Foreign Correspondent: ATOM HUNTERS IN ANTARCTICA
We take an epic journey across Antarctica with a crack team of scientists on a mission to unlock our planet’s secret history. They hope clues from the earth’s pre-industrial past will illuminate our climate future.
It’s a mission six years in the making. A top team of scientists – from the USA and Australia – are finally realising their dream: they’re heading to a remote corner of the Antarctica to execute an ambitious plan.
They want to drill hundreds of metres deep into the earth’s frozen past in a bid to illuminate it’s not-so-frozen future.
‘We need to see how the atmosphere has handled the emissions that we have thrown at it’, says CSIRO’s Dr David Etheridge.
The team’s destination is Law Dome, a mountain of ice holding a precious, pristine climate archive stretching back over 80,000 years.
To reach the site, the scientists must first haul hundreds of tonnes of equipment on sleds 130 kilometres from their base at Casey Station, then set up a high-tech lab for three months on ice.
Their quarry is tiny: individual atoms that should reveal the truth about the ‘detergent of the atmosphere’.
‘It really is a question of increasing the sum of human knowledge…in terms of climate science and ultimately the future of our planet’, says Dr Andrew Smith from Australia’s nuclear research organisation ANSTO.
Film-maker Dr Richard Smith was embedded with the scientists – and his brother Andrew – recording them as they carry out extraordinary work in the most extreme of environments. They endure snow blizzards and ferocious winds, lose weeks of precious research time in weather lockdown, camp in freezing temperatures and (almost) run out of clean socks.
‘I don’t want to just come down here for a jolly. Spend three months of my life toiling away drilling ice’, says glaciologist Dr Peter Neff. ‘I want to do it so that we have the best information …with what we can expect from the atmosphere and its influence on us as people living on Earth.’
They’re mining for air as old as Ned Kelly and Edison’s light-bulb. It will be taken back to Sydney for analysis at ANSTO where the team hopes it will yield crucial missing information about how well we can expect the atmosphere to clean itself in the years ahead.
‘This is certainly a very unique and a very difficult experiment that we’re undertaking’, says the understated Dr Smith. ‘It may not work.’
Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Antarctica in summer, this program showcases the passion and commitment of a dedicated team of scientists, seeking to give us all a clearer view of an uncertain future.
Film-maker Dr Richard Smith is available for interview.
Foreign Correspondent: Tuesday 7 April at 8pm on ABC TV and iview
