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00:04When you get to the Arctic, you normally go there by ship.
00:09And when you are standing on the ship and get into the ice,
00:12there's a smell which is very peculiar, the smell of cold water and ice.
00:26And then when you get away from the ship and you don't hear the ship's engine anymore,
00:31you only have natural sounds, you see?
00:34The cracking of the ice, the holding of the wind and maybe your own footsteps.
00:41And you hear your own heart beating, which you don't hear in Europe.
00:50Everyone who actually goes there is overwhelmed by it.
00:54First of all, it's enormous.
00:58Second, it's actually a lot more varied.
01:02If you haven't been there, you think, oh, cold.
01:06And it's lighter than you think when it's dark.
01:12Because there's not necessarily a lot of cloud cover,
01:15and you will get starlight, moonlight.
01:18And they reflect off-white surfaces, which look, of course, blue.
01:24So you'll get a kind of shimmering light even when there isn't any sun.
01:32200 years ago, most people could only imagine how the Arctic might be.
01:39I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks,
01:43which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.
01:47I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation.
01:53It ever presents itself to my imagination as a region of beauty and delight.
02:00I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited,
02:07and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.
02:15Mary Shelley wrote at a time when the Europeans had only ventured to the edge of the Arctic Ocean.
02:21In the following two centuries of exploration,
02:24our knowledge and understanding of the region has increased enormously,
02:29transforming the way we imagine it.
02:32It's become a place where heroes were born,
02:35and heroes would disappear without trace.
02:39We have discovered that, however remote and forbidding it seems,
02:44it is vitally connected to the climate and nature of the rest of our planet.
02:49It's been both a theatre of war, where great powers vie for supremacy,
02:55but also a cause for international collaboration.
03:01Recently, it has become a symbol of the fragility of our planet.
03:08And now the way we see the Arctic is being transformed once again.
03:28Throughout history, the idea of wilderness has developed from meaning a place of fear and the unknown,
03:34to a place of beauty, unspoiled by humankind.
03:39By any definition, the Arctic once symbolized both these ideas.
03:44In our times, wilderness has come to mean something we must protect,
03:49something we must save from ourselves.
03:54The word Arctic derives from the Greek word arctos, bear.
04:00And wilderness comes from Old Anglo-Saxon, the place of wild beasts.
04:12And in the early 1800s, the British Navy planned to conquer it.
04:21One image above all inspired the would-be polar explorers of the future.
04:27The Navy's greatest hero, Horatio Nelson, was said to have fought a polar bear single-handed at the age of
04:3416.
04:37It was an anecdote told by his commanding officers.
04:40It made its way into the Nelson biographies and certainly many of the polar histories through the 19th century
04:46seized upon this episode of the young boy engaging the Arctic.
04:51Is there truth to the story possibly a mixture of truth and fantasy and myth?
04:57But it's a wonderful story.
05:00The polar bear was to become an integral part of the Arctic image.
05:09If you want to think of it as an allegory for man against nature, the bear, emblematic of the Arctic
05:16wilderness in its sort of ferocity.
05:19Certainly for a generation of people reading heroic biographies, it was a story that they cherished.
05:27Young Nelson's Arctic encounter was to be redrawn and republished dozens of times in hagiographies and schoolboy comics right up
05:36to the present day.
05:38As a symbol of the navy against the Arctic, the challenge of the bear personified as the Arctic wilderness, it's
05:46an image that has taken right through the century.
05:50The Arctic wasn't only playing on the imagination of schoolboys dreaming of emulating Nelson.
05:57John Barrow, second secretary of the admiralty, was also looking north.
06:01The maps of the time show that he had as little idea as Mary Shelley as to what lay beyond
06:07the great ice barriers of the north.
06:10He did hope to find the fabled Northwest Passage, a short and potentially lucrative route to the great trading emporiums
06:17of Asia.
06:19The Northwest Passage was this elusive chalice which had been sought for centuries.
06:24And it was a chance for Britain to plant the Union Jack, to claim new lands, to explore, and to
06:31in effect have the honour of discovering undiscovered parts of the world.
06:38The Northwest Passage had been a British obsession since the time of Henry VIII.
06:43Numerous expeditions had failed in the attempt to find it.
06:47Now what spurred John Barrow on was a fear that another nation might get there first.
06:56The Russians have for some time been strongly impressed with an idea of an open passage round America.
07:03It would be somewhat mortifying if a naval power but of yesterday should complete a discovery in the 19th century,
07:10which was so happily commenced by Englishmen in the 16th.
07:18The Navy's first expedition was to produce a new model of naval hero, the Arctic Explorer.
07:26First among them was the leader of the expedition, Captain John Ross.
07:31He was vain, he was egotistical, he was a cantankerous Scot devoted to the Arctic, devoted to enhancing his public
07:39profile.
07:40He was a celebrity hell-bent on utilising the wilderness to self-promote.
07:45Captain Ross's expedition was supplied in naval fashion.
07:48All the latest equipment of the day and other essentials.
07:52A 25 volume library and 90 religious tracts.
07:56Also 129 gallons of gin and brandy, 105 pounds of snuff and 40 umbrellas.
08:03If you think of Arctic explorations as voyaging to the limits of the known world, these naval voyages in their
08:09well-stocked ships were literally sailing to the edges of the map they took with them.
08:14All the things that perhaps seemed totally unnecessary if you were to travel successfully through the Arctic.
08:20But all these things that were deemed necessary for English gentlemen to sustain themselves in a civilised manner within a
08:30challenging wilderness.
08:32In June 1818, Ross's two vessels managed to penetrate past Baffin Island into the Davis Strait.
08:40It was the first sight that he and many of his crew had had of the Arctic in summer.
08:46It's hardly possible to imagine anything more exquisite by night as well as by day.
08:54They glitter with a vividness of colour beyond the power of art to represent.
09:00The weather was beautiful, fine and clear, and nothing could exceed the serenity and at the same time the grandeur
09:09of the whole scene around us.
09:12The water was glassy smooth and ships glided gently among the numberless masses of ice.
09:19The land of Greenland, rugged and high, and almost entirely covered with snow, filled up the eastern horizon.
09:28The Arctic was a vast geography of nothingness. It was a tempting sublime. It was an imaginary landscape. What could
09:38they expect? They travelled with baggage. They travelled with a perceptual baggage.
09:45Icebergs that reared from the sea-like towers and cathedrals.
09:51Midnight polar winter sky with ribbons of the aurora borealis in emeralds and golds and deep crimsons.
09:58A beautiful, wondrous, awe-inspiring, sublime place. A sublime place that was terrifying.
10:07Ross and many of the officers in his crew were keen diarists and competent watercolourists.
10:12The pictures and accounts of their experiences were to shape the Arctic image in the European mind.
10:20They also discovered a new people. An isolated band of Inuit they called the Arctic Highlanders.
10:28Until Ross's two naval vessels arrived, they believed themselves to be the only human beings in the world.
10:36What my ancestors have told me is that when the first contacts were made between the Europeans and the Inuit,
10:45I think there was a sense of fear in many ways because they had never seen people with the type
10:54of skin colour that they had.
10:56Some of the explorers had blonde hair. They didn't really know where these beings were coming from.
11:04So there was a lot of reluctance and hesitation involved in actually going up to someone and making contact.
11:16Ross's voyage, and indeed his reputation, was to be marred by one of the tricks that the Arctic plays on
11:22the naive observer.
11:25He aborted his expedition after what he perceived to be a range of mountains blocked his route through to the
11:31Northwest Passage.
11:33He named them the Croker Mountains after an admiralty official.
11:38The land I then saw was a high ridge of mountains extending directly across the bottom of the inlet.
11:45This chain appeared high in the centre and those towards the north had at times the appearance of islands being
11:52insulated by fog at their bases.
11:55The Arctic was a great place for illusions as well. There are Arctic mirages.
12:01They're quite wonderful mirages. They're called Fata Morgana and they make things look a lot taller than they are.
12:08They look very real until you get out your binoculars and you look at them closely and you realise that
12:15some of the information is missing.
12:19They're shimmering around the edges and then the next minute they're gone.
12:25Ross's so-called Croker Mountains were indeed a polar illusion and not a mountain range.
12:33On his return to London, Ross found himself pilloried for his failure.
12:39The great cartoonist George Cruickshank ridiculed the collection of Arctic specimens Ross and his officers had brought back.
12:48The Arctic and the prospect of a Northwest Passage were to entice and confound John Ross and many subsequent explorers
12:56for the rest of the century.
13:02The early British explorers, they really didn't understand the Arctic.
13:08People tend to have this concept of the Arctic ice as being like a big skating rink.
13:13Certainly the early polar explorers kind of thought that.
13:16They figured they could, well once they get in the ice they'll just haul off on their sledges and away
13:19they go.
13:20It's not like that. I mean the ice is constantly in motion. It piles up into great huge ridges.
13:26You see these people, you know, pushing sledges over ridges that are 10, 20 meters high.
13:33And that ridge is extending 30 or 40 meters down into the ocean below it.
13:38For a ship to try to break through that is next to impossible.
13:49Though they failed to penetrate the ice barrier, their exploits were celebrated in the popular art and literature of the
13:56time, making them national heroes despite huge loss of ships and lives.
14:01One expedition above all was to dominate the 19th century culture of the Arctic.
14:09It was homeward bound one night on the deep.
14:16Swinging in my hammer I fell asleep.
14:22I dreamt a dream and they thought it true
14:28Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew
14:36John Franklin was a veteran explorer.
14:39He was given the command of the Northwest Passage expedition in 1845, left England full of optimism.
14:45His ships full with the latest Victorian gadgetry, but he didn't return.
14:49The Franklin saga occupied the minds of a generation of naval men going in search of him over 30 voyages.
14:58He's perhaps remembered now as a bumbling old man who was full of all sorts of Victorian ideals and didn't
15:06really approach the wilderness in an appropriate manner.
15:08I think that's probably a harsh analysis.
15:13Well, the Franklin expedition was one of those things like the Titanic.
15:17In fact, there is a great parallel between the way those two stories both came out.
15:25Both involved ships.
15:27Both involved ice.
15:29Both involved huge fanfare when they set out.
15:33State of the art.
15:35Best we've got.
15:37Modern technology.
15:39No danger.
15:41It'll be a snap.
15:43There's never been anything like this before.
15:48They had special plating on their hulls.
15:52They had steam organs.
15:54They had libraries and best of all, they had tinned food.
16:01The best equipped expedition to date with 129 men disappeared among the frozen islands above the Canadian mainland.
16:10Unfortunately, his expedition coincided with a particularly cold sequence of years.
16:17If nothing else, Franklin can be accused of bad timing.
16:21You know, he sailed at really one of the coldest periods in 500 years.
16:26It was a period where, you know, already a very forbidding landscape in terms of geography, very, it was like
16:35a puzzle.
16:36It was like a maze. It was an extremely difficult challenge to begin with.
16:43Usually the pan ice would melt in the summers and for three years it didn't.
16:49So their ships got in to a place near King William Island and they couldn't get out again.
16:55They were stuck.
16:58And when you're beset by the ice, it's not just that you're frozen in as in an ice cube.
17:04The ice is actually pushing and being driven up against you so that it piles up.
17:10If there's a wind, the sticking out parts of the ice act is sails and it can move very quickly
17:18and it can move with enormous force.
17:32Quite what happened during the three years that Franklin and his two ships were iced in is still a mystery.
17:40They had to abandon the ships. Nobody quite knows where those ships are.
17:45Had they walked north, they might have been rescued by whalers because there were a lot of whalers in the
17:51summer, went there.
17:54But they didn't.
17:55They walked south, dragging a sledge which contained such things as a copy of the Vicar of Whitefield.
18:04Just what you would wish to drag on a sledge.
18:09Lots of bars of soap.
18:11Lots are very handy.
18:13There was obviously something wrong with their ability to reason at this point.
18:20They went in the wrong direction. They took a lot of unnecessary things.
18:25It took three years before people in London began to wonder whether anything had gone wrong.
18:31Spearheading the Let's Find Franklin lobby was his redoubtable wife, the first heroine of the Arctic story, Lady Jane Franklin.
18:41Amazing celebrity in her own right, this remarkable woman who turned her husband's tragic disappearance into a career.
18:51She became this incredible celebrity. She was beautiful. She travelled the world. She certainly made the most of his loss.
19:00Her charisma and exertions were to launch more than 30 Arctic expeditions over the next few decades.
19:08Many lasted for years at a time. New landscapes were charted, ships were wrecked, more heroes emerged, more lives were
19:17lost.
19:19Neither Sir John nor his two ships were ever found.
19:23Successive search parties returned from the North with handfuls of artefacts, assorted human bones and a lot of conjecture.
19:31There's a book called Dead Elvis, which is about the posthumous life of Elvis Presley.
19:37And it turns out that he's led a much more vigorous, energetic and varied life since being dead than he
19:45did when he was alive.
19:48And you could write a book called Dead Franklin, which would follow the life of Franklin after he died.
19:55The first phase of that would be Franklin the mystery, you know, where has he gone?
20:01The second phase when Lady Jane Franklin really got going was Franklin the brave hero.
20:08And she built him up to no end, making him almost like somebody who had died in a war or
20:15had sort of selflessly martyred himself.
20:18The fact was that he was setting out to find the Northwest Passage, which was not a war.
20:23It was going to be a cheap way of getting to Asia. It was a commercial venture.
20:28But nonetheless, brave Franklin, heroic Franklin got statues in Westminster Abbey and mythology of the very heroic person kind.
20:39Just as money was being raised to commemorate Britain's great Arctic martyr in Westminster Abbey,
20:45one of the most intrepid Franklin searchers returned with new evidence.
20:50From Lady Franklin's point of view, Dr John Ray was decidedly off message.
20:56The bodies of some 30 persons and graves were discovered on the continent.
21:02From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles,
21:07it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative.
21:14Cannibalism.
21:17John Ray brought the wrong news. The wrong news was they were eating each other.
21:24This was the wrong news. It caused great indignation.
21:28Both from Lady Jane.
21:30Hard to get your husband into Westminster Abbey if he had been practicing that kind of cuisine.
21:39And also from Charles Dickens, who wrote a very outraged piece.
21:44No honest, virtuous, good, true English sailor would ever, ever, ever eat another honest, good, true and virtuous English sailor.
21:56The three earliest casualties from the expedition have lain buried high up in the Arctic for the last 160 years.
22:04Their graves on Beachy Island have remained one of the few tangible symbols of the Franklin disaster.
22:12In 1984, some Canadian scientists exhumed their bodies and gave a new breath of life to the Arctic mystery.
22:25To be able to look into the eyes of someone who's been dead for more than a century, not only
22:30that, who was a participant in one of the great discovery expeditions.
22:33It is a profoundly moving experience. But I think for people who saw that image, who saw that face, this
22:39is a face that they know.
22:41This could be the face of a family member or, you know, a brother or a friend.
22:47I think that that really opened up a new era of interest in Arctic exploration.
22:53You can see that in terms of the number of sort of amateur sleuths who are poking around King William
22:59and Beachy Islands every summer.
23:03Forensic analysis drove the Canadians to the conclusion that Franklin's crew had been poisoned by the lead from the tin
23:10cans they had stored their food in.
23:12Lead poisoning may explain why the remaining crew hauled bars of soap, silver spoons, silk slippers and a copy of
23:20the Vicar of Wakefield across the ice and in the wrong direction.
23:24The Canadian theory is hotly disputed and has reopened the Franklin mystery to yet more speculation.
23:32This is one of those historical stories that really is very difficult to answer.
23:37It's a story, I suppose, about the ongoing appeal of the Arctic as an imaginative space.
23:44The North Pole is an absence of anything, but it's a featureless spot.
23:49But at the same time, it's that point where scientific curiosity and imaginations combine and continues to capture people's interest.
24:01There was one significant by-product from 15 years of Franklin search expeditions.
24:07Almost the entire coastline and island system above North America was mapped out, showing the region to be almost permanently
24:15ice-bound.
24:19By the 1860s, however, after years of sacrifice and failure, the awesome nature of the frozen North seemed to have
24:27sapped the strength of British ardour.
24:32Edwin Lancia's picture summed up the sentiments of the time.
24:37Edwin Lancia's A Man Proposes, God Disposes is this wonderful, biting, controversial painting.
24:44It was painted in 1864 and people cried when they saw it.
24:47The newspaper reports said, gosh, this is too awful to read proper art.
24:51It wasn't a patriotic picture, it was a picture exposing the vanity of human effort.
24:57There's an echo of cannibalism there too. These ravenous polar bears, the personification of a hostile Arctic, are chewing on
25:04the corners of a Union Jack.
25:06There's shipwreck, there's a chaos of tumbled icebergs.
25:12At this particular moment in 1864, Lancia so well expresses dissatisfaction, the sheer uselessness of polar endeavour.
25:25The dissolution of the 1860s was only a brief respite in a savage struggle between the Arctic wilderness and Victorian
25:33endeavour.
25:35Although the North West Passage was written off as a viable trade route, a new Arctic goal emerged, the North
25:42Pole.
25:45And from now on there was to be international competition, and there was little place for the large-scale British
25:51naval expeditions.
25:53The key to success lay in the Arctic itself.
26:03The Inuit had been part of the polar image from the beginning of European exploration.
26:08They had survived thousands of years in an Arctic environment where the British failed.
26:14It eventually dawned on the would-be polar explorers that the Inuit were more than just another exotic part of
26:19the flora and fauna.
26:22They and their use of the raw materials of the Arctic might be the key to conquest.
26:27And the new conquerors were not going to be the Brits.
26:36Norwegians like Roald Amundsen and Americans like Robert Peary were to be the new pioneers of the Arctic.
26:44And they adopted the ways of the Inuit to get to places no Brit had gone before.
26:49Peary was to take the Inuit example further than anyone else.
26:53He not only copied the Inuit, he co-opted them onto his expeditions.
26:58Peary learned to travel on the ice with light sledges, with dogs.
27:04They'd figured out the problem of scurvy.
27:07Lead poisoning was no longer the issue.
27:10So Peary was able to, by adapting the local Inuit way of living in the Arctic,
27:19was much more successful at achieving the farthest north.
27:24On the 6th of April 1909, Peary had himself, his black servant Matthew Henson, and his Inuit team, photographed what
27:33he claimed to be the North Pole.
27:38The discovery of the North Pole stands for the inevitable victory of courage, persistence, experience over all obstacles.
27:47Here is the cap and climax, the finish, the closing of the book on 400 years of history.
27:56Such was the glory associated with reaching the Pole that another rival explorer, Frederick Cook, also claimed to have got
28:03there first.
28:04The world's media was captivated by an acrimonious debate among rival claimants.
28:10Peary's claim prevailed at the time, but doubts remain.
28:15Did Peary get to the North Pole?
28:18Does it really matter?
28:21He certainly got farther north than anybody had been.
28:25His claims of distances, the 40 odd kilometers a day that he traveled, or he must have traveled to actually
28:32get to the Pole,
28:34it's maybe hard to believe.
28:37But, you know, we weren't there.
28:38Maybe he got very lucky ice conditions, and there's variable ice conditions.
28:44And whether he really got to the Pole or not, like I say, does it really matter?
28:49The Arctic Pole is kind of a virtual place.
28:53If you stand on the North Pole one day, the ice is moving, and if you don't even move yourself,
28:58you won't be at the North Pole the next day.
29:01So, you know, whether he really made it or not, I don't think it really matters.
29:06Peary certainly exploited his achievement to bring the Arctic into every American household.
29:12A whole plethora of merchandise was emblazoned with his picture, and his polar success.
29:26So, by the early 1900s, the Arctic had become embedded in the public consciousness.
29:31Its Pole had been conquered, and its image had become a global marketing gimmick.
29:38Now, its inhabitants were to become the heroes of the world's first ever cinema documentary.
29:59It's a wonderful film, a beautiful, technical piece of cinema.
30:03It's pivotal in the 1920s as marking a change of the way the Arctic wilderness is represented,
30:11from explorers' narratives in the 19th century through to new forms and new technologies of image representation,
30:18the camera and the cinema, which gave quite wonderful and new and challenging images of the Arctic as a wilderness.
30:29It gets its world premiere in New York in 1922, and it really goes global.
30:36The image is seen in Australia, the film shows in London, in Indonesia, in India, in Africa.
30:42An image of the Canadian wilderness, albeit a romanticised one, possibly.
30:47Nevertheless, an image of the Canadian wilderness, the Arctic wilderness, travels the world.
30:53The film opened the eyes of millions of people to a distant region very remote from their own.
30:59Its release coincided with the discovery that, far from being an isolated wilderness,
31:05the Arctic was powerfully connected to the rest of the hemisphere.
31:23That connection was the ever-moving boundary between the mass of cold air over the Arctic,
31:28and the warmer body of air moving north from the equator.
31:33You see, they discovered that we have, on the northern hemisphere, two big air masses.
31:41The subtropic air over the North Atlantic, and the polar air over the polar regions.
31:48And these air masses touch each other at a border which is called the polar front.
32:00The polar front is where the cold Arctic air meets warm air from the equator.
32:05Bad weather or cyclones form along the front.
32:08Find where the front is, and you can predict the weather.
32:11If the polar front is north of us, we'll have good weather.
32:15If the polar front is in our area, or even south of it, we'll get the cyclones.
32:24As the Second World War drew closer, the Arctic became an area of vital strategic significance.
32:30On the oceans, the safe passage of Atlantic shipping would depend upon it.
32:35So would the success or failure of military campaigns on the mainland.
32:43All-year-round prediction necessitated all-year-round presence in the Arctic.
32:48After years of trials and tribulations, Europeans had finally developed the capacity to operate in the High North.
32:57It was during the Second World War that the technology finally allowed Southern individuals to actually be able to function
33:04in the North.
33:05It's the development of the steel-hauled vessel, the steam engine, and the airplane.
33:10That meant for the first time ever, that if you were a non-Inuit, you could actually have a reasonable
33:16hope of having transportation within the region.
33:18And it's within that context where we start seeing the ability to go forward.
33:24And we see this, of course, from the German secret weather stations that they had in Greenland and in Labrador,
33:29where they were trying to ascertain what the weather was going to be in the Atlantic by having these weather
33:35stations in the Arctic.
33:36Some of the secret weather stations had to be manned.
33:39In September 1944, Dr. Wilhelm Diger and a team of young German meteorologists were secretly transported out to the remote
33:49Arctic archipelago Osvalbard
33:51to set up a station that would help forecast the weather in Western Europe.
33:56Dr. Diger carried a film camera and was able to provide an extraordinary record of a year in the Arctic.
34:02And the last station, 1944 to 1945, was led by my father.
34:09You see, they were very well equipped, because their status was higher than the submarine people.
34:16So, highest status, they got everything, even in 1944.
34:21But they stretched the food with hunting, and they stretched the heating material with collecting and shopping up driftwood.
34:38They were very well equipped.
34:39He had to keep people busy.
34:40It was a bunch of ten young men, I think between eighteen and twenty-one years of age.
34:48And the official job, the weather measuring, didn't take up all their time.
35:00We have a nice movie, it shows the beauty of it.
35:02It was a beautiful scene of everybody disappearing in the steam bath.
35:06They had a sauna, and they claimed that was the best thing they had up there.
35:11You see, once a week, on Friday, they had a steam bath up there.
35:15You see, the first day of the day, they had a great day.
35:25You see.
35:26Diger's team did provide crucial forecasts that made a significant contribution to the German war effort,
35:32determining the timing of one famous battle in particular.
35:41And one weather report in which my father was involved was in December 1944, the Battle
35:50of the Bulge in Belgium, the last German offensive on the Western Front, which was timed for
35:57a weather situation when the Allied planes were grounded because of drifting snow and fog.
36:06After initial setbacks, the Allies eventually repulsed the German attacks and went on to
36:12force German surrender in 1945.
36:20Diger and his team were shipped home, leaving behind a year's worth of sardine supplies.
36:29Elsewhere on Svalbard, other artefacts of war were left to rust.
36:33But from a military point of view, things were going to hot up rather than cool down.
36:41The region was now about to play a central part in the story of the superpower rivalry of
36:47the Cold War.
36:48Here is a shadow that hangs above our world.
36:52Our fears, suspicions, nightmares of the future are all held in this picture of our shrunken
36:58earth.
37:02From here we can see the main centres of human life, America, Europe, Asia, gathered in close,
37:10in range of one another.
37:13But whether this is to be a new link between us, or our last battlefield, depends not on
37:19the machines we fly, but on ourselves.
37:24Most people are used to thinking about the Arctic as being a peripheral region.
37:28It's a little strip of white you see at the top of your map at School of the World, which
37:33is a Mercator projection.
37:34But when you look at a proper projection, the polar stereographic projection, you see
37:39that the Arctic is a little blob surrounded by all the advanced industrial countries of
37:45the world, North America, Europe, Russia.
37:48So the Arctic Ocean becomes, geopolitically, it's the centre of things, it's not on the
37:53edge.
37:54During the Cold War, therefore, it became very, very important and a huge amount was being
37:59spent on Arctic research, not because of the climatic implications, but because of the military
38:05implications.
38:06From the end of January to the middle of March, the big delta country of Alaska is a snowbound
38:13wilderness, where the mercury can drop to 50 degrees below zero, and often does.
38:19Yet, during these three months, your army held exercise moose horn.
38:24Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful, and since we've no
38:32place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
38:38Man, it doesn't show signs of stopping, and I brought me some corn for popping.
38:46It completely transforms itself.
38:49When the Soviets and the Americans have both figured out how to use their captured German
38:55rocket scientists to the best avail, and develop what become known, of course, as ICBMs,
39:00Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, and you figure out how to put a nuclear warhead
39:04on it, the means of targeting is over the pole.
39:07So, from 1947 onward, the polar region becomes the major strategic transfer point as tensions
39:15continue to develop between the Soviets and the NATO countries, and in particular, the
39:20North Americans.
39:25You had to have a clearly working system that was going to alert you to the missiles.
39:32Ultimately, within North America, this becomes known as the dew line, distant early warning,
39:37and it was basically a trigger point in which we would be told, oh, the nukes are coming,
39:43basically say goodbye to your family, we're just about to go kill Moscow.
39:54All around the rim of the Arctic, small bands of indigenous people, including the Inuit, have
40:00been eking out a highly adapted livelihood for at least 5,000 years.
40:05The Cold War and the dew line were to change this forever.
40:12The dew line completely transforms the economic situation of the Inuit across the entire North
40:20American Arctic.
40:22You had town settings where the major construction was occurring, and many of the Inuit who had
40:28traditionally only lived off the land started looking for employment and being introduced
40:33into the whole idea of a wage economy.
40:37The unique, traditional way of life for Inuit has disappeared in many respects.
40:45The part that we still retain is our cultural identity and our language.
40:51We've now come into communities, everybody goes to school, people go to work that can find
40:57a job.
40:58So you can see the transition that has taken place, it's very, it's very stark compared
41:03to the way it used to be in a very short time.
41:06I mean, there have never been such big changes, I don't think, in any culture that we've had
41:12to go through in the last 70 years.
41:14It's been tremendous.
41:18Cold War and nuclear technology was to have another major impact on the North Polar region.
41:25As a wilderness, the Arctic is unique in that it exists both above and underneath the ice.
41:30The arms race led humankind to where no man had gone before.
41:43Prior to the development of nuclear power and being able to build a small reactor, there
41:49was no way of going under the ice.
41:50You would never go under the ice in a conventional powered sub because there was always the danger
41:54that when you needed to surface to get air and recharge your batteries, you weren't going
41:58to break the ice.
41:59When the Americans and the Soviets figured out how to put a nuclear reactor in a submarine,
42:04that eliminated that issue.
42:07By the end of the 1950s, the Americans were able to cross the Arctic under the ice.
42:14On March 17, 1959, the USS Skate was the first submarine to surface at the North Pole.
42:23On this voyage, the crew of the Skate had been able to navigate for 4,000 kilometers under
42:28the ice, surfacing only 10 times.
42:33And as such, you saw nuclear deterrence being above the air in terms of bombers and ICBMs.
42:41You saw nuclear deterrence under the ice.
42:46The sea under the Arctic became the scene for games of hide and seek, where submarine crews
42:52of each side listened for tell-tale sounds of each other's engines.
42:57Occasionally, scientists were allowed on board to measure the ice from below and take soundings
43:02of the seabed.
43:04Frequently, the sonar equipment picked up some of the wildlife from below.
43:12A lot of the early understanding of wild behavior in the Arctic came from recordings done from
43:18submarines, US and British nuclear subs, and that was partly because they needed to collect
43:24a library of sounds so that they could recognize natural sounds and separate them from artificial
43:30sounds made by other subs.
43:39There has been a project to map the migration of belugas under the ice.
43:45And it turns out that not only do they migrate around the edges of the Arctic, but sometimes
43:52they take quite long, dangerous voyages under the ice itself to get from between two feeding
43:59grounds, for instance, in the Beaufort Sea.
44:01And this means they have to rely on being able to surface in polyneas to breathe.
44:07And of course, if there aren't any polyneas, they drown.
44:09So, the tracking devices show them swimming under the ice and then taking very deep dives,
44:16so they can use their sonar from a great depth to survey a bigger area of the surface and
44:21find where there's a hole.
44:25But the wonders of Arctic wildlife were not only on the minds of scientists and submariners listening
44:31on hydrophones.
44:32Towards the end of the 80s, the importance of the polar environment was dawning on yet
44:37more powerful figures.
44:40It was here in the Soviet Union's Arctic capital that a dramatic new vision of the high north
44:46was to be outlined.
44:49When Gorbachev comes forward, even before the Cold War ends, he comes forward in what is
44:53known as the Murmansk speech in 1987, in which he starts bringing forward his whole ideas of
45:00perestroika and glasnost and says to the West, you know, we've got this commonality.
45:05We're Arctic nations, we should be cooperating in the Arctic.
45:11Let the north of the globe, the Arctic, become a zone of peace.
45:16Let the North Pole be a pole of peace.
45:20We suggest that all interested states start talks on the limitation
45:24and scaling down of military activity in the north as a whole.
45:31Now, in 87, when he makes that speech, he basically gets dismissed.
45:35He basically gets seen as a Soviet ploy.
45:38The Russians are just doing this for some form of protection of their northern fleet.
45:42But he also makes the very strong point that we need to come together on the environment.
45:49We attach special importance to the cooperation of the northern countries in environmental protection.
45:56The urgency of this is obvious.
45:58It would be well to extend joint measures for protecting the marine environment of the entire
46:04oceanic and sea surface of the globe's north.
46:18Although his speech was too early and possibly too utopian,
46:21Mikhail Gorbachev did set out a vision of an Arctic surrounded by a community of polar nations
46:27collaborating peacefully.
46:30Once demilitarized, the polar region was something that could bind hostile nations together.
46:37He sets the stage.
46:38When it becomes evident by 1989 that in fact he is very serious,
46:43and then you start seeing events overtake him,
46:46you start seeing some of the other Arctic nations saying,
46:49hey, you know, maybe he was on to something.
46:52Well, when you get everyone together, they say, okay, well, what are we going to do besides talk?
46:55Well, let's start looking at environmental issues, nature issues.
46:59I mean, there can't be anything too terribly bad in the Arctic, but, you know, let's actually give substance.
47:04Well, lo and behold, when they start looking, they discover that the image of a pristine
47:08environmental condition in the Arctic is completely wrong.
47:13That it is completely and utterly connected to almost all other environmental sections in the world.
47:20So pollution occurring in Pakistan ends up in the Arctic.
47:25For the Arctic is no longer understood as an isolated area, but in fact becomes the cornerstone
47:32of understanding environmental processes worldwide.
47:44Parallel to the twists and turns of the Cold War, the media, particularly television,
47:50was bringing Arctic wildlife into the homes of millions.
47:53For many, this created an image of a remote and pristine ecosystem supporting large and exotic mammals.
48:03One animal above all became the emblem for the region.
48:14A high slope above the sea ice is a relatively safe position for a bear's maternity den.
48:23Polar bears have between one and three cubs, or very occasionally four, but twins are the most common.
48:31Since their birth under the snow around Christmas, they have suckled their mother's milk.
48:36But she has not fed since November, and having lived only on her fat reserves, is now extremely thin and
48:43hungry.
48:45The filmmakers also recognised the fragility of the environment.
48:51If disturbance were to reduce the number of seals, or industrial waste poison the Arctic Ocean,
48:58then polar bears would feel more strongly than most the sweeping changes that now face the north.
49:05Just as the Arctic was emerging as a symbol for the vulnerability of the planet,
49:10another more insidious and ultimately overwhelming threat became apparent.
49:21Global temperatures have been rising, and the warming has been greatest in the Arctic.
49:27Each year, the sea ice expands and contracts with the seasons.
49:34The sea ice is about 7.5 million square kilometers, which is about half the wintertime size.
49:43In the past decade, we've seen smaller and smaller amounts.
49:482005 set a big record with only 5 million square kilometers, so a couple of million square kilometers
49:56than the normal. 2007 was stunning to the Arctic scientists, where we reached a minimum of 4.1
50:03million square kilometers, so 4.1 almost half the normal minimum size of ice in the summer.
50:13If the trend continues, then it's possible that the Arctic Ocean will be clear of ice in the summer
50:19by as early as 2030.
50:24The scientists are only confirming what the Inuit have been observing for years.
50:29Some are now seeing their homes sink into the thawing permafrost.
50:36Now, with the change in the climate and the sea ice melting, the elders are no longer able to
50:43predict the weather. And they're very uncomfortable now about using their knowledge base because they
50:52themselves are questioning whether it's valid or not. There's pockets of ice that have melted,
51:00and hunters don't know that. And you hear about accidents quite a bit where snow machines have gone
51:06through the ice and people have gone. These are things that would not normally have happened years ago.
51:18But it's the Arctic's number one icon that has now become a global emblem of climate change.
51:26What's so powerful about the imagery of the Arctic is that if you start talking about climate change
51:32and the impacts of, say, New York or London, and you start saying, okay, in a few years,
51:37you know, you're going to have to start dealing with a much higher tide line here.
51:41You start showing a picture or an icon such as the polar bear or the walrus, and you say,
51:47here it is in all its glory in the Arctic. Everybody can understand that right now.
51:51And you say, in 20 years, 30 years, it will no longer be there. That is one of the most
51:56powerful images
51:57that I think people have in terms of the environmental distress that the Earth is now facing.
52:04In just a few decades, the polar bear has been transformed from being a ferocious symbol
52:10of the Arctic, the Niliet Nelson, to the victim of mankind's abuse of the planet.
52:16Human-induced climate change is fundamentally altering the way the Arctic is perceived.
52:31I think once upon a time, and as we're talking only of the European perception here,
52:37once upon a time, it was the harsh, threatening, but beautiful, very alien other place. So from there,
52:46I think we have now come to a point where it's now seen as a fragile, easy to destroy place.
52:58When a hundred seamen can sail...
53:03Throughout the 19th century, the frozen north had been seen as the great ice barrier,
53:08which enticed brave seamen on heroic voyages, many never to return.
53:14Now this 19th century obsession is literally melting away.
53:20The Northwest Passage, now in 2007, has been open, clear of ice.
53:25It's been open, clear of ice, for two years in a row, for an extended period, about six weeks.
53:30We don't have any record of it being like that so frequently in time.
53:39Franklin came through 1847, he found a bit of a route, but he was stopped.
53:50Now today, we're sending ships through that area more and more frequently, but we still expect we'll be seeing years
53:58when there will be difficult ice conditions,
54:00well into the next few decades, until all the ice finally melts in the summertime.
54:07The Arctic is more accessible than it's ever been.
54:10No longer the exclusive reserve for Inuit explorers and camera crews.
54:16An open ocean in the north, surrounded by industrial nations, is a possibility that might be realized within the next
54:24two or three decades.
54:26There will be losses, as well as gains.
54:29As in any other massive transformation, and I'll use the adjective massive very purposely, there are pros and cons.
54:38The cons are getting fairly understood, you will have the elimination of most of the major mammal species, particularly polar
54:45bears, walruses.
54:46You will have a major disruption of the traditional way of life for the Inuit and for other northern indigenous
54:53peoples.
54:53But by the same token, you are going to have opportunities.
54:56You are going to have economic opportunities in terms of the exploitation of natural resources, oil, gas, diamonds.
55:05You are going to have the ability to have new transportation routes.
55:10We're not entirely sure where it is going, but it is going to be massive.
55:19Some estimates suggest that as much as 20% of the world's oil and gas reserves may be found beneath
55:26the polar seabed.
55:28Discoveries are being made of yet more gold, diamonds and tungsten.
55:34Environmental consequences will be inevitable as exploration gets underway.
55:39There is also the prospect of an international land grab and disputes over sovereignty.
55:47There is also the prospect of Russian domination of the polar seabed.
55:47Two centuries ago, John Barrow of the British Admiralty was spurred into action by the prospect of Russian domination of
55:54the polar sea.
55:56History seems to be repeating itself.
56:00I mean, it continues to be a stage for geopolitical contests.
56:05Just in 2007, the flamboyant Russian explorer Arta Chalingorov planting a flag on the sea floor,
56:134,000 metres below the North Pole, below the sea ice, as a gesture of Russian sovereignty.
56:22The melting Arctic is now between two visions.
56:26Will it become the scene of peaceful collaboration as Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in 1987?
56:33Or will it return to being the scene of armed hostility that characterised the Cold War?
56:39We are literally on a crossroad.
56:43We have a possibility of seeing true international cooperation develop in the North.
56:49Unfortunately, there are also forces that are coming to the forefront that are suggesting that
56:54nations may in fact start looking to their own interests.
56:58We have the choice at this point in time in terms of how we respond to this transformation,
57:02but at this point it's not entirely clear which of the two we are in fact going to follow.
57:18It's now 190 years since Mary Shelley opened her story of Frankenstein
57:24with the idealistic imaginings of a young explorer.
57:30I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.
57:38I try in vain to be persuaded that the Pole is the seat of frost and desolation.
57:44It ever presents itself to my imagination as a region of beauty and delight.
57:51I shall satiate by ardent curiosity the sight of a part of the world never before visited,
57:58and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.
58:06This is now a landscape where the imprint of humankind is so powerful
58:11that we are fundamentally altering its appearance and its ecology.
58:15But it is still within our power to ensure that, at least in part, the Arctic remains a wilderness,
58:23a place of wild beasts, and a region of beauty and delight.
58:38Stay with us here on BBC 4.
58:40There's another chance to catch Friday's music night programmes coming up next,
58:43kicking off with the gloriously sparkly joy of disco.