RRS Sir David Attenborough central to discovering Antarctica's changing climate
For all the wildlife, wilderness and wonder in Antarctica, ITV News has been on a journey of scientific discovery through unchartered waters.
The scientists aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough are getting the data which drives global climate science.
The team have collected a certain type of moss they can share with scientists back in the Netherlands - just one example of scientists across the world working together.
Samples collected will be kept in a freezer to be analysed later.
What might look like mud to the average person is to Marine Chemist Dr Rhiannon Jones a gold mine of data.
'What we've previously seen is that glaciers are really important in the summer providing food to the ocean nearby through meltwater. But what we've seen in winter this time is it looks like there are different drivers of that food supply.'
During this journey, the RRS Sir David Attenborough has been mapping the sea floor, often passing through unchartered waters which used to be solid glaciers.
Measurements show walls of ice can stretch up to 200 metres underwater, making them even more susceptible to warming waters than previously thought.
Professor Mike Meredith, from the British Antarctic Survey, told ITV News that scientists have learned more about global warming during the journey.
'We've learnt a lot about how the ocean impacts the glaciers in Antarctica and how that works differently in the winter rather than the summertime.'
This new information will help forecast how Antarctica will change as climate change progresses.
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ITV News
8 hours ago
- ITV News
RRS Sir David Attenborough central to discovering Antarctica's changing climate
For all the wildlife, wilderness and wonder in Antarctica, ITV News has been on a journey of scientific discovery through unchartered waters. The scientists aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough are getting the data which drives global climate science. The team have collected a certain type of moss they can share with scientists back in the Netherlands - just one example of scientists across the world working together. Samples collected will be kept in a freezer to be analysed later. What might look like mud to the average person is to Marine Chemist Dr Rhiannon Jones a gold mine of data. 'What we've previously seen is that glaciers are really important in the summer providing food to the ocean nearby through meltwater. But what we've seen in winter this time is it looks like there are different drivers of that food supply.' During this journey, the RRS Sir David Attenborough has been mapping the sea floor, often passing through unchartered waters which used to be solid glaciers. Measurements show walls of ice can stretch up to 200 metres underwater, making them even more susceptible to warming waters than previously thought. Professor Mike Meredith, from the British Antarctic Survey, told ITV News that scientists have learned more about global warming during the journey. 'We've learnt a lot about how the ocean impacts the glaciers in Antarctica and how that works differently in the winter rather than the summertime.' This new information will help forecast how Antarctica will change as climate change progresses.
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on Our Story With David Attenborough and The Herds: a new theatre of the Anthropocene
As parts of the UK swelter, this week brought yet more alarming reports of increasing temperatures, extreme weather events and dwindling chances of meeting the global 1.5C target. It was the UK's warmest spring on record and its driest in more than 50 years. Communicating the urgency of our predicament without provoking despair and hopelessness is an intractable challenge, especially when it comes to children. But two trail-blazing theatre experiences are bringing the breakdown of the natural world into urban metropolises, and raising the alarm with such immediacy that even those of us fortunate enough to live in places that have so far been relatively unaffected by the climate crisis must pay attention. Our Story With David Attenborough is a breathtaking 50-minute immersive history of the planet, from the team behind the recent film Ocean. Thanks to 24 projectors and 50 speakers, the Natural History Museum's Jerwood Gallery is transformed into the solar system, prehistoric caves, the ocean and the jungle. As in Maurice Sendak's children's classic Where the Wild Things Are, 'the walls [become] the world all around'. We swim with whales and come face to face with gorillas – as Sir David did in Life on Earth in 1979. We look from space: like last year's Booker prize-winning novel, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, Our Story inspires the feelings of awe and protectiveness towards our planet that astronauts call 'the overview effect'. In the past, Sir David has been accused of not speaking out strongly enough on human-made ecological disaster. But the Guardian writer George Monbiot, once one of his fiercest critics, described Ocean, released for Sir David's 99th birthday this year, as the film 'I've been waiting for all my working life'. In Our Story, we journey through mass extinctions of the past and, speculatively, in the future. Without change, 'the prospect for the generations that follow is grim', the audience is warned. Next Friday, hundreds of lifesize elephants, giraffes, gazelles and animal puppets of all kinds will stampede through London's streets on their 20,000km journey from central Africa to the Arctic Circle. The Herds is the follow-up project to The Walk. In 2021, a 12-foot puppet girl, Little Amal, travelled from the Turkey-Syria border to London, to raise awareness of the refugee crisis. Little Amal reached 2 million people in 17 countries. Now her creators hope to do the same for the climate emergency. As the herd flees north, it will be joined by puppets of native species from each country it visits. Manchester is its next destination, before continuing on to Scandinavia. The project's artistic director, Amir Nizar Zuabi, has acknowledged that all such endeavours, however ambitious, are just 'water dripping on a stone'. But, as he says, over time enough drips can reshape a stone. These are visceral, sensory immersions. Like Olafur Eliasson's climate art installation The Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003, such spectaculars invite us to reflect together – they are collective experiences. This is the theatre of the Anthropocene: vast, cataclysmic, beautiful and yet ultimately hopeful as well. They help us visualise what a different world might look like – if only politicians and corporations were made to act. The next chapter is up to us. As Sir David says at the end of Our Story, we must work towards a time when Earth becomes a planet 'with not only an intelligent species, but a wise one too'.
Time Out
13 hours ago
- Time Out
Our Story with David Attenborough
The seemingly unstoppable David Attenborough has achieved more since hitting retirement age than most of us - let's be honest, all of us - will achieve in our entire lifetimes. This new immersive film is his second major project since turning 99 in May, following his more traditional documentary Ocean. Produced by Open Planet Studios, Our Story sees the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum transformed into a smaller version of the Lightroom in King's Cross (a sort of projection-based theatre). While 'immersive' is a word exhausted by overuse, 'immersive documentary' is emerging as a fairly distinct genre with clear hallmarks. As with the Lightroom's shows, Our Story is based around powerful digital projectors beaming the film onto the four walls of the space, wrapping around the surfaces so there are different images whichever direction you look. You are indeed immersed. It's still a narrative documentary film, in which Sir David tells us the story of the planet from fiery, lifeless rock to the advent of mankind to a possible future. Attenborough narrates, and appears at the start and end. There's a fair smattering of expectedly dazzling wildlife footage. But Our Story isn't really a nature doc in the style of Attenborough's most famous works, and rather than painstakingly captured original footage of animals, it uses pre-existing stuff plus heavy use of CGI to supplement its storytelling. Occasionally this feels like a minor letdown: though they're not trying to pretend they're anything else, some very obviously computer generated whales feel a little jarring in a documentary from the literal David Attenborough. For the most part, though, the graphics are used well to create dramatic vistas of space or primaeval Earth, or to offer more prosaic illustrations of Attenborough's words (collages of cave paintings or early depictions of agriculture). It will probably not shock you to learn that you can't tell the entire story of the planet Earth and mankind in any great detail in 50 minutes. But the Att-man knows what he's doing by this stage in his career, and works deftly with the time he has. A visually razzle-dazzly pre-life on Earth section; a gallop through the first four billion years of the planet before establishing that the appearance of man coincided with an unprecedented stable patch in the planet's climate; an explosion of nature footage to illustrate this; bringing himself into it as he describes the world he was born into and how it's changed over his long, long life. Climate change is accepted as a part of the human story rather than laboured over bombastically; which works, because the question of doing something about it is raised not as a hypothetical but an inevitability. And it ends on a hopeful note: the whales are an illustration of how humans can influence the planet for the better, populations of the aquatic giants having bounced back since humanity took concerted action to save them. A projected cityscape of a hypothetical low carbon future London is another dose of optimism. Whether or not Attenborough feels as optimistic about the future as he professes to be here, it's a more inspiring note to end on – particularly for young audiences – than declaring it's too late and we're all doomed. The final image of the show isn't a spectacular vista of space or nature, but a life-size Attenborough, sitting in his study: it looks like he's in the room with us. I wouldn't put it past him to still be presenting documentaries in 10 years' time, but there is something haunting about the sense of his physical presence – the show feels like a time capsule already, wisdom designed to live on after he's gone.
