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Pole to Pole with Will Smith - Season 1 - Episode 07: The North Pole
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00:12Okay it's freezing. We are making our way to 9-0-0-0. I'm gonna try to find the
00:23North Pole. Look at that. Look how crazy that is. I don't know how it's okay to let me get
00:31off the
00:32boat and walk on the ocean. Oh geez. At least they'll find my body in a thousand years. Come on.
00:41I'm gonna find it. There is a geographic North Pole but it's a difficult thing to find because
00:52the ice is moving. It felt like I was chasing the North Pole. 97, 97, 98, 95.
01:06So it's 98 there. Hold on. I set out for 100 days and here I am looking for 90 degrees
01:18north.
01:23There it is. The North Pole.
01:33Here I am. Top of the world.
01:45There's not many people who have been from pole to pole. To actually reach the North Pole
01:54the North Pole was a delicious moment of accomplishment. But I knew we weren't finished.
02:06because my final goal wasn't to just get to the pole. It was to dive under it.
02:15What was I thinking when I said yes to that?
02:21So
03:10Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, our Odyssey across the globe is coming to an end.
03:26I set out on this journey because my mentor, Dr. Counter, told me that the answers to everything important are
03:35out at the edges of our world.
03:38And man, was he right.
03:41It's been an incredible journey.
03:43We've discovered deadly creatures which could save millions of lives.
03:48That's insane.
03:50We've learned of rivers in the sky.
03:53We recorded a language on the verge of extinction and explored the secret of happiness in a land above the
04:02clouds.
04:02And now the final leg of our journey.
04:09I am putting my neck on the line for a discovery that could eclipse all of that.
04:15All right, we're landing.
04:17We're landing.
04:17Let me get myself.
04:25Hey.
04:26Hey.
04:28Allie, how you doing?
04:29Good.
04:29Nice to meet you.
04:30How are you?
04:31Let's get in there.
04:32Thank you for coming all the way up here.
04:34I know.
04:34This is fantabulous.
04:36It is a very beautiful place.
04:38You know how to pick locations for sure.
04:40I do.
04:40I do.
04:41I'm very, very excited for you because it gets better.
04:44I'm ready.
04:45Let the games begin.
04:46Follow me.
04:46This way.
04:48My name is Allison Fong and I'm an oceanographer and sea ecologist.
04:58So, you know, this moment in history, our planet is facing a very big crisis.
05:07By burning fossil fuels, we created an abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is warming the earth and
05:17causing all sorts of extreme events.
05:23And so, Will and I are embarking on a scientific expedition to the North Pole to see if there's anything
05:29that we can do about it.
05:32There used to be tons of snow covering these mountains.
05:35Doesn't look like there's a lot of snow here now.
05:38That's kind of the problem.
05:39I believe that living under the ice at the North Pole, there are some of the most efficient organisms on
05:47planet Earth at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
05:52If my theories are correct, then this could be a breakthrough for climate change.
05:58All right.
05:59All right, here we go.
06:00Headed north.
06:02Oh, there we go.
06:03The only way to do this kind of work is to dive under that ice and collect samples.
06:17But first, we've got to get there.
06:20There she is.
06:22That's our ride to the top of the earth.
06:24That is a big, giant boat.
06:27She's a big icebreaker.
06:28That's what we need, where we're going.
06:31Yeah, for me, an icebreaker is like, girl, your feet must be tired because you've been running through my mind
06:38all day long.
06:40How's that?
06:41I hope that's a better icebreaker than mine.
06:47The ambition of the entire journey is gigantic.
06:52You know, it was like, wow.
06:55We're on a scientific mission to help save the planet.
07:03And if somebody offered me that script as a movie, I'd be like, come on, man.
07:10Come on, really?
07:11Send that to Matt Damon because he's smart.
07:15Like, Matt's going to have to make that.
07:41Welcome on board.
07:42Nice to meet you.
07:43Welcome in my office, the best office in the world.
07:47Right, so this is my first time on an icebreaker.
07:51How does it break the ice?
07:53I'm not nervous.
07:54Yes.
07:54I'm not nervous.
07:54I'm just asking, how does the ship break the ice?
07:57We use the weight of the hull, 30,000 tons, and we jump above the ice and we break the
08:06ice to optimize this route to the North Pole.
08:10All right, so you feel confident that crashing the ship into the ice is going to be successful and you'll
08:15get us to the North Pole.
08:16Yeah, but you know, which is very important is don't take it for granted.
08:20We're entering a different world.
08:22Only ice and weather will decide.
08:27I'm just breaking down this mission, getting a sense of what we're doing.
08:30And so essentially, the captain, you see the captain, that's the captain right there, you see, oh, right there.
08:36He's just going to slam the boat on purpose into the ice for a week until we get to the
08:42North Pole and he's pretty sure that the boat will be fine.
08:45And Ali thinks it's a good idea for us to get out of the boat and scuba dive under the
08:51North Pole.
08:53Between the three of us, one of us has made a really bad life decision.
09:01And I'm not sure which one of us it is.
09:05Welcome on board.
09:06My name is Eli.
09:08Eli.
09:08Yeah.
09:09I want to learn my way around the boat.
09:11All right.
09:15Here we have which deck we're on and which main vertical zone.
09:18Okay.
09:19Some of these zones can be locked away if there's water intrusion or something like that.
09:22Oh, water intrusion.
09:24That's like when you're on a plane and they say in case of a water landing.
09:28Yeah.
09:28It's like, Joker, there ain't no water landing.
09:30That means you crashed.
09:33What do these things mean?
09:35What are all it is?
09:36So it's basically the documents for abandoning.
09:39Everything on the walls is about the damn boat crash.
09:43Damn, where is the fun stuff on the damn boat?
09:48Okay.
09:48So I've been to the South Pole.
09:51I've been to Ecuador.
09:53I fought anaconda.
09:54And now I'm about to explore the dessert tray.
09:59Now this is how exploration is supposed to be.
10:03I was telling them from the beginning.
10:05I was saying this is how we're supposed to be doing it.
10:07I'm going to see if that's strawberry or raspberry.
10:10That's what I need to know.
10:11This is going to be the first part of my expedition.
10:27This is your captain speaking from the bridge.
10:32We are just arriving at the edge of the sea ice.
10:48We, uh, we ran out of ocean.
11:03That was a big one.
11:07To watch the ship break the ice, it's not little ice.
11:13It's from the size of a car to giant apartment-sized pieces of ice.
11:22That is so thick.
11:25It's really, really loud.
11:29And it's rocking the ship.
11:42Seeing the ice made it more real for me.
11:46It made me realize just how crazy this expedition really is.
11:52Diving under ice is new for Will.
11:56But it's also new for me.
11:59I've dove in warmer waters, temperate waters that are cold, but never this cold, and certainly not frozen.
12:08Growing up in Rhode Island, we have tons of coastline.
12:11So the ocean was just a natural place for me to be.
12:15I love understanding how things work.
12:19And so science was a way of taking my natural curiosity and investigating the world around me.
12:26When I told my parents I was going to be a scientist and not a medical doctor, they're like, why
12:29would you do that?
12:30I was like, there's something beautiful and amazing and awe-inspiring in the power of science.
12:37And so I thought to myself, what can I do?
12:40Where is it that I can really make a difference?
12:44And it's microbes.
12:46Because microbes are the unsung heroes of our planet.
12:49They're what makes this planet unique in our universe.
12:56Okay, all right.
12:58So you got your little bat cave.
13:00This is where all the, like, real magic happens, actually.
13:03Right?
13:03So we're in the lab, and I wanted to give you a chance to see what we're actually looking for
13:09under the ice.
13:09Okay.
13:10But first, let's work on the atmosphere here.
13:13Mm-hmm.
13:14Ooh.
13:14Ooh, okay.
13:19Check this out.
13:21This is a single-cell organism called phytoplankton.
13:25Okay.
13:26They're just absolutely incredible.
13:30Oh, phytoplankton, yeah.
13:33I knew everything.
13:34That's when I was growing up, phytoplankton was all we talked about.
13:39We would be on a corner in Philly, and somebody would walk up and say,
13:42yo, man, did you hear about phytoplankton?
13:44And we would stop basketball games when a new phytoplankton discovery was made.
13:52It was the biggest thing when I was growing up.
13:57All right, so take me all the way back to five years old.
14:01Okay, so that is a phytoplankton.
14:04Yep, so phytoplankton are tiny little plant-like cells.
14:09Mm-hmm.
14:10Trillions and trillions of them live in the ocean.
14:12They're the reason that this planet is habitable for all the other living organisms that use oxygen.
14:19Wow.
14:23Around 2.4 billion years ago, our planet's climate was transformed by phytoplankton.
14:35Through photosynthesis, they harness the energy of sunlight.
14:41They consume huge amounts of carbon and fill the atmosphere with oxygen.
14:47Making life possible for all of the animal kingdom.
14:58Phytoplankton are like the lungs of the planet.
15:02So they clean the atmosphere of CO2, and they create oxygen.
15:09Yeah, so that CO2 doesn't get back into the atmosphere.
15:13It stays trapped there for thousands of years.
15:16So we got to get phytoplankton their flowers.
15:18They don't get their flowers.
15:19No, they don't.
15:20It's like the trees get all the props for us being able to breathe.
15:26We know how efficient phytoplankton are at utilizing sunlight for energy.
15:31But in the Arctic, it's dark for half of the year.
15:35So the big question has always been, what do they do when there is no direct sunlight?
15:40Do they still have the potential to photosynthesize?
15:44This area of research could transform our understanding of climate change.
15:49That's why we need that sample.
15:57This is officially the wildest day of my whole life.
16:03You know, check this out.
16:08That's a daggone polar bear.
16:14That's my first polar bear right there.
16:18I don't know why I'm whispering, because there's a really long way away.
16:22It just seems like you should whisper when you see a polar bear.
16:27For multiple reasons.
16:31Craziness, folks.
16:51As we got to the North Pole, you know, the excitement of that was very short-lived.
16:59I was very insecure about the dive.
17:05We're going to stop this ship, and we're going to get off this ship.
17:09Yeah.
17:10And then we're going to stand on a piece of floating ice, and then we're going to scuba dive under
17:16the ice.
17:17Yeah.
17:19It's dangerous, because you're going into an environment where maybe five to ten meters of ice
17:24are hanging over your head.
17:27If you run into a problem, you can't just go directly up.
17:30You have to find that hole in the ice to properly resurface.
17:37I generally do well with stress, but I was very concerned that this time I had bitten off more than
17:48I could chew.
17:49Is that a storm in the distance?
17:52Are you worried we're going to...
17:53No, no, no.
17:54I'm just trying to keep my eye out, and I just want to be alert.
17:58Alert.
17:58Okay.
17:59Yes.
18:02The idea of coming up and bumping into ice and knowing you can't get out right there if you had
18:11to.
18:14I was really thinking to myself, oh, no, is this the one where it goes wrong?
18:29The weather's terrible now.
18:32Terrible, terrible, terrible.
18:37The whole Dagorne trip coming down to this moment.
18:50Callum, how are you feeling about today?
18:52Optimistic.
18:53Optimistic, okay.
18:54The word was optimistic, but his voice didn't sound good.
19:05Good to go?
19:09Stand by.
19:20Oh, this is terrible.
19:22This is absolutely terrible.
19:28I ain't no professional diver, but this don't seem like dive weather.
19:37Hey, so how many people have you taken out to dive in this kind of weather?
19:41Oh, you know, I'm the first one.
19:43Oh, I'm the first one.
19:46There's no way this is a good idea.
19:49The weather was not good for the dive.
19:53When we got there, you know, it was like a snowstorm rolled in.
20:00This is ridiculous, man.
20:03Can't even see the damn dive site.
20:06The captain, with the weather coming in, said it was a now or never kind of situation.
20:15Uh, the boat is supposed to be leaving.
20:18The captain has given us, uh, one shot, then we gotta go, uh, over here.
20:23Uh, oh, jeez.
20:24Oh, good heavens.
20:26This was the highest fear point for me in the entire journey.
20:35The thing is, Arctic weather can change in, like, a snap.
20:38So 20 minutes from now could be bright sun, beautiful.
20:42You never know.
20:43Or it could be worse.
20:44Or it could be worse.
20:45Or it could be worse.
20:46It could be worse.
20:46Oh, it could always be worse.
20:48Yeah.
20:53This is exceptionally cold water, so I don't want you guys completing this task any longer
20:59than 10 minutes.
21:00If anybody gets any sort of serious leak, the dive is terminated.
21:05Uh-oh.
21:06Come on, you can do it.
21:15That's better.
21:18Diving, in general, is a risky endeavor.
21:22Diving under ice is inherently more risky.
21:25And in a very remote place, you're really stacking the challenges.
21:31Okay, I'm going.
21:33But this research could change our outlook on the planet.
21:38Going in.
21:41How can you not be all in?
21:46Oh, my goodness.
21:47Oh, my goodness.
21:49Freezing.
21:51Cold.
21:58I was legitimately scared.
22:01But I could tell the weather was coming in.
22:03I could tell we were pushing.
22:07I wanted it to be perfect, and I wanted to get the sample.
22:12And I could feel the tension.
22:24Good to go?
22:27Hang on, guys.
22:28I've got a problem.
22:32Okay, I'm sitting back down.
22:38Frozen.
22:39The ice in there, see?
22:40Yeah.
22:42Hot water's coming in.
22:45My thing froze.
22:47And it was right before I was about to jump in.
22:51That's how cold it is at the North Pole.
22:57I'm seeing them bubbles.
23:01The dust was to be down there.
23:08It's getting cold.
23:11At this point, Will's taking more time than anticipated.
23:17But because we're a team, we're on standby until all of the divers are safely in the water.
23:23They're going to need more hot water, guys.
23:26Time is ticking.
23:27Time is ticking away before I can actually do what I've come to do.
23:32Let's try again.
23:41Come on, Will.
23:43Come on, Will.
23:46Three, two, one, go.
24:04Wow.
24:13Look at that, see?
24:15I could see under the ice sheet.
24:20And it was like an upside-down ice mountain range.
24:28And the sun was coming through and all of that.
24:31It was just stunning.
24:34It was definitely those once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience.
24:41Allie, CWS.
24:43Holy s***, this is amazing.
24:46It was incredible.
24:47It was absolutely incredible.
24:50It was like going through a crystal castle.
24:53All of the ice crystals are reflecting the light that's shining in on you.
24:58It was literally incredible.
25:01Let's go towards the areas that look greenish along the bottom of this ice.
25:07Show me the way.
25:10The dive was going well.
25:12I see the target samples that I want.
25:17And all we need to do is swim two and a half meters and slurp a sample.
25:31No.
25:32No.
25:34No.
25:36No.
25:44No.
25:44No.
25:45No.
25:45OK, we've got a problem.
25:52my face mask went into free flow
25:58i started hearing abort dive abort dive
26:04and that's not what you want to hear
26:08this is it i have to surface
26:12break the ice break the ice
26:23there we go
26:25wow
26:50well that was terrible
26:56no samples
27:01literally it's within my fingertips
27:05right and that's the hardest part about this
27:08we have no samples
27:16so it would have taken waiting at least until the next day to try again and the weather was still
27:23relatively poor
27:25we weren't going to be able to convince the captain to stay another day
27:32so it was gut-wrenching when i actually felt the ship move
27:35it was the realization that the opportunity was gone really gone
27:47so we missed the sample
27:51yeah
27:54uh well that sucks
27:56yeah i guess that's putting it pretty lightly and the hardest part about i think this is that
28:03when you're so close and i mean we were like you know you could feel it like we were there
28:09it was in our in our grasp
28:13for me to miss out on this is just there's just a lot of feelings that i have about it
28:20yeah to come all the way to come all the way to the north pole and miss
28:26yeah
28:27i can see you know how heartbreaking this thing is
28:33yeah
28:33it's like
28:36yeah it just it feel it feels like i slowed you down
28:42for me it feels like being in the way
28:45you know
28:48you know there are a lot of moving parts
28:51and um when we got out of the water
28:54and i was thinking about what it is that went wrong
28:58and what part of the process could have been better
29:00and could i have been better
29:08but it's not your fault
29:10you know it's not any single person's fault for having not brought
29:14their very best
29:16to the work
29:17sometimes you fail
29:19there's probably people all over the place
29:22who have failed somehow
29:24just not as big as us
29:27that might be that also might be true
29:30uh it's a pretty
29:31it's a pretty significant fail
29:38seeing
29:38ali's disappointment in missing the the sample
29:43i realized ali had missed
29:47a part of her life's work
29:49something that she may never have another opportunity to pursue
29:54that's where
29:56that's where it really started to uh feel bad
30:16the second day i'm sitting in my room
30:18feeling horrible
30:21and someone is communicating via the radio that we've been called by the captain
30:27there's a good weather window
30:28and so there's the opportunity to get back in the water under some ice
30:33we've moved significantly further south but it's still in the high arctic
30:40i'm definitely used to being the guy that takes the shot at the at the buzzer but we're
30:48on an expedition that has a mission and with a more experienced dive buddy ali's got a
30:56better chance to bring her discoveries back home so i'm gonna step aside
31:04step in in in three two one
31:09ali
31:18and we're there
31:20and it's again incredible
31:25my dive buddy and i work quickly to collect material off the bottom of the ice
31:32that's the moment where all of the hope turns into reality
31:40we collected samples we collected really really good samples
31:51welcome back to the lab let's see what we got see what you got see what you got so i
31:56wanted to give you a chance to see some of the things that we found
31:59okay when we're out there you ready yes i'm very very ready okay i'm excited this is
32:04this is the the uh the part that i i most enjoy you most enjoy yourself is it because it's
32:10warm
32:11and not cold and not freezing and snowing in your nose yeah me too
32:17let me show you yeah
32:21here we put part of the sample that we collected in these bottles and these bottles are gas tight
32:26and we've been keeping them in an incubator that has a control setting for temperature and light
32:32right so it's cold and it's low light
32:34and we've been measuring all of the oxygen and co2 that they've been using and creating
32:39and if you look at the top yeah you see those little dots yeah so that those are gas bubbles
32:45okay so
32:46that was gas bubbles all created within a sealed environment in the dark that's right
32:55this experiment shows that arctic phytoplankton are incredible
33:01they produce oxygen while consuming carbon at imperceptibly low light levels
33:08so you can imagine like when people are designing and thinking about how do we like create cooler
33:13technology that might slow down climate change they're looking at how you can create power out
33:18of things like co2 and sunshine that's spectacular these polar phytoplankton are some of the most light
33:27sensitive cells we've ever seen if we can figure out how to harness their potential it could revolutionize
33:35the future of green energy but not only that it could also help reverse climate change because they
33:43not only generate power they do it by consuming co2 but this single entity has all of the power
33:53to create an earth that is habitable for all of us you have no idea that all of that is
33:59going on
34:00in a drop of seawater it's a whole universe a whole universe of microscopic life
34:14it blows my mind that just a single drop of water could open up an astonishing new frontier
34:23for the future of our planet i guess my mentor dr counter was right the answers to everything important
34:33are at the edges of our world
34:40and the point of all of our exploring is to return to the place where we started
34:46the planet and know that place for the first time
34:51three two one
35:07traveling pole to pole has not only changed the way i see our planet it's changed the way i see
35:14myself
35:16i've been inspired by the truly extraordinary people i've met
35:23to ask burning questions about our place on earth questions about our health happiness history even our
35:36our ultimate survival
35:52i've been to the edges of our world
35:55i've been to the edges of our world but coming home it feels like my journey is just beginning
36:01because i'm even more curious now than when i first began and that is a beautiful thing
36:07happy
36:29you
36:36the
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