What a Long, Cold Trip It’s Been | Continent 7: Antarctica
ETHAN: Your fingers freeze up and get cold. And they feel like you've got a glove on even when you don't. It becomes almost impossible to do some of the things you've got to do. I'm handling metal with bare hands.
MAN 1: Put it in your mouth. And then it warms up. Is that a trick? Yeah. Well, I don't really want to lose the nuts and washers in the snow, so I've just been putting them in my mouth. But they're a bit cold, so I've been ripping bits of skin off my tongue with them. Whoa! Oh, that one's really cold. [music playing] Cool. Shall we put it up?
CHRISTIAN: Yes. [grunting with effort]
MAN 1: Easy, now!
CHRISTIAN: Yup, it's heavy. Hopefully this weather station will become a part of helping us understand what's going on here. Once we get a few storms through, hopefully it'll give us some good data. There it is! Woo-hoo! [plane zooming]
WOMAN 1: Woo!
CHRISTIAN: It's a huge relief to be done setting up. Now we have our base camp for future seasons. We've figured out what we needed to. Everything worked the way it should have. We showed that, you know, the Ross Ice Shelf program works really, really well. We have scientists from all different disciplines all coming together. Whatever we're going to discover, it's going to be new. And it's going to be interesting. [snowmobile zooming]
MAN 2: We need muscles!
MAN 3: OK, good. Get that shovel!
MAN 1: So we're going to stage some stuff here for the following season. So we've left 50-odd drums of fuel over there. Next year, we'll be coming straight back out to this side. And we'll have kind of the basis of the camp already set up. Here's poo, some of our food waste, recycling, and our general waste. We'll get rid of a fair bit of that. Pees! Lovely. [grunting with effort] [laughing] Your favorite part of your job, I bet.
The Scott Base, they can only process one of those pee barrels every day. So we'll go home with 34. So we wanted to get as many as we can back to Scott Base now to start that process. It's going to take a month to get rid of our pees from here. We don't need snacks.
How long's the flight? An hour?
Yeah, an hour.
MAN 1: Basically, it will take away four of our people, leaving us with a little small crew to begin the return journey.
WOMAN 2: What is this luxury accommodation?
MAN 1: I know. All-- all this space on our feet.
WOMAN 2: Those rookies!
MAN 4: Momma, I'm coming home! [laughter] [music playing]