Encounters at the End of the World Page #3

It's so big that the water that is inside of it

would run the river Nile for 75 years

MacAYEAL This is a little bit

of video that we shot

when we were flying up to the iceberg

It looks big and it looms above us,

even if we're on an aircraft

flying above the iceberg,

the iceberg is always above us

It's above us because it's a mystery

that we don't understand

Here's a picture of what it looked like once

we had arrived in the center of the iceberg

We put out our instruments

Now we're gonna have an opportunity

to monitor how the iceberg drifts north

They're so big, there's an element of fear

We don't know, really,

what's going to come ahead

when they eventually begin to melt

in the ocean beyond Antarctica

What we're seeing now here

is a time-lapse sort of animation

of satellite imagery of the sea ice

and of the continent of Antarctica

And what you see are three shades of gray

This sort of lighter shade of gray

is the sea ice,

and these little bits and pieces here,

these are titanic icebergs

This little fellow right here, he's not a very

big iceberg compared to these other ones,

but that guy there might be the size of

the island of Sicily in the Mediterranean

It's like a little tiny bumblebee

zipping around in a circle,

happy to be in the warm waters

as it's drifting north

I'd be happy to see Antarctica as a static,

monolithic environment,

a cold monolith of ice, sort of the way

the people back in the past used to see it,

but now our comfortable thought

about Antarctica is over

Now we're seeing it as

a living being that's dynamic,

that's producing change, change that

it's broadcasting to the rest of the world,

possibly in response to what the world

is broadcasting down to Antarctica

Certainly on a gut level

it's going to be frightening

to watch what happens

to these babies once they get north

HERZOG What environment would the men

of Shackleton's expedition encounter

if they returned in a next life?

Shackleton, seen here,

would finally make it to the Pole,

a quest he had to abandon

a mere 100 miles short of it

Would there be any ice left?

Would he have to construct

an artificial Antarctica in a studio

and try to find his route through

papier-mache icebergs?

Would our only modern recourse

be to create ice with machines?

This is Frosty Boy, here in McMurdo

It's the equivalent of ice cream in the States,

and it's a really big hit

Everybody loves it It's what they go for

three or four times a day

And it has the texture of ice cream,

but it's not quite ice cream

There's a lot of crises that happen

in McMurdo when the Frosty Boy runs out

It's bad news

Words circulate everywhere throughout

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