

came to rest at the shore of a large penguin colony,

effectively blocking access to their food supply.

So this big iceberg, B1 5A,

parked itself in the southern Ross Sea.

So there was a lot of disoriented penguins during those five years that essentially

had this 97-mile-long fence that went across the Ross Sea.

So during those five years,

there was an increase in the numbers of these penguins

that were really beside themselves about which way to go

and which would get them to where they wanted to go.

Several more of these penguins that were going the wrong way,

so to speak these would be the heroes that penguins would write about.

However, without the warming temperatures

that placed giant icebergs in their path,

there would be no heroic penguins looking for a new home for their tribe.

Suicide missions aside,

the relocation of penguin populations is taking a significant toll on their numbers.

As well, global warming and the ozone hole

have combined to threaten penguin populations across the continent

and may very well cause their extinction.

For many penguin species,

warming temperatures have reduced the size of ice floes upon

which species such as the Emperor penguin hatch their young.

Combined with the increased winds

resulting from the ozone hole,

entire colonies of baby chicks

are being blown off the ice to certain death.

But as is being shown at Point Geologie,

that colony has decreased by 50 per cent since the mid-70s

and partially it is related to the fact that the fast ice is too thin

and so it gets blown out repeatedly.

And many eggs and chicks are blown away on the ice with parents sitting on them.

It's okay with the parents,

you know they're used to water

but this is happening with greater frequency.

Also occurring with greater frequency

is an extended period of dependency by young penguins on their parents for food.

Young Gentoos such as this one have usually begun

to collect food for themselves by now.

Yet more and more of these penguins

have been observed to be relying on their parents.

Penguins far beyond the age of nestling

are having trouble "leaving the nest" as it were,

perhaps afraid to face the relatively bleak prospects

of their diminishing food supplies.

Failed mating attempts, such as this one,

have been observed more and more in the past five years,

suggesting the birds are becoming more disoriented,

perhaps another result of their difficulty in adapting to the rapidly changing environment.

Another cause for concern,

especially among the younger penguins,

is the increase in attacks from a predatory bird

known as the skua.

Usually, these birds attack only the eggs of penguins,

but as the number of eggs has been reduced,

the skua has now become a predator of baby chicks.

And since these birds prefer a warmer climate and a rocky shore to live on,

more of them are entering the peninsula area,

providing the remaining penguin populations

something they are not used to - a predator.

While the warmer climate in Antarctica

is impacting on the survival of the once plentiful penguin populations...

. . .the increased temperatures are also resulting

in the decline of Antarctica's only indigenous land animal the common fly.

Okay, what we've been looking at here are little, tiny terrestrial invertebrates

that are the main animal fauna on the Antarctic Peninsula.

They're virtually the only fauna you see in the Antarctic

and what I've been looking at specifically here is this little fly.

There are only two real flies in Antarctica,

and this is one of them.

It's the largest land animal in Antarctica,

and if you're lucky, it's about 4 or 5 mm long

and about half a milligram in weight

so it's a, a really rather, a small, cute little insect basically.

It's a fly without any wings.

The Antarctic Peninsula,

it's one of the three fastest warming parts of the planet at the moment.

And these little invertebrates and in their distributions

are potentially sensitive to these changes.

So if it gets warmer, as it is doing,

they can carry out their lifecycle quicker.

What this means is they die faster.

The warmer habitat here can be deadly.

The barren rock now being exposed

by melting ice is very dry,

depriving the creatures of water.

It doesn't have very good water-holding capacity.

If you warm it up, and particularly if you have increased amounts of sunshine,

direct sunshine landing on it,

it actually dries out more quickly,

so you actually may end up with a warmer habitat

but one in which there's no water available.

Now that combination of effects

is actually then negative on these little invertebrates.

And while warming temperatures are creating deadly environments for Antarctica's land animals,

the warmer waters are having the same effect for Antarctica's marine life.

Laura Grange is a marine biologist

working with the British Antarctic Survey at their Rothera Research Station.

She tells us that an anticipated increase of only two degrees in water temperature

will cause starfish and other marine life to stop reproducing.

This is a starfish.

All these animals were actually collected from

the shallow water around the Rothera Research Station.

And they're all collected by scuba-diving.

And it's also incredibly colourful

which is easily shown on this starfish.

We collect them directly from outside

and then we bring them in to carry out various experiments on them.

I'm actually looking at their breeding success from year to year.

They're also very important

because they're very sensitive to temperature change.

Many scientists have actually predicted

that there will possibly be a global temperature change

of two degrees within the next 1 00 years.

Well, these animals, in particular, are very susceptible

or very sensitive to changes in temperature.

And therefore, because of this predicted change,

both regionally but also globally,

it's very unlikely that they won't be affected.

And in my case, for my work,

if they're not able to breed,

obviously they won't be able to survive.

And while global warming in Antarctica

seems to be a significant threat to its fauna,

the flora seems to be experiencing a genesis...

in what is commonly referred to

as the world's largest desert.

Daniella Rubling, a sub-Antarctic botany researcher,

describes a new vegetation here

that she has not seen before.

It looks to be a combination of moss-type plant...

as well as potentially some algae as well

but basically chlorophyllic species

that do use photosynthesis in order to produce their food,

and to produce, to grow and to survive.

And it's very interesting to see it in this type of area

because most of the time,

these islands are covered by snow.

They're covered by ice.

They don't see light.

And so to see greenery in an area that has always been considered to be a desert,

it's very interesting and exciting

to see new life growing in places

where it has never been previously.

But perhaps the biggest mystery of the "greening of Antarctica" is

where this new life came from.

Was it always here, lying dormant in the rocky soil?

Or was it brought here by birds or winds?

Well I mean the seeds or spores of these plants

may have been carried in by winds.

This may have been occurring for hundreds of years

but because it's been covered in snow,

these plants have not been able to establish themselves.

Whereas now, once you get exposure of rock,

you get soil deposition,

allowing these seeds or spores to establish themselves

and grow in areas where they would never have been before.

And does it stop there?

Is this possibly the beginning of an entirely new eco-system?

This type of vegetation,

it can serve as both food supply for animals

that need to convert the plant material into energy for themselves,

but also in and amongst you can see

that it could also provide shelter or protection for animals

as well or for smaller invertebrates.

I mean the possibilities are,

are for more life to grow

and for more species to find their way here

and establish themselves as well.

But in order to predict how severe climate change will affect this continent and,

by extension, the rest of the world,

a series of measurements and data recordings is done

on a daily basis by devoted scientists the world over

in what is often a thankless, yet essential, job.

Recording temperatures from the past,

and projecting a tendency to continue,

is not a very reliable method of forecast

given the wildly changing atmospheric and meteorological conditions here.

What was different last night, I don't know.

Okay, down we go!

Okay!

One of the more accurate methods involves ice core sampling.

Where I'm sitting, the ice is 950 meters thick.

If I drill through all the way down to the bedrock,

I would have recovered ice spanning the last 40,000 years.

This is quite an important period.

Forty thousand years ago,

the earth was in an ice age.

Today we're in a warm period.

By analyzing the record of the climate from the bottom of the core to the top,

I will be able to see how we moved from a cold period into a warm period

and this helps us understand

how we expect the climate to change over the next hundred years.

That's a nice piece of core about 2 meters long,

and round about here is 500 meters depth from the surface,

and that's ice that fell as snow about 5,800 years ago.

Many things in the atmosphere change from summer to winter

and we can see this in the ice cores when we analyze them.

So when we plot out our results,

we see a series of waves going down the ice

and these are summer, winter, summer, winter.

So we can simply count the layers

just like counting tree rings.

Once we get the 2-meter ice core back to the surface

and we've packed it into insulated boxes,

and then it's shipped by small aircraft back to one of our coastal stations - Hailey Bay -

where it's loaded onto one of our ships,

and is shipped back to Europe in a refrigerated container.

Once it gets back to Europe,

we cut it into much smaller pieces

and send each of these pieces out to different laboratories for different analyses

to try to understand all the things that are happening in the climate and the atmosphere.

This study has shown

that the increase of greenhouse gases found in the air bubbles

is directly proportionate to the increase in size of the ozone hole.

And what if the hole gets bigger?

How many lives might be at risk as a result of the cancer-inducing UV rays?

One of the most important areas

of study in Antarctica today is the ozone hole.

As its regularly increasing size approaches human habitats,

such as New Zealand,

the related increase in cases of skin cancer

has made ozone study a high priority.

At Vernadsky Station,

ozone scientist Igor Gvodzdovskyy

keeps a daily vigil of recording ozone

readings every three hours.

To do this, he uses a Dobson Ozone Spectrophotometer,

an instrument used by the British Antarctic Survey to study the Ozone Hole.

The hole was discovered in 1 985 by Dr. Jonathan Shanklin,

using this very device.

Well this sort of white box

that we've got in front of us is the Dobson Ozone Spectrophotometer.

And as you might guess from the fact that it's got ozone in its name,

it's for measuring ozone in the atmosphere above us.

And we can see on the top of the instrument

this black tube with a prism at the top,

and that allows us to direct a beam of sunlight into the instrument.

Now this sunlight has come through the earth's atmosphere,

through the ozone layer,

and it's slightly changed that beam,

particularly in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

And what we do inside the instrument

is select out those wavelengths,

or parts of the ultraviolet spectrum, that have been affected by the ozone.

And by looking at the ratio of intensity of two wavelengths,

we can look at how much ozone was in the path

from the instrument to the sun.

And the observer would make some adjustments on the levers

and the dial to either select the wavelength,

or to find out what the absorption was.

So it's essentially a very simple design,

designed by an Oxford professor of physics in the 1 920s,

and it's still the world standard for measuring ozone from the ground.

Measurements recorded here on Galindez Island

detail the amount of ozone in the atmosphere.

Recent measurements have ranged from 270 to 300 Dobsons

and this is good news!

A measurement of 260 or less

is dangerous for people and animals.

This allows all wavelengths of ultra-violet rays through,

burning unprotected skin in five minutes

and blinding Antarctica's land animals.

This Weddell Seal, for example,

has been blinded by UV rays

and this is becoming an increasing problem.

There seems to be evidence

that the changes in the ozone hole

are having an effect on climate change here as well.

The changes in the ozone hole

certainly have been driving some of the changes that we've seen in surface climate.

I think that's now pretty well established

that one of the big changes in Antarctic climate over the last 30 years

or so has been that the westerly winds that blow around the continent

have speeded up by maybe 20%..

We now think that a large part of that

is due to the reduction of ozone in the stratosphere.

Since its discovery in 1 985 by Dr. Jonathan Shanklin,

the hole has been getting bigger every week.

Now that it has reached an area in excess of 25 million square kilometers

the size of North America -

it has, for the very first time, stopped growing.

This year's ozone hole has actually been quite unusual.

Quite often, it's not a circular thing.

It can be quite elliptical

and sometimes when it's elliptical it sweeps northwards

over the tip of South America

or the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.

And that can usually happen once every few weeks.

This year, it's only happened once.

The hole has remained very, very circular and consequently, very stable.

The reason for this, many scientists believe

has been the Montreal Protocol

an urgently created global initiative

to ban the use of gases

that destroy ozone, such as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.

The treaty was signed on September 1 6, 1 987

by almost all the nations of the world

and the results have made a difference.

Timor-Leste, San Marino and Andorra

are the three that haven't signed up.

Everybody else has signed up to the basic protocol and it's working!

It's really quite amazing.

The amount of these ozone-destroying substances in the atmosphere is clearly dropping.

It will take a few years before

what we see at the surface filters through

to the high atmosphere above Antarctica.

But nevertheless I think even in Antarctica

we're starting to see the amount of ozone-destroying substances go down.

It's a slow process because they're very stable

and it's probably going to be another decade before

we can be certain that things are actually improving,

but we can confidently say

that we're on the right track.

And while Dr. Shanklin believes in the reduction of our use of CFCs

is the reason why the ozone hole has stopped growing,

his counterpart in Antarctica,

Igor Gvozdovskyy, has recorded measurements

that suggest the hole is actually shrinking.

The correlation between the world-wide CFC ban

and the reversal of the ozone hole's size

will hopefully encourage further collective efforts

to help reduce the damage to ourselves and our planet.

The Montreal Protocol together with the signing of the Antarctica Treaty,

have proven to be two unprecedented international co-operatives

that ended up protecting the Earth's environment.

No territorial disputes, no military presence,

no natural resource mining,

no commercial interests,

no residential land claims.

Antarctica is unique in so many ways.

It is the driest, windiest,

highest and coldest continent on Earth.

We can now add to that list

that it is the only place on Earth

where the world has come together in peace

to effect environmental change

for the betterment of all life.

No matter how insurmountable the environmental crisis may seem to be,

we have proven that with an internationally united effort,

we can answer the call to any challenge,

even The Antarctica Challenge.

There's no denying the effects of global warming on our planet.

Countries around the world. . .

have been experiencing record temperatures for years,

but none more pronounced than right here in Antarctica.

I'm standing in beautiful Neko Harbour here

where the temperatures have increased hugely in the past five years.

Five years ago the idea of swimming in Antarctica

was not only ludicrous but actually impossible

because most of the shoreline water was frozen.

However, as you can see over my shoulder,

the water is not frozen.

And the temperature today is a balmy eight degrees Celsius

and to me, that sounds like a good temperature for a swim.

So here I go.

Okay, we'll see you in a bit!

So there you have it -

swimming, Antarctica's newest sport!