A Voyage to Antarctica

Alok Jha talks to Zaria Forman, an artist who captures the beauty and fragility of Antarctica’s frozen landscapes in breathtaking pastel drawings. 

Zaria travels to remote regions of the world to collect images and inspiration for her work, which is exhibited worldwide. She has flown with NASA on several Operation IceBridge missions over Antarctica, Greenland, and Arctic Canada. She was featured on CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, PBS, and BBC. She delivered a TEDTalk, and spoke at Amazon, Google, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, exhibited in Banksy’s Dismaland, and was the artist-in-residence aboard the National Geographic Explorer in Antarctica. She curated the first ever, permanent, polar art exhibitions aboard Lindblad Expeditions National Geographic Endurance and the National Geographic Resolution. Her works have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and the Smithsonian Magazine. Zaria currently works and resides in upstate New York and is represented by Winston Wächter Fine Art in New York, NY and Seattle, WA.

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Season 6 of A Voyage To Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Expeditions.

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Alok Jha talks to meteorite-hunter Katherine Joy to discover why the icy continent is one of the best places on Earth to find them.

Professor Katherine Joy is a Professor of Lunar and Planetary Sciences at the University of Manchester. She received her PhD in 2007 at UCL, before taking up post-doc positions at Birkbeck College and the Lunar and Planetary Institute/NASA Johnson Space Center, and then a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship and a Royal Society University Fellowship at The University of Manchester. 

Katherine studies different types of lunar samples to understand how the Moon has geologically evolved through time and how it is a recorder of Solar System processes. She is a member of the Artemis III Geology Team, and is involved in science teams for the ESA PROSPECT and DIMPLE lunar experiments. She also co-led the first UK team working with the British Antarctic Survey to recover meteorite samples from Antarctica. 

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Season 6 of A Voyage To Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Expeditions.

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Alok Jha talks to Robert Macfarlane about the history of Western exploration and Antarctica's place as the last great wilderness on Earth.

Robert Macfarlane’s Sunday Times and New York Times-bestselling books include: Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe.

Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

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Season 6 of A Voyage To Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Expeditions.

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What if Antarctica had rights and its own voice at the international table? Alok Jha explores that question with Cormac Cullinan, environmental lawyer, author, and advocate for the rights of nature.

Cormac is a director of the Wild Law Institute and the specialist environmental law firm Cullinan & Associates. His groundbreaking book Wild Law A Manifesto for Earth Justice (2002) pioneered Earth Jurisprudence and has played a significant role in informing and inspiring the growing Rights of Nature movement.

Cormac led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (proclaimed on 22 April 2010 in Bolivia) and is a founder and Executive Committee member of the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature. He was awarded the 2025 Shackleton Medal for the Protection of the Polar Regions and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Antarctic Alliance, launched on 1 December 2025.

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Season 6 of A Voyage To Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Expeditions. 

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Alok Jha talks to pioneering explorer Ann Bancroft: the first woman to have skied to both North and South poles.  

Ann joined the 1986 Steger International Polar Expedition as the only female of the eight-member team and became the first known woman to cross the ice to the North Pole. After leading the first American women’s East to West crossing of Greenland, she took her team to Antarctica, leading the first all-women’s expedition to the South Pole. In January 1993, after skiing more than 600 miles, Ann made history, becoming the first woman known to have skied to both North and South poles. She and Norwegian explorer Liv Arnesen then set an international record as the first women to ski sail across Antarctica. 

Today Ann is a globally-recognised educator, speaker and founder of the Ann Bancroft Foundation. She lends her voice to organisations in education and the environment and is the co-founder of Bancroft Arnesen Explore.

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Season 6 of A Voyage To Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Expeditions. 

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Alok Jha talks to Lorraine Kelly about her lifelong passion for Antarctica, inspired by her hero Ernest Shackleton AKA ‘The Boss’. 

Lorraine Kelly is a Scottish television presenter, journalist and Sunday Times bestselling author, best known for her ITV show, Lorraine. In 2024, she was awarded a BAFTA for her outstanding contribution to the television industry, marking four-decades of her unstoppable and impressive broadcasting career, as a hugely significant presence on British television.

She has presented many other TV programmes including The Last Leg, Queens for the Night and Have I Got News For You?. She has made guest appearances on The Masked Singer, The Graham Norton Show, Ant & Dec Saturday Night Takeaway, RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, Late Night Lycett and Portrait Artist of the Year. Lorraine is also a best selling author, most recently with her debut fiction novel, The Island Swimmer. 

In 2012, Lorraine was awarded the OBE, for services to charity and the armed forces, by HM The Queen at Holyrood palace in Edinburgh. In 2020, Lorraine also received a CBE for services to broadcasting, journalism and charity. She is a keen charity supporter and is a patron of Help for Heroes and the STV Children’s Appeal.

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Season 6 of A Voyage To Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Expeditions. 

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Astronaut Dr Meganne Christian takes Alok Jha on a trip across the universe, to explore the many connections between Antarctica and space travel. 

Meganne is a member of the European Space Agency astronaut reserve and a Senior Exploration Manager at the UK Space Agency, advising on human and robotic spaceflight. She has undertaken two missions, including one over-winter, at Concordia Station in Antarctica (known as ‘White Mars’), where she was a research scientist in charge of atmospheric physics and meteorology. In November 2022, she was selected from a pool of over 22,500 applicants across Europe to be one of the 17 members of the European Space Agency’s first astronaut class in 13 years.

To support this podcast and the work of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust click here 

For more information about our guests, click here

Season 5 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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The winter before Captain Scott’s ill-fated attempt on the South Pole, his youngest team member Apsley Cherry-Garrard (known as “Cherry”) set off across the ice in the middle of the polar night. Henrietta Hammant talks to Alok Jha about this astonishing journey and Cherry’s subsequent memoir, which remains one of the most gripping works of travel and adventure writing to this day. 

Henrietta is an anthropologist specialising in the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration. Her research considers how this era of Antarctic history is displayed in museums. She has worked across the UK and Canada, most notably at the Polar Museum in Cambridge, and has recently submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Reading.

To support this podcast and the work of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust click here 

To buy a copy of Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard click here 

Season 5 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Hurtigruten Expeditions.

Sound Credits: 

Footsteps in Snow by SoundBiterSFX - https://freesound.org/s/730914/ - License: Creative Commons 0

Walking in Soft Snow.wav by Percy Duke - https://freesound.org/s/420633/ - License: Attribution 3.0

Silencyo_CC_Wind Mistral_Strong_pine trees.aif by silencyo - https://freesound.org/s/81797/ - License: Creative Commons 0

Heavy hailstorm with thunder by Cinetony - https://freesound.org/s/620489/ - License: Creative Commons 0

Short Hailstorm.wav by Benboncan - https://freesound.org/s/63802/ - License: Attribution 4.0 

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With Antarctica sea ice levels reaching record lows over the last four consecutive years, Alok Jha talks to leading glaciologist Professor Martin Siegert about glaciology: the study of ice in all its forms - from the Antarctic ice sheets and glaciers to the icy bodies of our solar system – why ice matters, and the crucial role it plays in our climate.

Martin is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Cornwall) at the University of Exeter. Previously, he was a Professor at Imperial College London and Director of the Grantham Institute and before that he was Head of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. He has published over 250 papers and 8 books on the geophysical exploration of Antarctica. In 2013 he was awarded the Martha T Muse Prize in Antarctic Science and Policy, and in 2007 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

To support this podcast and the work of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, click here 

For more information about our guests, click here

Season 5 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Hurtigruten Expeditions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Leigh Hickmott takes Alok Jha up close and personal with Antarctica’s most fearsome resident: the killer whale, which Leigh calls ‘the apex and most adept predator on the planet’. 

Leigh is a research scientist, zoologist and wildlife presenter, who has co-authored and contributed to numerous scientific research papers. His killer whale research is featured in BBC documentaries ‘Expedition Killer Whale’ and ‘Frozen Planet II’ and he has acted as an ‘on location’ scientific adviser during the filming of natural history series including: NatGeo/Disney+’s Emmy award winning ‘Animals Up Close – Killer Waves’, ‘Our Oceans’ on Netflix, ‘Sentient’ on Disney+ and ‘Blue Planet III’ on the BBC.

Leigh’s Antarctic research journey began in 2017, and he has returned each austral summer season since. His research includes studies of three ‘ecotypes’ of killer whale found along the Peninsula’s coast, with his core focus on ‘pack ice’ killer whales.

Special thanks to Leigh for providing images and recordings of killer whales for this episode. 

To support this podcast and the work of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, click here 

For more information about our guests, click here

Season 5 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible by support from HX Hurtigruten Expeditions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.