A Voyage to Antarctica

Alok Jha talks to Leilani Raashida Henry about her father: the pioneering Antarctic explorer and civil rights leader, George Washington Gibbs Jr. 

Born in Florida during the Jim Crow segregation era, Gibbs enlisted in the US Navy in 1935, and went South aboard the USS Bear. On 14 January 1940, Gibbs made history as the first black man to set foot in ‘Little America’ and the first recorded person of African descent known to have landed on the Antarctic continent. 

Leilani, an author, facilitator, coach, artist, and public speaker, pieced together her father’s story after his death from diaries and contemporary accounts and wrote a book – The Call of Antarctica: Exploring and Protecting Earth’s Coldest Continent – inspired by his life. She has also followed in her father’s footsteps on two expeditions to Antarctica.

To support 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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Alok Jha talks to world-renowned volcanologist and filmmaker Clive Oppenheimer. More people have been to space than have set eyes on the depths of Mount Erebus in Antarctica – the continent’s highest active volcano. But Clive has been back to Erebus 13 times: to better understand what is happening in the fiery depths below the ice and answer big questions about life on our planet and beyond. 

For 30 years Clive has been based at the University of Cambridge, where he is Professor of Volcanology. His research seeks to understand how volcanoes work and to probe the connections between eruptions, climate and society. He has conducted fieldwork around the world, either at the crater's edge peering in with assorted monitoring devices or hunting for the far-flung deposits of Earth's greatest eruptions.

His books include: 'Mountains of Fire' and 'Eruptions that Shook the World' and he has also made two documentary features with legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog: 'Into the Inferno' for Netflix and 'Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds' for AppleTV+.

To support 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.

Alok Jha revisits one of Antarctica’s most enduring tales of exploration with author and journalist Katherine MacInnes. Her book 'Snow Widows' tells the story of the race for the South Pole, from the perspective of the women whose lives would be forever changed by it: the wives and mothers that Sir Robert Falcon Scott and his expedition team left behind. 

Katherine MacInnes has been an arts journalist and commissioning editor and has gained an MSt from The University of Oxford. She has published plays and children’s books, as well as a biography of Oriana Wilson - 'The Woman With The Iceberg Eyes'. She is a regular on local BBC Radio and her journalism has appeared widely, including in the Times, Telegraph and Country Life. 

For more information about our guests and episode transcripts, click here

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

To buy 'Snow Widows' by Katherine MacInnes, click here 

Season 4 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible with support from Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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

Alok Jha talks to NASA astro-botanist Jess Bunchek about growing vegetables in Antarctica – and outer space. 

Jess started as a botanist and agronomist and, after completing her masters, worked as an astro-botanist at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where she researched space crop production and supported “Veggie” – a vegetable production chamber on the International Space Station. 

While at NASA, she proposed a new collaboration with Germany's space agency, DLR, on the EDEN ISS greenhouse project in Antarctica. For this, Jess overwintered for 14 months at Germany's Neumayer Station III in Antarctica from late 2020 to early 2022, where she operated EDEN ISS and contributed to multiple areas of Antarctic research. 

For more information about our guests and episode transcripts, click here

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

Season 4 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible with support from Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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

Alok Jha talks to Dr Peter Fretwell, award-winning cartographer and leading scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, about Antarctica’s most iconic residents – Emperor penguins – and the threats they’re facing from climate change. 

Peter pioneered the use of satellite imagery to find and monitor polar wildlife – a project that has led to him discovering almost half of the world's Emperor penguin colonies.

He chairs the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, Bedmap3 group and ‘Censusing Animal Populations from Space’ (part of the Southern Ocean Observing System) and heads BAS’s ‘Wildlife from Space’ group. He has completed five field seasons in Antarctica.

For more info about our guests and episode transcripts, click here

To support the work of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust - and adopt a penguin - click here

Season 4 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible with support from Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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

Alok Jha talks to journalist and author Julian Sancton about the harrowing and epic survival story of The Belgica: an early polar expedition gone terribly wrong – with a ship frozen in ice and its crew trapped inside for months of endless polar night. 

Julian is an editor at The Hollywood Reporter. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among others. He has reported from every continent, including Antarctica, which he visited while researching his New York Times bestseller Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night. A graduate of Harvard College, where he majored in History, Julian lives in Larchmont, New York, with his partner, Jessica, and their two daughters.

For more info about our guests and episode transcripts click here

To support the work of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust click here

Buy Julian's book, Madhouse at the End of the Earth here

Season 4 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible with support from Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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

Dr Susannah Maidment, Principal Researcher in fossil reptiles at London’s Natural History Museum, takes us 100 million years back in time to when Antarctica was a rainforest and home to some of the biggest creatures to ever walk the earth – the dinosaurs! 

Susannah has a PhD in vertebrate palaeontology from the University of Cambridge and, prior to working at the Natural History Museum, was a Research Fellow at Imperial College and a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum. She appears regularly in the media talking about dinosaurs and has been a guest on BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific and The Infinite Monkey Cage.

https://www.ukaht.org/antarctica-in-sight/podcasts/

Season 4 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible with support from Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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

Alok Jha talks to Guinness World Record-breaking polar explorer Preet Chandi MBE – known as Polar Preet – about her extraordinary, inspiring and boundary-breaking achievements in Antarctica.

In 2022, Preet became the ninth woman in history to ski solo to the South Pole and the first woman of colour to complete a solo expedition on the continent. The next year, Preet set out on another adventure: covering 922 miles in 70 days and breaking two Guinness world records for the longest solo unsupported one-way polar ski journey for a woman and overall. 

After we spoke to her, Preet went back to Antarctica – this time to attempt a speed record for the fastest woman to complete a solo South Pole ski expedition, covering 702 miles of Antarctic ice in 31 days, 13 hours and 19 minutes.

www.ukaht.org

Season 4 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible with support from Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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

Alok Jha talks to award-winning polar architect Hugh Broughton, to find out what it takes to design buildings where people can live – and even thrive –  in the world’s most extreme conditions. 

In 2005 Hugh’s practice won an international competition to design the UK’s most southerly Antarctic research station – Halley VI. The modular elevated base was completed in 2012 and is the world’s first fully-relocatable polar research facility. Hugh’s practice has gone on to win a string of design competitions for remote projects and is now considered one of the world’s leading designers of research facilities in the Polar Regions. 

Hugh has won over 50 international awards for his designs. His work has been published around the world and has been featured in numerous exhibitions and on television and radio. He has lectured worldwide on the work of his practice, and regularly sits on award and competition juries. 

https://www.ukaht.org/antarctica-in-sight/podcasts/ 

Season 3 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible with support from Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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

Alok Jha talks to climate scientist Dr Tamsin Edwards about how her pioneering work in modelling the impact of ice sheet and glacier melt on rising sea levels is predicting the future of the planet. 

Tamsin is an award-winning science communicator, including through her blog for the Public Library of Science, articles for the Guardian, and co-presenting the BBC Radio 4 series “39 Ways to Save the Planet”. She recently wrote an essay about the consequences of rising temperatures worldwide – and how to stop them – for Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book.  

Tamsin regularly provides advice on climate science to the public, policy makers, media, business and charities. She was a Lead Author of the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was published in 2021. 

In 2023, Tamsin will be the first Parliamentary “Thematic Research Lead” for Climate & Environment, a role based on the concept of Chief Scientific Advisers – responsible for bringing about a step change in the way climate research feeds into Parliament’s scrutiny, legislation and debate. 

https://www.ukaht.org/antarctica-in-sight/podcasts/ 

Season 3 of A Voyage to Antarctica is made possible with support from Hurtigruten Expeditions.

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