The Worst Place to Change a Tire | Continent 7: Antarctica

The Ross Ice Shelf team is at a dead stop in a growing storm, 100 miles from help. You out, you in the middle of nowhere; no one's really been here before. Your life is in danger if you go outside and hang around in there too long. Rob has to change a flat tire on the lead vehicle in the middle of whiteout conditions before they can get moving again.

"I told him I'm just gonna back it up onto that block a little bit, and then I'll come out and we'll set this up. Then, as I draw it back, hopefully, it'll just push those tracks apart; we can whip that out."

"Yeah, good. I had no idea that it could go wrong on a Pistenbully. I just assumed that you just drive on the tracks. I am NOT a mechanic, but Rob's an amazing mechanic."

"Now we're cooking. You can see that it's got a gouge out of the side here, so the ice just ripped into the point of that. There are snow and ice conditions. You get an intact the current, like really anywhere else in the world; you just got to manage it. We've got the spare tire working. In places like this, it's not always about what you want to do. Or hey, you want to do it—that's it's almost entirely what you have to do."

It was all right. The team has only been stopped for 45 minutes, but conditions have gotten much worse. "That's windy; these blowing snow, and then it affects your visibility. It gets quite difficult to drive."

"It's kind of getting to the point where it's really only a couple of options. Or you reckon we have to make a call? Either make camp for the night or push on, try and make up a bit more time."

"Yeah, the reality is we have to stop everything today where we are; hunker down, keep everybody warm. From now, with what we can see out there, it's probably just not worth going anywhere. So it's a shame to lose one day, you know, one of our weather days, even when we're not even doing the science. But you know what? Definitely display it down."