20140109_SA

Source: BBC Radio 4

URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01nrjj5/Science_in_Action_Colour_of_Ancient_Reptiles/

Date: 09/01/2014

Event: Andrew Luck-Baker: climate sceptics guilty of "saloon-bar pseudoscience"

Attribution: BBC Radio 4, Science in Action

People:

• Andrew Luck-Baker: Senior producer, BBC Radio Science Unit
• Greg Mortimer: Geologist and mountaineer
• Roland Pease: Science writer and broadcaster

Roland Pease: If you're a regular listener to the World Service, you can scarcely have missed the adventures of Science in Action regular Andrew Luck-Baker, trapped in Antarctic pack ice aboard a Russian research vessel. The team he was with had been repeating an expedition made 100 years ago by the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson. And they were about to head home to port when ice engulfed them, on what had shortly before been open water. When I called Andrew by sat-phone, on board the rescue ship Aurora Australis, it sounded like his troubles were far from over.

Andrew Luck-Baker: I'm holding on for dear life. There's a satellite transmitter, which is allowing me to do this interview, and balanced on my knees is my laptop, and I've got my foot on my rucksack, to stop it being blown over the ship, in these winds that are gusting 40, 50 knots. So, yeah, it's not your regular studio interview, I can tell you that. [This is verbatim from his interview with Adam Rutherford on BBC Radio 4: Inside Science - same audio?]

Roland Pease: We'll try and keep it quick for you, Andrew, so you can get back into the warm. I hope that people listening to this programme have also been listening to your brilliant series of Discovery programmes describing the way that your ship went into Commonwealth Bay, you had some extraordinary scientific measurements you made there, and then of course, as is very well-known, your ship got stuck on its way out, and you were helicoptered to safety. It sounds like something really extraordinary happened, when the pack ice came in on you.

Andrew Luck-Baker: Yeah, well it certainly took the scientists on this expedition completely by surprise. What seems to have happened: we were heading into this area of clear water, free of ice, to try and sneak as close as possible to the very edge of what they call the "fast ice", which is ice that forms a continuous sheet from the ice-edge of the sea to the continent margins. Now we accessed that through this clear body of water called a polynya, which are generally free of pack ice, where winds chill these waters, form ice, but the ice is blown straight out of them. Now, on the other side of this water - this is what the scientists believe - there had been this huge build-up of this fast ice, on the other side of this huge glacier called the Mertz Glacier. Now their feeling is that perhaps over ten, fifteen years, one had had an enormous build-up of very thick, very dense, lumpy, bumpy fast ice, that, for reasons I don't quite understand, under some kind of pressure, tension, that just went snap, and released all this broken fast ice up, for it to be then carried, at great speed, on the very stiff south-easterly winds that were blowing. We were taken quite by surprise, our time late on the 23rd December - that's when it all began to kick off.

Roland Pease: And is there any question that this should have been foreseen, by the team running the ship?

Andrew Luck-Baker: Well, it's very difficult to say, at the moment. Obviously they're going to be looking into that, to see whether or not we should have had some warning. But, I mean, speaking to Greg Mortimer, who's one of the co-leaders, he said, based on the data that they had that day, there was absolutely no reason to think that this event should happen. And he's a man who has been down here for more than 20 consecutive Antarctic summers, so he does know his Antarctica.

Greg Mortimer: It was an extraordinary event. It was unbelievable to watch. And I've spent a lot of time watching ice. And this was simply extraordinary. When we got stuck, we were within a mile or two of open water. A few days later, it was three or four miles of ice, and then, within a week, there was 22 nautical miles of ice between us and open water, closer to 40 kilometres. Now, all of that ice set like a gummy mix of concrete and superglue and - all put together, and, and nothing's going to move it for a long time, I don't think. There's a risk that that ice, that the ship is now trapped in, will become locked fast to the land, and could stay there for a very long time, which could ultimately lead to the ship being squashed and sunk, or for a very long time being beset. So, I think we've just seen a cataclysmic event.

Roland Pease: Andrew, your Discovery programmes documented big oceanographic changes in the area. Were they in any way connected to this pack ice problem, at all?

Andrew Luck-Baker: It's very difficult to know. The connections between the ocean, the ice, the winds, the weather, the different kinds of ice - I mean, it's all a really kind of complex interplay and relationship of various feedbacks, that it's actually really difficult to know exactly what is related to what. I mean, I understand, you know, from the outside world, that there have been some climate sceptics out there who've been sort of saying "Well, look at this, they went down to find evidence of global warming down in Antarctica, and they got frozen in by too much ice, ha ha ha". Well, that's a - one of the scientists said here - that's a very saloon-bar pseudoscience way of looking at the way Antarctica works. And the work of this expedition, particularly the oceanographers and the glaciologists, over the next two years, as they go through their data, that should help us all understand much better this sort of complex interrelationship between temperature, water, weather, ice melting and even the growth of new ice in Antarctica.

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Roland Pease: Andrew Luck-Baker, and if you missed his reports on Discovery, they are still available on the BBC World Service website, and they're well worth catching up with.