Antarctica

Antarctica is one of the harshest environments you can imagine. Winds can reach 200mph and the lowest temperature ever recorded was -89 degrees Celsius. But the monochrome above the waves is matched by the explosion of colour beneath them. The Southern Ocean is home to more than 9000 species, many of which can only be found there.

Hannah Stitfall is joined by scientist Lucy Woodall, who led the first expedition to find Shackleton’s ship Endurance, and Antarctic historian John Dudeney.

John Dudeney (Intro):
Oh, the first moment. This is when I fell in love with Antarctica. I was on a small ship called the John Bisco. And we’d left the Falkland Islands heading across straits passage, of course it’s pretty bumpy on close passage quite often, particularly in a small ship. As we approached the south Orkney Islands, the sea started to calm down, and a mist formed. And us new lads, what the hell’s going on here, you know. Out of the mist appeared this white line on the horizon, and it was pack ice, which had calmed the sea down. And then the ship started to work through the pack ice and it’s an experience which engaged all my senses. Sense of smell, the motion, the sound, the ice crunching against the side of the ship, penguins jumping off the floe and disappearing in all directions, the clear black water and the ice, white on the surface and going green-blue as it went down into the water. It was just such a moment that I was completely sold. I can’t wait every time I go south to have that experience again.

Hannah Stitfall:
This is Oceans: Life Under Water, a podcast series all about the oceans, and the mind blowing life within them. I’m Hannah Stitfall, a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster and I’m on a mission to learn everything I can about the Big Blue. In this episode, we’re headed south to Antarctica.

John Dudeney:
The Southern Ocean is a grand, frightening, exhilarating, strange place – it gets under your skin.

Hannah Stitfall:
This is one of the harshest environments you can imagine, it’s the windiest, coldest continent on Earth. The winds alone can get up to 200 miles per hour, and the temperatures on land can plummet to minus 80 degrees Celsius. But under the waves, it’s a different story. There are more than 9000 known species, many of which you can only find there.

Lucy Woodall:
My image of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica was sort of dark water or white ice and snow. But then actually when you look and just have that peek below that white blanket, that’s the snow and the ice, you see all these amazing colours.

Hannah Stitfall:
This is Oceans: Life Under Water, Episode Four.

Hannah Stitfall:
I’m very lucky to be joined by John Dudeney. John has been going down to the ice since the 1960s. He’s an Antarctic historian and author. So it gives me great pleasure to welcome John!

John Dudeney:
Thank you, Hanna. It’s great pleasure to be here.

Hannah Stitfall:
Thank you for coming on today. I can’t wait to talk to you. You are a wealth of all knowledge.

John Dudeney:
Well, I’m starting to forget some of it now as we get older. But yeah, I hope I am still.

Hannah Stitfall:
So tell me what it’s like to be on the Southern Ocean. I mean, does it feel dangerous? Is it rough? What can you see what can you hear?

John Dudeney:
The Southern Ocean is a grand, frightening, exhilarating, strange place. And that’s because if you look at the map, Antarctica is completely surrounded by ocean. So the seas have a chance to build up to enormous swells, they have quite a wide gap between the peaks, so it’s not quite so wild as it might seem. But they can be really really big waves. You know, you can find yourself in 10-15 metre waves without any trouble at all — which are quite large. And if the winds blowing 50 or 60 knots as well, scooping the top of the waves off into spray. It can be quite exciting. So it’s a wild place. One of the things that I often do, been travelling on the Southern Ocean now for so many years, is standing in the wardroom say or in the lounge, with a gin and tonic in your hand looking out the window and thinking, here I am. Lovely, comfortable environment, gin and tonic. And just over there is death. The other side of that window is death. No two ways about it. And it’s a very old feeling. And you something about all these people who’ve done solo yacht trips in that water. You think, Well, crikey. What are they doing?

Hannah Stitfall:
So you’d never do a sailor yacht trip?

John Dudeney:
No.

Hannah Stitfall:
So how cold does it get down there?

John Dudeney:
Depends where you go. It’s the coldest place on the planet. The lowest temperature ever recorded is about at minus 85 degrees C or something like that.

Hannah Stitfall:
Gah! Goodness!

John Dudeney:
Yes. About that temperature, CO2 freezes. So if you take a deep breath…

Hannah Stitfall:
…that’s it!

John Dudeney:
Yeah.

Hannah Stitfall:
I can’t even begin to imagine that. The coldest I’ve ever felt was filming in northern Sweden…

John Dudeney:
Oh that will be cold.

Hannah Stitfall:
I think I got it was minus 29, minus 30. And I remember stepping outside of the hide, we were filming Golden Eagles. And as we stepped out, as I breathed in and out, just all of I got icicles start forming around there. You could feel it as you’re breathing in and out. And it was the first time I felt like that. And just that it’s just a different sort of cold, you can feel it to your bones.

John Dudeney:
Minus 40 degrees, you can’t keep your skin warm.

Hannah Stitfall:
And you decided to live there.

John Dudeney:
Oh, it was a wonderful experience. It was a life changing experience. No doubt about it.

Hannah Stitfall:
Talk me through that. How did you end up down there in the first place?

John Dudeney:
Well, the first place – I walked out of university in 1966 – and on a whim, I joined the British Antarctic Survey. I don’t know why I did it. Apart from that I was trying to impress the young lady at the time.

Hannah Stitfall:
It’s always the way John.

John Dudeney:
Yeah, well…

Hannah Stitfall:
Did it work?

John Dudeney:
Ah no. No, it didn’t, but that’s besides the point. And six months later I’m on a ship heading down south, heading down to the Antarctic for two years. And in my second year, I was made the base commander at the age of 23, which was a shock to me, and a shock to most everybody else because I didn’t look the part. If you saw a picture of me that I couldn’t even grow a beard so. So I found myself on an Antarctic station through an Antarctic winter. But I was both the base commander, the government magistrate, the postmaster, the doctor and the dentist.

Hannah Stitfall:
The doctor and the dentist? I mean, did you have any pre-training of being a doctor or a dentist?

John Dudeney:
There were several events that got in the way of the normal operation. So when I got somebody who was really very ill in the middle of winter, I had to deal with it by radio. This guy developed what’s known as obviously colitis. We didn’t have the drugs to deal with it. We were completely isolated from the outside world. And so a rather long and complicated rescue attempt started. What I believe to be if not the first, probably nearly the first winter flight into the Antarctic to drop drugs to us. And then we tried to use an aircraft from another station to fly the guy further as far north as we could get to take him off with an icebreaker. But unfortunately, that flight crashed. It was quite a story. I was in the plane, we flew into an iceberg.

Hannah Stitfall:
You were in the plane? When it flew into an iceberg?

John Dudeney:
Yes. Yeah, we got airborne. We’re taking off on a short ice runway about 500 metres of sea ice. And then there was open water and broken sea ice. And the engine, it stopped, so we lost power. Of course if we went straight ahead, we would have been into icy water at a temperature of about -15, we would have been gone. So the pilot tried to bank, and out of the mist bloom this iceberg, which was higher than we were but it had a valley in it. And he got the plane in the valley. So one wings scraped across the valley and folded so it ceased to be a wing. And we came over the other side where there was some fresh sea ice had formed. We crashed down on that. One ski went through we ended up pressing the on the broken wing and the other ski and spinning. So we came to a, we skated along and we came to a stop, door burst open next to me. And I saw an ice foot – that’s a place where the sea ice joins the land ice. I thought, I’m off. The next thing I remember I was still on the ice foot looking back at the aeroplane. And then of course once I got out and realised what was going on, we’re actually on a small island not on an iceberg. We started to get a sick guy out of the plane and so on and so forth. And get ourselves sorted out. You get a few things.

Hannah Stitfall:
There’s not many people that can say they go into an iceberg.

John Dudeney:
Well not not unlived No. No, it was it was an odd experience because by then I was very experienced about what what was possible and wasn’t possible in the Antarctic. I didn’t have a seat belt because there weren’t any so I was being thrown around in the back of the plane. Every time we hit something I got chucked about somewhere. And I can remember thinking to myself the next time I hit that bulkhead, that’s it. Luckily, it wasn’t.

Hannah Stitfall:
Goodness me! And now you’re sat here all these years later telling the tale.

John Dudeney:
Well, I had to learn to fly to get over a fear of flying as a result of that.

Hannah Stitfall:
And that must have just added you know, that was your first time down there. Yeah. So, of course, when you first arrived the feelings of you know that that isolation and you must have been like, oh, goodness, me. I don’t know, I don’t really know what I’m doing here. Just being so isolated from the rest of the world. And then of course, all of that happening. What made you keep coming back to be honest, I would have been like, you know what, I’m going home.

John Dudeney:
It gets under your skin. It just takes over. It’s a place of such grandeur, such majesty, such interest. I’ve had a career where I can really say I didn’t have a job for a living. I did what I wanted to do. I frightened myself several times, including flying into icebergs among other things. But it’s just been a wonderful time. And I’m tremendously grateful for it. I’ve done some really interesting science. I’ve seen all sorts of things going on in Antarctica, I’ve been involved in the politics of Antarctica. So, no, it’s been great.

Hannah Stitfall:
And what would you say has been, I’m sure you’ve had many memorable moments but what is one of your most memorable moments with wildlife species down there?

John Dudeney:
I suppose it’s in the springtime going out on the on the sea ice. And watching Weddell seals pup. And then the pup just sitting on the ice for the first few weeks, just ballooning out with this really rich milk before it’s pushed down a breathing hole and taught how to swim. But also another one would be walking out on the sea ice in the winter, on a calm day, and listening to the sound of silence. Because you have silence there, like you’d have nowhere else. And if there’s a seal under the sea ice, you’ll hear it. You know, hear it calling. If there’s an avalanche 20 miles away in the mountains, you’ll hear it. Otherwise, you’ve got this absolute silence. If the wind gets up, then you start to hear that whistling of spindrift on this on the surface. It’s just…

Hannah Stitfall:
And how often now do you get, because I know you’re very busy. You’ve always we were talking before you’ve got three books on the go at the moment. You know, busy busy man, John.

John Dudeney:
Well, normally I try to go down these days as a tour guide. Once a year. For this year I haven’t been able to go but I hope I’ll get back to it – but I’m getting a bit old now. I’m pushing 79 so…

Hannah Stitfall:
No, you still got a few more experiences of flying into icebergs, I can tell

John Dudeney:
Well I’d prefer not to fly into icebergs, that’s not really very habit forming. Well, sadly, the amount of sea ice is disappearing quite quickly at the moment. And that has significant ecological consequences, particularly for krill because krill which is the main feedstock for the whales, of course, at least the baleen whales, their young, basically they have nurseries underneath the marginal pack ice and they live off the phytoplankton in the ice – as the ice retreats, so then the krill are going to be impacted. And that means the whole of the ecosystem of South Georgia is impacted because the krill aren’t born there. They’re born on the Antarctic Peninsula and they’re carried by the west wind drift, the current of the ocean, to South Georgia, where they provide the feedstock for all the wildlife.

Hannah Stitfall:
Yeah, I was I was reading actually, the krill distribution has actually moved 200 miles from where it originally was. I know it moves across the ocean, but it’s where they’re breeding…

John Dudeney:
Well that is because of the retreat in the sea ice. When I, when I first went down the Antarctic Peninsula in 1966, in December, we spent a lot of time bashing our way through pack ice. Now, that’s very unlikely to happen. Very unlikely you’ll see any pack ice. And now when you go down to the northern end of the Antarctic, it doesn’t snow in the summer, it rains. That was something that which would have been very unusual in my time, first of all, and of course, that has a feedback. Because the rain on on the snow melts, the snow melts, the ice changes the albedo makes everything speed up.

Hannah Stitfall:
So in the time that you’ve been going down there in your lifetime, you’ve seen a huge change.

John Dudeney:
Yeah, some of the changes are quite surprising. One of them is the resurgence of Gentoo penguins. When I wintered we had an island nearby us that had a penguin rookery on it. They were entirely at dailies. And around our station, even in the summer, we would have mostly snow and ice, not rock. Now when I go back there, the station is completely surrounded by rock. And there are a Gentoo penguins nesting outside the station. And that’s because the Gentoos need rock for their nesting. So they’re they’re progressing southwards, pushing the daily penguins southwards. So there’s quite a bit of ecological change taking place at the moment as more rock becomes more available for the Gentoos. And so the Gentoos are doing quite well.

Hannah Stitfall:
But as we see across ecosystems throughout the world, there will be there will be winners and losers.

John Dudeney:
Oh absolutely. And the Gentoos appear to be winners at the moment. But other things are happening now — there’s an Antarctic grass, which normally would be only at the most northern ends of the Antarctic Peninsula, that’s spreading southwards. So things are changing, and there’s much more rock exposed than there ever was before. And you can see that the rock has not been exposed for many, many years because it’s completely clean. It has no vegetation or lichen or almost anything on it.

My favourite fact about the Southern Ocean is being off the northern coast of Elephant Island, surrounded by fin whales, so many blows at once. It was just like the air was full of fog. And that is wonderful because it shows the return of the species. And the reason they are all there is because there’s an upwelling as you bump into the island, bringing nutrients to the surface, and they’re all there feeding. It was a sight that was just incredible. Because there were so many of them. And they’re all happily going on with their lives again.

Hannah Stitfall:
I mean, I live down in Cornwall, and the amount of humpbacks we’re now seeing around the coastline and fin whales. And everyone’s like, Oh, well, why are they here? And it’s because populations are…

John Dudeney:
Well fin whales and the humpbacks are doing very well. Blue whales, not so well. I saw my first blue whale about four years ago of South Georgia, off of Saunders, no off Cooper island. And last year, I saw a blue whale with a calf. Quite close to the ship. There’s a small pod of them now developing on the southern end of South Georgia. When you see a blue whale, you know you’ve seen a blue whale. There’s no doubt about that. It can’t be anything else. It’s just so bloody big.

Hannah Stitfall:
Well thank you, John! That was fascinating talking to you. Thank you very much. I’m going to have to get down to Antarctica.

John Dudeney:
You really should go, and go soon. Go on a small ship. Go on a ship that is carrying a 100 passengers or no more and you’ll have the most incredible experience if you do.

Hannah Stitfall:
When are you going, I want to come with you.

John Dudeney:
I don’t know yet. It will be sometime next season.

Hannah Stitfall:
Alright. Let me know. Thank you!

Hannah Stitfall:
The whole Antarctic continent has more than 11,000 miles of coastline. That’s basically the same distance from the North Pole to the South Pole. That is a lot of ocean. But what does it look like underwater?

My second guest today is Lucy Woodall. Lucy is a marine biologist who’s led many expeditions to the Southern Ocean. She does a lot of work in trying to open up the ocean space, and make it more accessible for people across the globe. So welcome, Lucy, thank you for coming along today.

Lucy Woodall:
It’s my pleasure to be here.

Hannah Stitfall:
Now we’re gonna go straight in with the first question. What does the Southern Ocean look like underwater?

Lucy Woodall:
You know, I? That’s a great question. And when I first went down, I didn’t have a clue, right? Because my image of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica was sort of dark water or white ice and snow. But then actually, when you look and just have that peek below that white blanket, that’s the snow in the ice. You see all these amazing colours. Because of course, the organisms that live down in the ocean, they don’t know it’s snowing up top right. So it’s the same colours, the brightness, the intensity, the diversity of shapes and sizes and colour that we see down at depth.

Hannah Stitfall:
And how quickly does that become apparent? So when you get into dive is that is there a bit of murkiness and at what level underneath does the colour really spring to life?

Lucy Woodall:
So the work that I’ve done is with remotely operated vehicles (ROV), so we haven’t kind of started near shore. We’ve started like right out in the ocean and we’ve gone to maybe like 200 metres. There’s often a little bit of a layer on the surface of the water where there’s maybe some fresh water that’s not mixing super well with the salty water. So it almost looks like there’s a bit of murkiness but then once you get out of that layer, which is the top few metres, you get this absolutely crystal clear as we had the most amazing visibility.

For me, going down, and having quite an uncertain situation on deck, you know not quite knowing where the ice flows are gonna go, when we’re going to have to pull the ROV up and leave our site. So, you know, lots of decisions made, being made, and then coming down, descending, sort of from the light into the darkness, and then seeing those bright colours, and just the calming effect that that has on me, I find that really powerful, and it makes me feel very small. And I think that’s actually a really important feeling. When we’re into these spaces, you know, we are just a tiny snapshot in the world’s history.

Hannah Stitfall:
And what sort of species do you see down there?

Lucy Woodall:
For me the the most surprising thing in Antarctica was seeing coral, you think of coral and you think of Nemo fish, right? You think beautiful sandy beaches. Your summer holidays. But in fact, there are a number of corals that we call cold water corals that live at depth and live in Antarctica. We also see sponges just like the loofahs in your bathroom. Imagine them sticking out the seabed? I think my favourite is something called a sea pig. Should I described to you what a see pig looks like? So think of your kitchen fridge that will get you cold right? And in your fridge you’ve got your pot of gherkins. Okay, pick out a gherkin. Now turn it pink in your mind – small pink gherkin. And then the final step, hopefully you’re going to like this – is put a hat on it, but it’s full of feathers about two thirds of the way down. And that is what your sea pig looks like.

Hannah Stitfall:
So I’ve got a small pink gherkin with a feathery hat on it.

Lucy Woodall:
Yes, you got it.

Hannah Stitfall:
That’s, I mean, that’s dreams right there. And are they only found in Antarctica?

Lucy Woodall:
You get sea pigs all around the world. But the ones that we saw when we were down in Antarctica most frequently with these beautiful pink sea pigs and they’re just the thing that comes to mind when anybody asked me any questions about the seabed in Antarctica. All I can think about is the little pink gherkins with the feathery hats.

Hannah Stitfall:
I need to see a photograph of one these! You’ve thrown me with the pink gherkins small ones. I was gonna ask you, what’s what’s the most amazing things you’ve seen underwater there? Apart from apart from the pink gherkins and the feathery hearts

Lucy Woodall:
I think I was quite surprised when I was first looking in the deep sea, just how many organisms kind of relied on each other for their habitats. So we can think about the seabed being some corals and some sponges, and they live on hard substrate just like rock, right because they’ve got to attach to something. But having that coral, and that sponge in that one location means that we get all sorts of other things like little lobsters, little crabs, snails, and brittle stars and basket stars just like the starfish that we see off our coastlines, Bristol stars. Like you might imagine having very tiny little legs and basket stars, almost thinking like that they could encompass the entirety of your head. It’s okay, they don’t. And these things together a filter feeders so they’re feeding off that really richly nutritious, cold water that is sinking that, what we call Antarctic bottom water, that is sinking creating that wonderful 3-D conveyor belt that goes across our one ocean across the planet providing nutrients for even us here in the UK.

Hannah Stitfall:
Tell us about some species that can only be found in the Southern Ocean. Nowhere else.

Lucy Woodall:
Yeah, so species that live in Antarctica are really varied. And I’m just gonna give two examples here. So one is that above the ocean, and when we think of that we think of a lot of our penguin species. We saw lots of Adelie penguins. They are incredibly inquisitive, they don’t see humans really because they live on these big floating ice islands, these ice floes. So Adelies I think were probably the first thing I saw when I was down in Antarctica. So I always like to think of them as kind of my penguin I’m sure they don’t remember me. So I’m probably not they’re human.

Hannah Stitfall:
What did you feel like when you first saw – you’re in Antarctica, and you see your first Adelie penguin?

Lucy Woodall:
I didn’t quite believe it. Their ability to move, their ability to be able to leap out, leap out of the water, I mean, vast distances. And then you really were able to appreciate their environment. It wasn’t just their breathing, their environment’s very different to us. It’s this massive 3-D space that includes the ocean.

Hannah Stitfall:
So you said at the top of that two species that are found in the set, what’s the second one?

Lucy Woodall:
So I want to introduce to you the Patagonian toothfish. So Patagonian toothfish, are very long-lived fish, quite important for fisheries. But it’s something that we as humans have exploited over time. Now, the thing about Patagonian toothfish and other large fish in these areas is because they’re long-lived, they kind of take a long time to mature. So we have to be incredibly careful how we can sustainably manage them for future generations, only by really understanding things which might seem very remote to us sitting here in London, why would I want to know about a random fish in the middle of the Southern Ocean? Actually, it does make a difference. Because those fish, just like the funny little penguins have their role in that ecosystem, and only by ensuring we have that diverse ecosystem down in Antarctica, can we actually live our lives here in London, as we expect.

Hannah Stitfall:
So how long do they live for?

Lucy Woodall:
Yeah, so Patagonian toothfish, you know, can live up to 50 to 60 years that we know, right? And I would always caveat that because we know as humans, we can live different ages across the planet, there’s different survival rates for all of us as well. So there’s still a lot more information for us to really understand about different stocks, where they’re living, and how that is changing with climate that is changing across the planet.

Hannah Stitfall:
And we know that krill underpins the entire Antarctic ecosystem. And I’ve got actually written here, it’s estimated that 700 trillion, adult Antarctic krill are in the Southern Ocean, and their swarms can be seen from space. That’s incredible. But for our listeners, why are they so important?

Lucy Woodall:
Yeah, so krill is what we would call a keystone species, right? The penguins we spoke about earlier, they’re going to be feeding on the krill, they’re going to be feeding on things that feed on the krill. And what krill do is have this critical point in the middle here. So they’re not just fully predators, like some of our big fish, and our penguins up at the top. And they’re not the little tiny plants, the little algae, that live in the summer months in Antarctica. They’re this point in the middle, so they really control the whole system, being able to funnel energy from the sun and from the nutrient rich waters, all the way through to some of those higher-end predators. And some of our really large mammals as well. Lots of our whales and such like.

Hannah Stitfall:
Yeah I mean, I was reading about it and crab-eating seals, they’ve got specially adapted teeth because actually they eat a lot of krill, leopard seals eat a lot of krill. So we automatically think, you know, krill, whales but it’s everything that that takes huge advantage of krill as a keystone species. It’s really, really important.

Lucy Woodall:
Yes!

Hannah Stitfall:
Tell me about your trip to find a particularly mysterious sunken ship.

Lucy Woodall:
Yeah, so they did find it after we’d left on another expedition. But I was really lucky to be part of the biology team that was on an expedition to go look for Shackleton ship, the endurance down in the Weddell Sea. I mean, it’s a shame on our expedition we didn’t see it, it would have been amazing if we did. It’s so exciting that subsequently a team has been able to locate it and take images. And I think from those images, you can really see what life lives down in the deep sea. I don’t think you’ve seen some of the images of the wheel that is still on the ship. And you can see some sea stars around that wheel. So it’s quite nice. You know, you’ve got a biological wheel and you’ve got a human made wheel. I quite like that analogy.

Hannah Stitfall:
I suppose as well with what you do. You’re going into worlds that new discoveries can be made all the time because we still don’t really know what’s down there. Which is really exciting, especially for a scientist.

Lucy Woodall:
Yeah, absolutely. When we head down into the deep sea, we are very, very often the first humans ever to see that bit of our planet.

Hannah Stitfall:
Wow, that’s, that’s pretty special!

Lucy Woodall:
It really is when we think about the number of people who climb up our tallest mountains every year, but we know the far, far fewer have ever gone down into the deepest trenches, and certainly not gone down and been able to view them, being able to look at that bit of the planet is, is important. I think it’s, it’s completely altered me as a human, you know, I grew up by the sea, the sea is part of who I am. But having that experience was really fundamental to how I think, and also noticing that that bit of the ocean has been impacted by humans. So we’ve not seen it before. But actually, we’ve had consequences at those depths – whether that be due to climate change, or types of pollution. And those two parts together, I think, is incredibly powerful.

Hannah Stitfall:
I mean, when you think about it, I was reading the other the other week, the US government is investing 100 million to you know, find intelligent life elsewhere. Like, you know, in space, we’ve got so much here already, that we don’t even know what’s there. And I think maybe we should put our efforts into finding what’s what’s down below rather than up above first. But that’s that’s just my personal opinion.

Lucy Woodall:
Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. I mean, of course, in the deep sea, we’ve used lots of technologies that have started off, you know, in some of those space programmes. Um, so we’ve definitely benefited from that. I feel that sometimes we as humans try and, and sort of curate our environments, you know, even thinking about things like having heating, right, we curate our environments to make them more comfortable for ourselves. And the more we do that, the more remote we get from our natural environments. So even if you never go down to the sea, you never see saltwater in your life. That ocean has really important impact on how we live our lives. Now, I often talk to school kids and that, oh, yeah, rainforests are really important. But they don’t necessarily know that the ocean is important. How do we do that? How do we lift our blue blanket from our 2-D place that we spend a week in the summer on holidays, make sandcastles and go for a paddle, into something that we feel kind of more connected to? Right? Because if we feel connected to it, we want to do something about it. And we want to both understand it and make sure that it is there for future generations in a state that is going to allow them to do what they need to do.

Hannah Stitfall:
Well Lucy mean you’ve captured me with the with the mini pink gherkin with the with the feathery hat. I mean, I want the Southern Ocean to be alright now and I’m gonna go and look them up. I can’t wait. But thank you for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure.

Lucy Woodall:
No problemo. It’s been wonderful chatting with you and sharing that image.

Hannah Stitfall:
Next week… Did you know the longest mountain range in the world is underwater? I’m asking all the questions you ever wanted to know about mountains under the waves. And if you can’t wait until then stick around for our closing story. Today we’re meeting someone who takes their love for the ocean to new limits.

This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It’s hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Anastasia Auffenberg, and our executive producer Steve Jones. The music we use is from our partners BMG Production Music. Archive courtesy of Greenpeace. The team at crowd network is Catalina Nogueira, Archie Built Cliff, George Sampson and Robert Wallace. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Flora Hevesi, Alex Yallop, Janae Mayer and Alice Lloyd Hunter. Thanks for listening and see you next week. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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