Justin Rowlatt lands in a dazzling white and blue world to join scientists checking up on Antarctic ice.
Finding out how fast Antarctic ice is melting is critical to understanding the scale of the climate crisis. The BBC's chief environmental correspondent, Justin Rowlatt, is therefore joining scientists as they check the health of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But first he has to undergo some checks himself.Dr McGovern had asked every conceivable question. He had peered at, measured and squeezed me."I am not," he replies, reaching for a latex glove.
They call it the Heroic Age, but it says a lot about Antarctica that the"heroes" we celebrate were more often failures, defeated by this unforgiving place.Shackleton did, but on his most famous journey never actually set foot on the continent. "If you want to suffer you can do that just as well in the Lake District," he tells me over coffee in the spring sunshine of our hotel in New Zealand.
I walk down the ladder and into a dazzling world of white and blue. The light is refracted into rainbows as it scissors off the ice. It is breathtakingly beautiful but I am entering a world in which time dissolves.
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