The North Pole Unwrapped - Russell Kane, Felicity Aston and Lloyd Peck

0:28Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I wanted a Hubble Space Telescope. No-one understands me. I'm going back to my room to listen to Heaven 17. Ooh! Heaven 17. Yeah, and I thought Heaven 17 was quite a good choice for you. I'd have thought you'd have been into them. It was either them or Flock of Seagulls. But Human League was kind of too mainstream, I thought. No, Human League I would have come before. So today we're going to visit Father Christmas's home and see if we can find Santa and discover why Brian didn't get the presents that he demanded. As usual, Robin is in a linear superposition of right and wrong, because we are going to the North Pole today, but not in search of centre.

1:07Though we will have a little look, won't we? Maybe. But mainly, we'll be looking at how our proximity to the geomagnetic North Pole affects navigation, what does the latest research tell us about the northern lights and the behaviour of our star, and how is the polar environment changing, and what effect is that having on the flora and fauna of the far north? And also, what is the best way of hosting a cocktail party at the North Pole? Now, astonishingly, that last statement is part of the not-wrong branch of Robin's wave function. To help us explore, we are joined by an astrophysicist Arctic explorer, a physiologist, marine biologist, and a comedian with an antipathy to the aurora borealis, for some reason, and they are.

1:50My name is Felicity Aston. I'm a polar explorer. and the coldest temperature I've ever experienced was not at the North Pole. I've been there several times. It was actually in a place called the Pole of Cold, which is the coldest inhabited place in the world. So this is a tiny village called Omikon in the very northeast of Siberia and there's a population of about 300 people there but their average wintertime temperature is below minus 70 degrees centigrade. Oh my goodness me. Hi, I'm Lloyd Peck. I'm the physiologist marine biologist and I'm a polar one. I work for the British Antarctic Survey and my thing is scuba diving underneath ice.

2:33And the best way I've found in the past to keep warm when you're cold is to get in a sleeping bag with somebody else and body heat is a really good way of keeping warm. Cover story. I'm Russell Kane. I'm a comedian. If you're over 50 and your name's Terry, you can put it in inverted commas. and the coldest I've ever been was in Luton. It was last December, just after Keir Starmer took my nan's radiator allowance away. Well, that's ended a rather gloomy opening to her, hasn't it, now? I wish we'd done the pole of cold now. That seems upbeat, doesn't it? Anyway, this is our panel.

3:20well i suppose really to start off felicity with you one of the major questions a lot people at home will be thinking about at the moment is how difficult is it to build an enormous toy factory in an area like the north pole i mean what would be the issues i've been to the north pole a number of times and I go quite often into schools to talk about the Arctic and the North Pole and all these sorts of things and the question I always get asked without fail is have you ever seen Father Christmas or any elves at the North Pole and you can hear the collective intake of breath from all the adults in the room like you do not mess with Father Christmas and you can hear them thinking what's she going to say what's she going to say what secrets is she going to give away but unfortunately I have never seen any sign of Father Christmas or the elves at the North Pole because it's magic isn't it you're not supposed to see it but I have seen Father Christmas but he's on the Arctic Circle in his office there is an office in Finland just north of Rovanimi and Father Christmas is there pretty much every day with his elves and I have been to see him many times, not always accompanied by children.

4:33So that is the place to go to see Father Christmas, not the North Pole. So that is what I can reveal. How do we define the North Pole? How is it defined? Depends which North Pole you are talking about, because there are many North Poles on planet Earth. The two that are absolute North Poles by anybody's definition is the magnetic North Pole and the geographic North Pole. The geographic North Pole is the one that everybody thinks of, the one at the top of our planet at 90 degrees north. The magnetic north pole is the north pole of our magnetic field that surrounds planet Earth. So that's not too far away from the geographic north pole.

5:14But then it starts to get a little bit more esoteric and it depends. Some people think these are true north poles. Some people think it's a load of rubbish. So you've got the geomagnetic north pole. So this is like a theoretical north pole. This is if the earth really was a definite sort of bar magnet and we had a perfect magnetic field that was all nice and even and uniform, then that's where our north pole would be. So this is the north pole that's used by a lot of models, computer models. But then you've got things like the pole of cold that I just mentioned and something like that's not really a proper north pole.

5:49And you've got the pole of inaccessibility which is the place that is most inaccessible from all directions and you've got a northern pole of inaccessibility and a southern pole of inaccessibility and then you really do start to get a little bit bottom of the barrel so there's the celestial north pole so this is that's not the bottom of the barrel well talking to an astronomer So astronomers use this a lot because if you imagine that the sky is actually a sphere that surrounds the Earth, then the north pole of that sort of celestial sphere, if you project that down onto the surface of the Earth, then some people say, well, that's another north pole on the surface of the planet.

6:34So how many is that? Is that six? That's six. So, you know, you could maybe stretch it to seven if you include the pole of cold. So it's two kind of North Poles and then just some general flibbity-jibbity stuff. But no, you could go for three at least. Do you reckon three? I reckon you could go for three absolutely rock-solid ones. What's the third one then you go for? So there's the geographic, there's the magnetic, and there's the geomagnetic. Oh, fair enough, yeah. Those three you can measure. The others are subject to argument. So the geomagnetic pole is the one that's wandering. The geomagnetic pole is fixed.

7:13Oh, sorry, the magnetic one that's wandering. So that one's wandering around. And that one sometimes flips. So hang on. Right, look, this is going to be an absolute. I'll tell you what, considering most of the people listening at home are drunk already on Christmas Day, this is not following Reethian values. So where is the magnetic north pole now? Well, for ages, it was sort of floating around the Queen Elizabeth Islands in the northern Canada, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. But then the last 10 years, it started really accelerating. So it started moving 50 to 70 kilometres in a year. So it's gone right the way across the Arctic Ocean, is now closer to the coast of Siberia than it is to the coast of Canada.

7:58It'll never go south, though, will it? It won't go on tour and appear in Manchester or something. It will. Yeah, it will. It'll come here. Well, it'll go down to the South Pole. But it doesn't actually... It doesn't keep... Right, let's just get this clear. It doesn't kind of keep sliding down, does it? There's a point, isn't there, when it flips? So it doesn't kind of just go, ooh, it's just gone past Guernsey. I'm not sure. It doesn't do that, does it? No, it's a bit like the expansion of the Big Bang. You know, there's definite theories, but no-one yet knows which of those theories are right.

8:29So one theory is that our magnetic field will slowly decrease until there's nothing, and then it will reappear equally gradually over time in a different orientation. Another theory is that it's an instant flip and that we might get lots of flips really rapidly. But, I mean, we're talking rapidly over geological time. We have a record of it, don't we? Because we have essentially a barcode across the Atlantic, for example, when rocks cool and they line up with the magnetic field so we can see when it flipped in the past. and it's quite it's irregular isn't it we should say this is the the north pole to which your compass points and then the question arises as an explorer is that a problem yeah your compass is pointing to different places yeah okay so the last time i skied to the north pole a helicopter set me down on the frozen surface of the arctic ocean about 80 kilometers away from the north pole and i have to find my way to the north pole there's nothing to see out there so every direction looks exactly the same.

9:32So what do you do? Do you use a compass? But the problem with a compass is that it's pointing not to the geographic North Pole that you're aiming towards, it's pointing towards the magnetic North Pole, which is several hundred kilometers away from the geographic North Pole. And occasionally in Canada and occasionally in Siberia. Exactly. So you can't really use a compass. And the other difficulty is that the difference between the magnetic North pole and the geographic north pole changes depending on your location it's called declination so you have to know what the declination is so that you can use a compass to direct you to the geographic north pole and you're trying to do that while the ice that you're standing on is also moving in an erratic motion not always at the same speed or in the same direction so then you think well i'll use a gps then so yeah okay you can use a gps but you're at temperatures of maybe minus 40 degrees centigrade and every handheld gps device that there is uses batteries of some description and they run down very quickly at those sorts of temperatures so you can't always navigate using a gps so unless you're going to drag out a sextant which you know they used to use in the old days but that's working out your position based on the position of the sun A bit difficult when it's really cloudy and you can't see the sun.

10:57So all of these different methods of finding your way to the North Pole have their inherent disadvantages in them. And so you end up sort of using a bit of a mishmash of all of it. So you go, oh, we'll just go to the right a little bit, and then maybe the ice will drift us back on to the North Pole and all will be good. So it's all a bit of a guessing game. I can't get anywhere without a sat-nav. I'll just be dead within... How did you get there? I mean, it explains why I've never seen Father Christmas, doesn't it? I mean, maybe I've never actually been to the North Pole and it's all just been a big mistake.

11:31Lloyd, you make it even more difficult for yourself by diving under it. Could you actually outline what the challenges are in diving in the Arctic Ocean and in the Antarctic Ocean? So in one sense, we don't have it more difficult because we usually know where we are. And we've got batteries in our GPS system, so we're pretty good because we're not out for days and weeks on our own. So our location is pretty good. The way we dive through ice is we take out a five-foot chainsaw and we cut oxo patterns in the ice until we get a block. And the problem with that is that as you cut lines with your five-foot chainsaw, it freezes behind the chainsaw.

12:11So it probably takes you about three hours to dig a hole in the ice. You're looking aghast. Yeah, good work for the council. That sounds like a pothole rate is about the same. And then you bounce the blocks in the middle out and you pull them out with a skidoo and you're left with a hole that's about... And you think, I'm going to dive in that. Well, yeah. Not only that, you think, I'm going to dive in that because that's great. That's the best diving you are ever going to do on the planet anywhere. What is it about that diving? So there are several things. One is that that time of year when the sea's frozen, everything settles out of the ocean and the visibility is hundreds of metres.

12:48Wow. And you can see all this life. that's around you on the seabed that you wouldn't otherwise be able to see because in the summertime, when the phytoplankton blooms are on, you can't see your hand at the end of your arm, so you don't see anything. But you said the hole freezes over. So the hole does freeze over. So if we want to go back to the same place day after day after day, we put a cover over it. What's the cover made of then? Everything else bloody freezes. Well, we use plywood.

13:15Was anyone else expecting something more scientific? because plywood's easy to get out and easy to retrieve and it's flexible enough it doesn't break like plastic does when it's cold you said that you see the life in the winter when the visibility is good can you describe the kinds of life you see and the differences between the north and south one of the great things that gets me excited about life in the polar regions is that some of it gets really big so and i did bring a couple of examples yes that i have in my box we all know wood lice, yeah? That's a group of animals called isopods. Well, in the oceans, there are lots of isopods.

13:54And they get bigger as it gets colder. And this is one that you would find in the Arctic. It looks like something from Star Wars that would kill you. You should edit this so it's the end of the show. And everyone goes, and this we found. Everyone went, ooh, and then it just stops. And that's the end. A scream. Ah, it's alive! It's gone into my mouth! So is that... If a lobster and a woodlouse had too much sambuca and got it on, that would be their kid. So they get up to 10 centimetres, four inches long. They are hundreds of times bigger than the biggest isopods that we have around our coasts. And Felicity, earlier, didn't you say that they jump at you?

14:38Yeah, so when I was stationed at Rothera Research Station, which is a British Antarctic Survey research base on the Antarctic Peninsula, there was a marine biology building that had these big aquariums and part of the wintering job that you had to do was that you had to do night watch one of the jobs that we had to do was sent to us by Lloyd it was like you need to check my aquariums to make sure that you know all the little beasties that we've collected are all doing all right so middle of the night I've been on my own all night in the dark in an Antarctic research station looking like a 70s horror movie set and so i let myself into this dark aquarium lab and it's all apart from the red flood lights so it looks like that scene from alien right where there's something scuttling underneath all the lab desks and i noticed that one of the covers that were over the top of the aquarium had been left partly off and the reason those covers were on the aquarium is because those little woodlouse creatures like to jump out of the tanks to anyone that's passing by and if they land on you they stick to you you can't get them off very easily so i was seeing that oh no i've got to go and put that cover back on the aquarium and these things are going to jump out of me in the dark in this red light but i managed to get them on and i didn't get attacked by a woodlouse question does Imodium freeze.

16:02Because I would need a lot of it to survive that scenario. Oh, no, you wouldn't. Honestly, it would be... Who was that guy, do you remember, when we went to the Adventurers Club? The Explorers Club. The Explorers Club, that was it. And he, when he got trapped underground, realised that because sometimes dog excrement, you could actually turn into a pick because it would freeze hard. So he did a big poo and then chipped his way out with his own excrement. And he also lost a leg and ate some of his own leg. I'll stick with Imodium. It sounds more convenient. So to come back to the large animals, the real big story here is not the isopods.

16:37It's these guys. So, listeners, it's... And these are... It looks... It's like a star-shaped spider-esque daddy long-leg thing, but it's the size of two adult hands. Very thin legs. It's a massive spider. What are you talking about? Sorry to be pedantic, but how many legs does it have? It looks more like a living asterisk. So you can all count, can't you? It's got ten legs. Taxonomically, is it a spider? No, taxonomically... Indeed, indeed, Poirot. However, there's a big story to this as well. 95 % of sea spiders in the world have eight legs. But in the Antarctic, you get 10-legged species and 12-legged species.

17:13And the biggest ones are three times as big as this. They're 60 to 70 centimetres across. And they are 5 ,000 times bigger than the biggest sea spiders that we get in temperate latitude. Not poisonous, not bitey. Well, they move very slowly. And if you were to put your hand underneath its mouth and hold it there for three or four hours, you might get bitten. You've done that, haven't you? Week five of the expedition, I'm going to do it. So why... Because many people have heard of island giganticism. What is it about the ocean, the Arctic oceans, that leads to this size? So the polar oceans are different in many ways from the oceans elsewhere in the world.

17:57If you go into the high polar oceans, the sea temperature is permanently below zero degrees. And that has extra characteristics. One is the amount of oxygen you can squeeze into water increases as you cool it down. And that's in simple terms. It's because the molecules in the water move more slowly, the gaps get bigger, and you can force more in between the gaps. And there's nearly twice as much oxygen in seawater at the polar regions as the tropics. So, one, more oxygen to feed the tissues. Two, these are all cold-blooded animals. And that means their body temperatures are the same as the environment.

18:39And because their body temperatures are below zero, their respiration rates, their amount of energy they need to keep their bodies going, is 25 to 30 times less than at the tropics. so there's more oxygen twice as much 25 times slower rate of use two times 25 is 50 you have a massive increased path length for supplying your tissues which means you can grow more tissues you mentioned just that the body temperature is the same temperature as the ocean as the water yeah and you said below freezing yeah so why doesn't it freeze so this is one of my lectures to undergraduates that takes about an hour.

19:18So if you're all sitting comfortably... Well done, Brian. So if you look at living cells, they have to stay liquid. And there are various ways that you can keep that cytoplasm, that cellular content liquid. One is you can use antifreezes. And fish in the polar regions produce protein antifreezes and glycoprotein antifreezes. So they make proteins that basically, when an ice crystal starts to form, they stick to the front of the ice crystal, like cling film and stop more water coming on. Then they can use a whole range of things, things like glycerol and things like glucose to change the point at which that liquid would freeze in the same way that we can put salt into water and lower the freezing points.

20:02Vodka in the freezer, that's what my nan does. Vodka in the freezer, yeah, yeah. So if you drink a lot of vodka, you'd have to go to a lower temperature before you froze, which I guess a lot of people in Newcastle on a Saturday night do as an attorney. So you can do all of that. But then they can also control the amount of water in their cells. And when it comes to wintertime in the Arctic, the different ways that animals survive the cold is absolutely mind-boggling. If you go and look in Canada at the red bark beetle, it has larvae. That starts off using glycerol, and it goes down to about minus 20 with glycerol.

20:40Then it pumps the water out of its cells, so there's less chance of water molecules sticking together. It gets down below minus 40. And then when it gets down below minus 40 towards minus 50, it vitrifies. And the problem with freezing is the ice crystals break your cells open and kill you. But if you vitrify, you turn into glass, and there are no ice crystals. And those bark beetle larvae have been taken down to minus 150. Wow. And survived. Can I ask a question? Is it ageing? still at this point or is it in stasis so we if it was to stay frozen it was to defrost 300 years later would it be the same age as when it froze so really really really good area of research it is in stasis and is it possible we could ever use this technology to stop human aging so we could travel to distant stars and things like that so cryogenesis yes that is possible in the 1950s there was a lot of work done on freezing mammals and they they were able to freeze mice and they couldn't do with rabbits and the problem is not with freezing them the problem is warming them up because if everything does not warm up at the same rate and something goes liquid while something else is solid your animal is not going to function and that was the research that led to the invention of microwave ovens.

22:01So they microwave them to warm them up. I could have told them. Where's Nan? She's on defrost. Shall we turn this? This has changed a lot of people's Christmas lunch. Absolutely fascinating. We've spoken about the life that we see underwater. So in terms of the life that you've seen on your expeditions, what's the variety of animals that you see on the surface? Yeah, I mean, this is the wonderful thing about going to the North Pole versus going to the South Pole. And one of the defining characteristics of the Antarctic plateau in the centre of Antarctica is the absence of life. I mean, there's no wildlife there.

22:38There's no penguins or seals or birds or anything like that. But when you are up in the north, you are surrounded by life, even if you're right up there in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. and it's not just that you see it, it's that you can feel it all around you from the presence of the big predators, the polar bears, right down to when a big chunk of ice turns over and there's lots of algae and even fish using the algae. I remember being startled by a lemming in my tent when I was... Didn't make you fall off a cliff, did it? That'd be the most ironic day in history. And you're thinking, how does this tiny little thing, you know, manage to survive all the way out here?

23:24It's really incredible. Everyone has a polar bear story. Surely every explorer has a polar bear story. I'm glad you narrowed that down. Everyone has a... No, actually, I shouldn't be an explorer. I just wondered, in terms of Jeopardy, you talk about, and they're big predators, so what's your big predator story? Oh, gosh. Well, the closest encounter I've had with a polar bear, luckily I was on a snow machine. So I was driving by myself on a snow machine past a big area of ice rubble. So that's a machine that goes on snow, not a machine that makes snow. Yeah, a snowmobile, a skidoo, whatever you want to call it.

24:02And I was keeping an eye on the ice rubble because that's where the polar bears kind of like to hang out. And I came over a rise to find one sort of stood pretty much right in front of me. I was close enough to really see the sort of definition of its muscles. I mean, these are frightening animals. The number of people that said, oh, I really want to see a polar bear. It's like, you really don't. And so luckily I was on a snowmobile and I knew that I was in an area where the locals hunted them on snow machines. So I was able just to rev the engine a bit. and it got up on its back legs, took a big sniff and my heart was sort of in my mouth as it's doing this and then it just took off and ran so I didn't have to even get the rifle off my back.

24:52Your snowsuit was a bit warm after that encounter, wasn't it? If you go and work in Svalbard and you go to the UK station in Svalbard the first thing they do on the first day is they give you a.375 rifle and that has bullets that are bigger than anything you've seen in a rifle before. They train you how to shoot it, and they give you thunder flashes. So that if the polar bear starts coming towards you, you're supposed to throw the thunder flashes between you and the polar bear, and the bangs make it go away. And then they say, if that doesn't happen, then you have a rifle if you can't get away from it in time.

25:28And if it worse comes to worse, you have to shoot the polar bear. Now, you're on Norwegian territory, and the law says you are not allowed to shoot a polar bear unless it is less than 10 metres away from you. And a full-sized polar bear does 11 metres per second. And then they say the last time one of these was killed, it took three bullets to kill it. So the best advice is if it starts stalking you, get out of the way really quickly. Yeah, so if you come across a bear when you're on an expedition, the only responsible thing to do is to get yourself out of there because we are intruders in their territory.

26:14My life is less valuable than the bears in that scenario, is what you're telling me. Yes. They are nine feet tall and they are heavier than any two people that you know. So they are massive animals. Now, we're going to do, because you, I believe, this is true, You have in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most polar bears shot. No, we're going to get that to you. No, you're in the Guinness Book of Records for the northern most cocktail party. Yes, that is a Guinness World Record that I currently hold. So I was on an expedition, and we were right up at 78 degrees north. So, you know, as you imagine, like, polar explorers are in a tent and all the polar gear with skis and everything else.

26:58but in order for it to be considered a cocktail party by the Guinness Book of Record there's a very specific set of criteria that you have to follow there has to be at least five people tick we were a five-person team you have to be in proper cocktail attire so that is a dress for women I mean you know they Guinness World Records have got something to to answer about sort of and if you're a man, it's a proper lounge suit or a lounge dress, cocktail dress. You have to have music playing. You have to have a table with a tablecloth. I'm already thinking most of the parties I've ever been to in my life are already not considered a cocktail party.

27:39You have to have at least three different types of cocktails and you have to have two different types of canapé, one sweet and one savoury. Oh, and it has to last for at least 15 minutes. We had to sort of drink it quickly. before it froze into a sort of icicle in the bottom of the glass. Of course, it goes straight to your head. How did you defrost the canapes? Oh, I knew you were going to ask that. So the cocktails were ready mixed and we took them in like these little packages. We had to defrost those by sort of putting them down our fronts. I knew it. The warmest part. So I want to say, you know, under your armpit, it's one of the warmest pits and down your pants, whatever.

28:22but they were all enclosed so that was fine but the canapes yeah our canapes we had to get inventive using the rations that we had we're going to now try and create aurora based cocktails using a uv light so what we've got in these glasses here is a gin and tonic just to say because i arrived quite late for this recording i have no idea what's going on oh neither do i Is there some context about why you've got a UV light and some gin? Do you know what, Brian? You've never complained before when we found reasons that we can have alcohol in, which appear to be tax deductible. So I have a vague memory of something now in some production meeting a while ago that said something about the Northern Lights.

29:06So that there, using a small amount of blue liqueur-style drink and a Barocca and a UV light, all of those things you probably receive for Christmas. so just to recap so this is an elaborate introduction to the aurora borealis yeah what is happening in the atmosphere that creates that kind of that's the the greenness of the aurora borealis yeah so if we rewind a bit to what the aurora is so if you imagine the earth is a big bar magnet and we have this big magnetic field that spreads all the way around uh the globe and that creates this sort of area of space around the planet called the magnetosphere.

29:46And then you have the sun in the middle of the solar system that is constantly sort of emitting this wind of charged particles. So it's this huge amount of charged particles that are cascading from the sun outwards across the whole solar system. And instead of hitting the earth, it hits the magnetosphere. And because these particles are charged, they react with that magnetic field that surrounds the planet. So it acts as a sort of shield. It protects us from the solar wind, from all this radiation. But some of those charged particles sort of get trapped inside the magnetic field of the Earth. And if you can imagine sort of around the poles, let's focus on the North Pole, around the North Pole, where the magnetic field lines are sort of going into the top of the planet, all these charged particles that are spinning around all these magnetic field lines are being dragged down towards the surface of the planet around the North Pole.