On an expedition to Antarctica, journalist Alok Jha ends up trapped on the ice for days.
Alok Jha is a journalist, author and broadcaster, focusing on stories about science. He is the science correspondent at ITV News. Before that, he spent a decade at the Guardian and made programmes for the BBC. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook.
This story originally aired on March 24, 2017.
Story Transcript
I don’t think I realized how much danger I was in, until a moment of stillness that happened.
That moment of stillness happened when I was fifty meters away from a helicopter that had just landed and was blowing air downwards, to the extent where it’s very hard to stand up.
I was fifty meters away from the helicopter and we were both on a very thin sheet of ice, and this ice was floating about two kilometers from the coast of East Antarctica.
And we’d been trapped on this ice for a couple of weeks, by the way, just to give you some context.
We’d been trapped on a ship on this ice and the captain of the ship said this helicopter — this enormous beast of a helicopter with Chinese symbols on it -- was the only way off this ice and back to safety.
Now, I don’t get myself into these situations often. Ask anyone who knows me - I’m a massive comfort bunny, basically.
I don’t like anywhere that doesn’t have strong coffee or Wi-Fi, and I don’t like leaving Zone 1, if I can be honest. If I do, then there’s usually a lot of people, support staff, and a rescue beacon, so this was an odd situation for me to be in.
But the reason I was there was because, about four weeks earlier, we left New Zealand on a ship to go to Antarctica to follow in the footsteps of a great Antarctic explorer, Douglas Mawson.
You may not have heard of him. He is up there with Scott and Amundsen, and Shackleton as one of the people who opened up Antarctica in 1913, 1912 and he was a scientist more than the others.
The others were explorers — great explorers interested in science. Mawson was a scientist who happened to be interested in exploring.
I am a journalist and I cover whatever I can, and the only reason I became a journalist was to meet interesting people and to go to interesting places.
As a reporter, you meet interesting people as I said, and one of those interesting people I met was a scientist who went to Antarctica quite often. I’d interviewed for something years and years before, and I said as a joke at the end, “Listen, if you go back to Antarctica, do you mind taking me along?”
And he said, “Oh, yes. Fantastic, hilarious. You can’t leave Zone 1.”
We had the same joke. Off we go. We had that joke and he left. A year and a half before this expedition left, he rang me up one day. He lived in Australia and he said to me, “Alok, do you want to come to Antarctica with me? Were you serious when you said that?”
And I found myself saying yes. It was a Sunday morning, I remember, and I couldn’t get reception at home. I was standing by the window and I said, “Did you just ask me to come to Antarctica with you? Are you serious about this?”
He said, “Yes. You have to tell me now. Do you want to come? It’s in a year and half’s time and I’m trying to raise money to go. Do you want to come?”
I said, “Yes, sure. Why not?”
He said, “See if you can persuade your newspaper,” I was working with The Guardian at the time “To cover it in some way.” And I was like, “Sure, why not? Yes, this is easy, isn’t it?”
A year and half of persuading later, me and my colleague Lawrence were standing on this ship taking selfies of ourselves, tweeting the last bars of reception as we left Bluff in New Zealand to go to Antarctica. This was amazing.
I just hadn’t considered, in that year and a half of persuading people, what it actually might be like to go to Antarctica.
It just hadn’t occurred to me to think about it, to be honest, apart from to buy a big coat. So I had a big coat and some thermals and apart from that, I just literally hadn’t thought about it.
We reversed, if that’s the word for what ships do, out of the harbor. Taking my bars of reception, this is me. I’m about to go to Antarctica. Isn’t it great?
Suddenly I’m feeling incredibly sick because the whole thing was -- everything was moving in three dimensions, in a way that I hadn’t quite understood that ships do. I’d never really been on a ship before, if I’m honest.
No one had told me that it involved 10 days across the southern ocean, which is the roughest sea in the world. Obviously, I got seasick immediately. I had to spend the first couple of days lying in my bunk, screaming, and thinking, “I need to get off this ship immediately.”
I had a month to go before I was allowed anywhere off the ship at all.
Anyway, the point is, I got over the seasickness (go me!) and got used to the weird gravity of the ship.
I’m a former physicist, so I was really intrigued by the gravity, because you’d go downstairs and suddenly the ship would fall underneath you. You float in the air for a bit then suddenly hit the ground.
You learn very quickly not to walk around with hot drinks. You learn to hold something wherever you’re going. I mean, it’s amazing, and your body understands that you need to just compensate for the movement.
Anyway, it was an incredible experience in many respects. We saw wonderful things: many, many penguins, many seals, and all these things. We went to the edge of Antarctica. We drove across Antarctica in what we were told were basically boats with wheels, so that if we went through the ice, we’d float.
Although, having said that, on one occasion when that did happen, the thing sank. I wasn’t on it so fortunately, it was okay.
Anyway, so we went to Mawson’s Huts. Mawson’s Huts still exist today, 100 years later. They’re looked after, but very hard to get to.
We had to drive across one hundred and fifty kilometers of ice. It’s not easy driving across ice because it’s not flat and easy like a road. It melts and you can’t go over certain bits because some bits are thinner than others. You need to be really careful.
Fortunately, I wasn’t in charge of any of this. I just was a passenger. At one point, in that area where Mawson’s Huts were, there’s a hill behind it — or a mountain I suppose you could call it — a little behind it, where I remember I stood on this mountain by myself.
The scientists were actually doing real science; I was just a passenger really.
I went onto this mountain and looked around in my big coat, and I’m thinking,
“This is the furthest I’ve ever been from anyone I’ve ever known.”
All the people I care about, all the people I love, eleven thousand miles from anybody. And then thinking also, “I’ve got to file a story for The Guardian.”
I wrote that and sent it from the satellite equipment, which they told me not to use because it was so expensive, which was twenty dollars per megabyte of information.
Websites these days are hugely complicated, so if you download anything, we spend thousands of pounds, and for a newspaper that makes no money, that’s a big thing. So hundreds of thousands-- actually tens of thousands of pounds.
Anyway, we’d done all this and we were turning back towards New Zealand. We’d done all this amazing stuff, and what you learn about Antarctica is that travelling around there is not like taking the tube to Chiswick or something.
You can’t get there in a certain time. You have to be accepting of the fact that you have a, what my captain told me was a “book of intentions”. You might want to go one mile, you might want to go ten miles, but you may not achieve that in a day, depending on the weather.
You have a book of intentions mediated by the weather, and so every day we’d hope to get somewhere. We may or may not get there depending on how the weather behaves, and the weather in Antarctica changes constantly.
It’s a fluid, complex, horribly painful thing if you have to stand outside in it, and we had to stand outside all the time to get our satellite connections.
The day we wanted to go back to New Zealand, the day we turned the ship around, again, I don’t know if that’s the correct terminology, but when we pointed ourselves back to New Zealand, the weather changed.
The weather changed all the time, and that was okay, but I remember later looking at a photograph of that day and looking at the distance. There was a black smudge in the distance and that was the clouds; that was the wind coming towards us.
Essentially, we woke up the next morning hoping to be in open ocean making our way from the Antarctic, but actually, we were still where we were the night before. Not only were we there, we were also stuck in a lot of ice.
Ice all around, and we could see in the distance about two kilometers away, open ocean and two kilometers behind us, the Antarctic continent.
So we’re stuck and a sheet of ice had just appeared. What happens is that around Antarctica, there’s lots and lots of floating ice — packed ice a couple of meters thick.
It floats around. It’s moved by the winds and if the winds push it in one direction, it just solidifies and stays there.
That is the environment. Many ships get stuck and then the wind changes and then they leave again. We thought the wind might change.
The next morning, the wind hadn’t changed and we had noticed that the wind had got worse. Now, instead of being two kilometers from the edge of the ocean, we were now twenty kilometers from the edge of the open ocean, and still two kilometers behind.
We’re being compressed, because the wind was just forcing itself this way towards us. Imagine the continent behind me. The ship itself was being slowly crushed against the continent.
The ship was strong, so it wouldn’t get damaged too easily, but it was being really forced and the ice was thickening up all around us.
I said to you at the beginning that I didn’t realize how dangerous any of this was. I didn’t realize what that was all about. When people said to me that the winds would change, we’d get out, that’s what would happen, and every day I believed that.
But what no one told me until much later, and which perhaps should have been scary, is that the icebergs all around us, which I thought they were beautiful by the way, and if you ever get to see an iceberg with your own eyes, please go and take the chance; it’s incredible to see.
These things, which are the size of cities, fifty meters from the surface of the ocean, hundreds of meters below, these beautiful objects are whipped into shape by the winds and the water.
The things which people have written about through all of exploring history and seeing ruined civilizations, and minarets, and columns, and all sorts of things within these structures, which I would stare at and take pictures of.
These things are actually deathly things because, whereas the surface ice moves because of the winds, and we would move within that ice because of the winds, the icebergs move because of the currents underwater.
So they move through this ice on the surface as if it wasn’t even there. Whereas we were stuck, these icebergs could move in any direction.
They could come towards us and we were nothing. We would have been completely erased by one of these things. No one told me that until six months later, so I was just looking at them as beautiful objects.
We were stuck for a couple of days, and it looked like the wind and weather weren’t going to change. On Christmas Day in 2013, I remember we were having a fantastic diner - a Christmas lunch, actually considering we were so far away from any civilization. Amazing Christmas dinner. I had a Christmas jumper on and everything, and the captain sent out a mayday.
In Antarctica, when any ship sends out a mayday, because it’s such a remote place that’s very difficult to get to, every ship in that region comes to your assistance, whatever they are doing. Whether they are going on a six-month expedition to the South Pole, or whether they are taking hundreds of researchers somewhere else, they just converge because they know that one day, they will also be in our situation, and they’ll need everyone to help. So they drop everything. It costs a lot of money to get into Antarctica, so it costs a lot of money to do this rescue.
The ships began to converge towards us, but they were all very far away. The very first one that made any headway towards us was a French ship - a French icebreaker. It wasn’t really an icebreaker; it was more of an ice strengthened ship called The Astrolabe.
The Astrolabe got to the edge of the ice, realized it was way too thick and just went, “Brrr, I’m not going into this ice, no. Screw you; I’m going back to my wine.”
They were amazing and they went off. The next ship that came along about a day later, on the edge of the ice, was a Chinese icebreaker - a huge thing - and it was on its way to make a Chinese base.
I’m not going to do a Chinese accent. They were on their way to make a Chinese base. The Chinese have lots of bases in Antarctica; this is their fifth one, a huge icebreaker.
It gets to the edge of the ice, twenty kilometers away and we heard a few days later, a crackle over the radio saying, “We’re coming, we’re coming. We’re going to rescue you. Don’t worry.” It was wonderful.
We didn’t see it until maybe a few days later. We saw this red dot on the horizon as it was coming towards us. I was told that what would happen is that this icebreaker would come to the ship, and carve its way through and then essentially turn around and carve away through the ice, and we’d follow it in the channel it would make out to the open ocean. It would carry on its way and we’d go back to New Zealand. Brilliant.
We all got excited, drank whatever booze we had, hugged each other, made Vines and sent them.
Do you remember Vine? Anyway, we made those, sent them off, and it was wonderful.
I went to sleep that night and I’m thinking the next morning that I’m going to see this amazing hull of this red amazing Chinese vessel next to us.
I threw open the curtains of my cabin to see that it was still right there in the horizon. I was like, “This is problematic. Why is it not closer to us?”
Well, it turns out the ice was thicker than they thought and they carried on trying. The next morning, it was still on the horizon, and then the third morning, they said, “We can’t actually get to you. Sorry guys, it’s just too thick. This ice is too thick.”
This was a massive icebreaker and it just couldn’t get to us, so what’s the next option?
Well, the Australians had an icebreaker too, which was a couple of days away on its way to Casey base to refuel that, and so it was on its way now. It would take two more days and we waited and we waited.
We thought, “Right, great. This will do the same thing. It will come to us, carve a channel, and we’ll go behind it. Excellent.”
I remember writing all this stuff out, sending it off and this is what’s happening and I’m thinking to myself, “Nobody’s interested in this, are they?”
It turns out that I was completely wrong. The whole world, because it was that moment between Christmas and New Years where there’s no news, was fascinated by this story.
We were getting interview requests from CNN, ABC, Radio New Zealand, BBC, IT - everybody was getting in touch with us. Our internet bill was enormous at this stage and so we thought, “Screw it. Why don’t we do these interviews?”
We even set up a little tent on top of our ship where we could sit in relative warmth to do these Skype interviews and stuff into all these places. We kept doing this to keep our minds busy whilst we didn’t get rescued.
This ship, The Aurora Australis, the Australian ship, came to the edge of the ice and started to make its way in.
We heard about this brilliant, excellent way it’s going to come. It got two kilometers in and decided to stop at that point because the captain had never seen ice like this. He said, “We’re not going to get in there because we’ll just get stuck as well,”
So we thought, “Shit, what do we do now?”
At this point I remember thinking, “What are our options? What do we do?” There were two other icebreakers much further away. One was the U.S. ship -- The Polar Star, which was actually in Australia at the time, so it would take about twelve days to get to us, and an even bigger ship than that, a Russian one, an icebreaker, which was somewhere in New Zealand, so it would take ages to get to us.
We obviously didn’t know what to do. We thought, “Do we have to wait for another two weeks before anything happens?” But then there was another option, which they kept as a reserve. The reserve option was maybe they could send a helicopter to land next to your ship, just a maybe, that would pick people up and take them to the Chinese ship, because it was a Chinese helicopter.
The Chinese ship, which was called The Snow Dragon would send it’s helicopter and the helicopter itself was called The Snow Eagle.
It would send The Snow Eagle to us, but the problem was there was nowhere for The Snow Eagle to land, because the ice was potentially very dangerous and you couldn’t just walk on this thing.
It took us a few days to work out that perhaps there was a portion of the ice which was strong enough for the helicopter to hover over essentially, not switch it’s rotors off to give the full weight.
If we were to build a helipad there, then it could come to us. The question is, how do you build a helipad? You’d need concrete and stuff.
They said, “No, you don’t do that. All you need to do is to get the crew of the ship to essentially just stamp out a helipad. Just walk around and essentially compress the snow on top of the ice. Just be careful not to fall through while you’re doing it,”
And so that’s what happened. On New Year’s Eve 2013, that’s what we did. We had groups of us walking out onto this ice to stamp out a helipad. Because we had no markings, no paint or anything, we put an H for a helipad and a circle using chocolate powder. There was a lot of that on board and I have no idea why.
Anyway, there it was and this was the helipad. We were told that at any point this helicopter could come if the ships didn’t arrive in time.
It was a backup option, just there, and all you have to do is you have to have a bag packed and the bag can only contain some underwear, your toothbrush, your passport and one object that you want to keep, because the rest of it was just lost at that point.
We packed these bags and every morning we’d be told, “Oh, the helicopter might come tonight.” The problem with helicopters in Antarctica is it’s incredibly dangerous, because the slightest wind would knock this thing out, and there’s nowhere you can just get easy access to fuel or repairs in Antarctica.
So this thing had to be completely perfect in terms of weather, for a good four or five hours, and there is no period of four or five hours around the coast of Antarctica where there is perfect weather.
So we weren’t expecting that as an option. We were thinking the ships would come to us. The ships just couldn’t reach us. They could not reach us, and we got resigned every morning thinking, “Today the ship’s going to come or something’s going to happen,” and then by the evening going, “Okay guys, another night in the ship stuck in the ice,” all the while thinking, “icebergs all around”.
Obviously, I didn’t know that, but everybody else who was much more intelligent than me would understand that.
We got to just doing things to distract ourselves on the ship. One of the things that happened was on the 1st of January we were interviewed by Anderson Cooper because that’s what we did.
I remember we were interviewed, sort of four o'clock afternoon our time and it was before midnight in New York. He interviewed us with Kathy Griffin who projected onto the screen at Times Square.
So we were there on Times Square talking about our experience and actually, we were warmer than they were in New York City at the time, which was funny.
But I remember that day. It was another day of disappointment, because we weren’t getting out. People started to get worried at this point because we thought, “How much food do we have left? How easy is it to get food at this place?” - because no one could reach us. It wasn’t easy to just send anything our way. The helicopter couldn’t reach us- nothing could.
I started to think, “Have we got food left?” I remember being slightly worried when the food went from three-course dinners to two-course dinners.
One day they actually even said, “Can you come into the kitchen to help us make these?” The crew was Russian. The Russians have this really amazing recipe of dumplings called Pelmeni. They said, “Come and help us make these,” and I thought at this point, “Hang on a minute, we’re making the food now, then that must be slightly worrying.”
We had the Pelmeni that day. It was second of January 2014. We had the Pelmeni, it was five o'clock and an hour later there was a message over the tannoy system of the ship that just said, “Right guys, this is it. We’re going,”
And that was it. That was all the notice we had. We’d been drilled, by the way. We had our bag. We were told that you’re going to be in a group of twelve and there were going to be six groups of twelve.
Each of you would stand on the ice, wait for the helicopter to land and then you would march onto this helicopter, get on, it would take to the ship and then you’d get off at that end.
I remember standing next to the ship; I was in the second group that went out. As the helicopter landed, it blew up every single loose bit of snow, so you couldn’t see anything in front of you.
All you had was the idea that you would hold someone in front of you and someone behind you would hold you, and so there was a group of twelve of us like a caterpillar.
Because you couldn’t see anything at all, you had to look down and just step into the footprints of the person in front of you, because this ice was not something you wanted to walk on.
It was potentially at any point something you’d fall through and there was five hundred meters of ocean underneath, which was very, very, very cold -- four or five degrees, near freezing in the southern ocean.
So we walked. I remember walking completely blind, and couldn’t hear anything because the rotors were so loud. The air was incredibly difficult to stand up in, because the rotors couldn’t stop, because you couldn’t actually land on this thing.
We went up to the helicopter. This helicopter, which had the step up here, was a bit difficult to get onto. We jumped on and there were people with us who were slightly older than me, who were in their sixties, who couldn’t quite get up, so we had to drag some of those guys up.
We got into the helicopter, squashed right in, the outside was blinding white, and the inside was completely pitch black. Of course, it took a few minutes to get used to it and to get used to the difference.
Once we had got used to the difference, the door had been shut and we were up. The helicopter was incredibly smooth. We were up in the air and I remember looking, at that point when the adrenaline was still flowing, and I thought, “I want to see what it’s like outside.” I turned to my left and the pilot was there. I didn’t want to disturb him, obviously.
I looked over his shoulder and I could see this field of ice. This field of ice that we’d been in for the last twelve days. I saw our ship and it was absolutely minuscule and there was ice in every direction. I couldn’t see the edge of it at all.
This was our environment. This is the thing that kept us there and would not have let us go like a vice. We flew and saw this Chinese ship, The Xue Long, which was also now stuck in the ice seven kilometers away, which had lent us their helicopter by the way, to take us to the edge of the ice where the Australian ship was waiting.
We got down at the edge of the ice twenty minutes later, and again did the reverse. The blinding white light outside as the door opened, the completely freezing cold temperature as the ice hits you in the face, and people guiding us towards the ship.
We got to the Aurora Australis, this enormous orange icebreaker, and climbed up the hull to go inside.
I remember walking inside, being guided in, because we were now technically in different territory. We were now in Australia, in a different time zone also by the way.
Walking in and being guided through corridors, up and down. In ships, you know the corridors are small, the doors are small, and you have a huge amount of clothing on you to keep you warm, and it’s quite difficult to get through everything.
But just being rumbled through all of this stuff and emerging into the ship’s mess where the ship’s crew were clapping and they were clapping. They were clapping and smiling at us, despite the fact they had been completely shafted for their entire Antarctic expedition that year because they had to rescue us.
They were smiling and one of them grabbed me and pulled me into a hug. I don’t know who this guy was. I thought, “Personal space, dude.”
He grabbed me, and he said, “Look, you’re home, you’re home, you’re home!”
And I was like, “Okay.” He just looked at me and he said, “It’s okay. You’re safe now.” Only then, did I really understand just how dangerous all of what I’d done was. Thanks.