Arctic Explorer Answers Polar Expedition Questions | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Mark Wood I've been doing polar Expeditions for over 20 years I'm here today to answer your questions this is polar expiration [Music] support So Adrien Jones 28 asked what was the most repulsive thing you had to eat on your Expeditions it was ranted whale blubber which is absolutely repulsive and just was really tough to chew through as well and the people who gave it me who knew me really well were smiling cuz they knew it tasted bad when you chew it it's like chewing on a car tire but it also stinks so Troy P Simpson asks I no idea why I'm watching videos about what to do if I come face to face with a polar bear well I've come face to face with a polar bear Troy and uh 300 M away right up close to my face actually followed me for about 3 days but the moment that I started to feel my heart really beat was when I actually could smell the bear and that means the bear is really really close and I could hear him sort of grunting so this is the nose of the polar bear I was stood on some ice luckily and he jumped up and sniffed my GoPro camera to give it perspective he was an arms distance away so he was this close away from me which is too close in my world and this is kind of what I was looking at the Incredible strength Within this jaw to rip an animal open was only at you know an arms length away it's the first time I've actually felt real danger and you only feel tremendously alone when you feel you need somebody's help and I I had nobody else there it seemed like hours but it was seconds of looking at this bear and eventually he dropped down and just walked away at that point I got this pen with the firework on the end and I pointed it at his feet and luy exploded in front of him not harming the bear but enough to scare him away and he ran off but for about 2 or three nights I was still sticking my head out the tent Like A Mir cat and looking around and making sure that he'd gone and he had definitely gone which was a massive relief so Sirius GF says bro where is the North Pole actually there's five North Poles let me show you so this is the top of the world and you've got Russia and you got Canada and all the countries around but the blue bit in the center is the Arctic Ocean to show you where the five North Poles are I'm going to use my trusty polar bear claw you've got the geographic North Pole which is the very top of the planet where all of the lines of longitude pass through that's a fixed pole then you've got the pole of inaccessibility which is on the Arctic Ocean itself again a fixed point but it's equa distance from any land mass around it from Greenland to to Canada to Russia Etc then you've got three other poles one of them is the geomagnetic North Pole which all G geophysicist like very difficult word to say and that's a moving pole and currently it's going across the Canadian island of elmir then youve got the Magnetic North Pole which I'm sure you've heard of and that's going across the Canadian ocean side and it's crossing over to Russia so it's moving and moving over to the Russian side and that's really in the news at the moment because of its shift and the final poll that you got is actually in the air itself it's the point from Polaris to the North Pole and it's a Celestial pole so that's five North Poles so a great question or statement from snakes L1 the dudes that were involved in the heroic age of Arctic exploration out of their freaking Minds so the Pioneer age of polar exploration we're really from the late 1800s onwards right up to the point we reached the geographic North and Geographic South poles which were earlier on in the last century at that time it was about Discovery and mapping these areas in the days of siron shakotan and his men doing epic Journeys across Antarctica some would say that they risked their lives for Discovery but really it was pure survival so they weren't given a choice they went out there to do something that no other humans had done before which was so heroic nowadays that wouldn't really happen because the community Communications we have the Global Communications the satellite Etc would allow us to show the Peril in real time so we could be rescued Arma Colberg has written read today that the Arctic explorers brought lard with them since it's so calorically dense did they just eat it or what that's what the explorers used to do nowadays we're a little bit more advanced in Understanding Nutrition and this picture shows little packets of food that I've decanted from the original pack there's actually about 100 packets of food and you got main meals and also puddings and that allows me also to put salami and butter and cheese and salt and everything else in there and you wrap it up into a little bow instead of having a big carrier bag full of food each day there's actually two handfuls of food that you have and inside there is Apple and cust of powder and that's what I eat as a pudding you've also got the main meals on this side which can be a mixture of curries stew use pastas as well for different packets so you're not eating the same food all the time I go and collect the snow or the ice and I melt it down then boil it up and then I pour this powder into a container and pour the boiling hot water into the Container mix it up and then it expands and that's what I eat full of protein full of carbs full of everything you need to perform really well Anderson LM asks a good question what kind of cell phones do Arctic explorers use with cell phones we can't can't use them in the these extreme cold areas we use satellite phones and you can't use them as well like normal cell phones to look at the internet and to connect with friends or say call Emergency Services we use these to connect directly with the Rescue Services that we've already connected with prior to the Expedition I can also connect with friends and family but I don't when I'm on Extreme Expeditions and the reason being is it's too emotional for me to bring myself back into their world will drain my sort of buildup of uh non-emotion that I've got for the Expedition it loses my focus for what I'm doing each day which is pretty tough mentally so I don't need somebody that I love on the other end of the phone weakening that Spirit if you like so this is a question from Al loow what's the difference between the North Pole and the South Pole all of the difference in the world he says so from an Explorer's perspective the Arctic Ocean or the North Pole is the toughest Expedition you can do hands down Antarctica itself being a continent all you have to deal with is oncoming winds tremendous cold the loneliness of being out there and sometimes crevasses but you generally know where the crevasses are in the north it's like a zoo up there there's a varied amount of animals there if you move to Antarctica in the center around the South Pole there's no birds or anything like that it's just silence so Sarah bushway asks watching season 7 of aan they have to survive 100 days in the Arctic by themselves to win a million dollars could you do it I'd love to win a million dollars with with what I do for me personally I work alone a lot so I'm known for solo work working in Antarctica the Arctic Circle also on training Expeditions as well so I spent 50 days in Antarctica alone 30 days around the North Pole another 30 days in Norwegian High IC generally I'm okay being alone and the biggest issue there is the mental status and strength that you require to do that and I think experience gives you the abilities to carry that out and as you're going through a blank landscape it gives you tremendous creativity in your mind to think about yourself as a human being but what direction you want to go in in life as well so be the spark has asked a serious question other than Reindeer and the occasional polar bear what kind of animals would live in Santa's North Pole you've got Arctic fox Arctic hairs which are small animals obviously you've also got Caribou which is a reindeer and you got muscock which are quite big animals pack animals and also you got lemons very very small and the only real bird I can think of would be the Arctic tan which is in fact the longest migrating bird on the planet and can also be found in Antarctica as well so it goes all the way around the planet it's very rare but sometimes you do get into interaction with these animals so Andy C1 asks which polar Explorer do you have the most admiration for and why so two big explorers sir Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott did epic Expeditions in Antarctica but there was one person who has actually worked with them is like shadow of these two men and it's an Irishman called Tom crean and he was the work force behind them and as known as the youngsung hero of that age so it was Tom crean's nature to survive but also to look after the people he was with so he put his life um in danger by actually rescuing his men looking after Shackleton being the Forefront or the the energy behind making that expedition to the South Pole a success as in all the men survived Rudy scha asks what do negative degree temperatures feel like to stand alive B in - 40 - 50 is a real tenseness on your body almost claustrophobic that you can't get out of the situation it's a real horrible feeling that you're engulfed in the cold but to survive in that moment you need to do three things one is you need to make sure your body core temperature is warm so by eating food is a real survival technique to warm yourself up from the inside the second thing is to wear the correct clothing and that's something that will help you keep warm but also allow your body to breathe as you're moving so you don't create sweat on your body cuz if you create sweat then when you stop that will turn to ice will cling onto your heart and your lungs and can give you hypothermia and then the third thing is movement so as long as you can move keep moving keep the blood flowing around the body away from the extremities so you don't get frostbite then your body can function and you can progress so inside the tent itself at night it's the same temperature as outside the tent you've got a little protection from the wind which is good but it can be minus 35 with inside the tent which is colder than your freezers at home but any Explorer any Adventurer that you ever meet and you say the sound of the cooker is as soon as you start hearing that sound your brain starts getting happy because your body starts warming up and it's amazing to feel that initial heat coming off the cooker where you start stripping your clothes down and you can actually be in base layers inside your tent as a tent heats up so Maiden slate are curious how would you envision Medical Care in remote and rural areas and I am self-sufficient so I need to first of all be trained in uh Medical Care myself in Antarctica as I started to move towards the South Pole over 50 days I had a problem with my boot it wasn't fitting very well with my skis so I had a little bit of movement inside with my foot and over a few days it started to heat up and one day I took my foot out and I found at the base of my foot the skin had come off a massive amount of skin had come off and you just had the rawness of the skin underneath and I was in a lot of Agony so what I did at night was I cut the skin off and because Skin's got protein in it I ate the skin I didn't eat the skin that's a joke by the way I took the skin off after a few days it actually dried off because Antarctica is a dry desert if you expose the foot to the dryness it dries really really quickly so the environment actually saved the day for me so this is from original L hrn I think I need a career change I wondered how one becomes an Arctic Explorer I think you just need to find where your passion lies and what you want to do and just take steps from there the word explor it is quite a contentious word in this modern era I've been asked whether I can actually call myself that well after 35 Plus expeditions in the polar regions I feel I have a right to say that and also it excites children when I come into schools to give talks that they know that have got an Explorer coming in really the explorers that I recognize are these guys in the past the Pioneers who discovered areas on the planet and in space they are the Pioneer explorers of the past the key point is you've got to have the desire to go out there because the environment is so claustrophobic and unpredictable that you've got to have the real need to go out there and operate so you got to consider that to begin with so my suggestion would be to go out and experience the environment to begin with and then to decide how you want to operate out there lime La Cowboy I love polar exploration because where else are you going to find this many people excited to discover a guy who got cannibalized 180 years ago that's a good statement and yeah people are excited about the maab aren't they 100 or so years ago in the days of s John Franklin and his men who perished along the Northwest Passage in high Arctic Canada weren't discovered until recent times the ships were but all of the men died on Ice there was talks of cannibalism as well and this is the human nature at its roist and really the only reason we know about this is because of the Diaries left behind and the historic value of the whole Expedition itself and that just shows how harsh these guys were living if you have to resort to something like that it's just hell on Earth so Arianas has asked how to travel to the Arctic you can pull sledges like I do carry everything with you you can go on snowmobiles with teams you can also go on dog teams which I love doing in Alaska I've worked with really good dog teams out there called squid dog Acres so these little blue bits of material are actually booties for dogs to put on their feet so these dogs have actually running these this was one of the main transports back in the day for dog teams to transport humans across the ice and it's still used today in high arctic areas but not in Antarctica they're not allowed dogs in Antarctica anymore cuz it's unnatural for dogs to be there but it is a main source of Transport for the polar regions so aside from pulling sledges we also wear skis and we go Backcountry skiing so we have the bindings which not are attached to the the ski itself with the whole foot it's just attached by the toe allows you to Pivot and push the ski along so we do this as we're pulling the sledges along it allows us to propel ourselves a greater distance using less energy so I do extreme Expeditions but the polar regions are accessible to anybody to go and Venture into you just need to travel with the right company Devon flarey has asked me about the third man Factor has anybody ever experienced the third man Factor when I did the South Pole I crossed there for 50 days without any music anything to stimulate my brain but after a while as I started to approach the South Pole itself it's on a plateau of 3,000 M and I started to push up this plateau and I was in quite a bit of pain my body was folding a little bit I was really pushing against the wind I I was going forward so it's an horrendous time for me and at that point I felt an arm around my shoulder I was alone I felt somebody gripping onto my shoulder and somebody leaning into me Whispering words of encouragement judement keep going keep going keep going and that allowed me to almost be quite Zen and even though I felt really relaxed as I was pushing forward my mind was clearer my body was still probably struggling but I didn't feel it inside and it felt great and that happened about six or seven times on that expedition and when I called for it it never happened when I got back to Canada I spoke to a great Explorer up there and said this is what happened cuz I was a little bit embarrassed as well and he said that it happened to him on the way back back from the North Pole when they tried to find this food area which said laid out on Ice they had lost it so they did a pattern search and something was telling him to go over towards the left and as he walked 100 yards he found the food in the ice I'm sure scientists would say that you're a lower step and your mind was thinking that you had no other choice and I needed support so it manifested this this support that I required my mom died 10 years prior to that so I could easily relate it to maybe it's the spirit of my mother coming through and a lot of people might do that and I wouldn't I wouldn't smile at that or joke about it it's one of the two I'd like to think it's my mom but who knows so see the universe has asked if you could bring one animal back from the North Pole to be a pet what would you choose and why uh and the bad news they're giving me is Penguins don't live in the North thanks for that I didn't really know that if you're asking me what's my favorite animal and maybe a cuddly toy version of it then I would def definitely bring back a leming cuz it's very small it's very cute and it's very easy to hide away in my house away from people who think a 58y old man shouldn't have a teddy bear so licensed clown asks what if I went to work in the Arctic I feel like that would be cool it would be how many people can say they did that I can talk about the Canadian High Arctic which is probably half the size of Europe with a human population of about 500 people there's two settlements grece F and Resolute Bay which have about 270 to 300 people in and then there's a few research centers around a vast area which makes the numbers up to between 4 and 500 people however there's also polar bears roaming around that area so the polar bear population really outweighs the human population so Kora asks how does one prepare for an expiration to the Arctic and I think that to answer this is in preparation there's many things you have to pack for a polar EXP ition but the top five things I would recommend are these sleeping bag is essential for a good night sleep sleep is so important to how you perform the next day a great tent you need something which will withstand storms and keep you protected from the wind a great cooker something which will be reliable through the 50 100 days and then the fourth thing is your navigation and the final thing is if I was going to drop all four of those and just pick one thing it would be a location be Beacon and if we don't take that with us I think it's full hearty so to take a navigational system with you to track where you're going and then to press it in your hour of need is so important because the success of an expedition is coming home safe and sound I don't really take books or anything like that cuz they're too heavy I take a little iPod with me with music on it and some podcasts on there as well but also I take a Dictaphone cuz I'm not great at writing things down as the pioner used to do like great Diaries so I actually sew it into my sleeping bag and at night when I've had something to eat and I'm nice and warm talk to him in a sleeping bag and it's the winds blown outside and it's tremendously cold I can sit in my sleeping bag and talk about the day and talk about how I feel which I think is really important for people to listen to what are your biggest fears the cold the natural Predators or the isolation what draws humans to visit the Arctic and how can one visit the great North and leave it untouched for me the biggest fear on expiration isn't polar bears isn't the cold it's the fear of giving in it's the fear of that moment where you find a weakness within your body and your heart and you say I can't go on and the trigger that keeps you going is the fact you truly believe in what you're doing and also you have the mental knowledge to know that it will get better you will progress and you will get to your destination in the end so when I was in Antarctica the plane did disappear and I was left on my own and I knew I had 50 days in front of me to reach the geographic South Pole I'd spent three years preparing for this and telling everybody I was going to do it so I had the weight of the world if you like upon my shoulders as I move forward but 5 days into the journey I lost a key element to My Expedition which was my music little iPod that I took with me I lost it in the ice and yes it was a white iPod that I lost so I had absolutely nothing to think about but my own thoughts and the silence and looking around 360 of nothing actually played on my mind to the point where I pitched my tent middle of the day and I sat in it and I thought I can't do this anymore this was 5 days into the journey and I spent 36 hours in that tent just going through my mind of giving in giving in giving in all the time I know I'm an older man but I can be honest to you and say that I cried and uh I judge myself and what I was doing and at that point I got on my satellite phone I found my friend back in the UK who knew me really well and I said I want to give in and he Tau me through what was wrong how I could process things he T me back on my feet but he didn't make me move my feet so I packed everything away then I stood looking at the path in front of me and I just put one foot in front of the other one foot in front of the other kept on doing that for another thousand ft and that's how I reach reach the sad pole by just basically moving myself in the right direction remember Sarah asks a good question how was the Golden Age of Arctic expiration possible before Hot Hands which is what I want to know Hot Hands is like a pad that you can have in your hand you break it and it warms up your hands they're great if you're going skiing or if you're doing stuff like operating cameras and things like that but for what I do I try not to use artificial heat it's a very short-term thing it feels great at the time then that's taken away and I'm back to being cold again it helps in in sense of emergencies but I don't generally use them just to warm myself up you got to remember they didn't have these pads but what they did bring on their ships were things like musical instruments like pianos and guitars and they had bottles of whiskey and wine and rum and all these different foods on the ship and then they transported that to the ice and they took a lot of heavy equipment along with them so even though they didn't have the comfort of hot hands they had the comfort of other things that we take for granted in normal life so tams in VR asks how cold is it right now do we need to dress like Arctic Explorers so you don't just put big jackets on you have very very thin layers that you wear that are bable the Trap air and you can have two or three of those on depending on how cold you are and then you have a mid layer on top and then if you're really really cold like if you're static and not using your body to generate Heat then you can put a big D jacket on zip it right up with your hat and everything to keep you nice and warm but it all depends on what you're doing if you're moving then your body will generate heat if you're static then you will release heat from your body so you need to contain it when you're in a tent at night and you're about to get into your minus 40 sleeping bag so really great sleeping bags you need the mistake a lot of people make is they think I'm really cold so they wear all their jackets and everything and they get into the sleeping bag and they start to freeze and the reason for that is because the sleeping that bag is designed to contain the heat of the body so you heat up the bag the bag doesn't heat up you so to wear less clothing in a sleeping bag is the important thing to do what I do is I get into my sleeping bag and when it's freezing cold I do a little jog I move around quite a lot and I generate a lot of heat then I put the bag up zip it up and all that heat is then dispersed inside the bag and that's how you keep warm so this is from Walter how are Igloo built and how do they keep you warm Igloo are built in uh Igloo shape because it gives strength to the structure if it just had walls then it'd be difficult to build a structured roof to it also the The Ice that is used has got very little water content so if you tried to get the ice and scrudge it up like a snowball then it would just flake away in your hands cuz it hasn't got anything to bind it together so that's why you cut bricks to build an igloo because it's more structural a bit like poyene if if you like the igloo will keep you sheltered from the wind and you can actually light a fire inside or or put your cooker on and that will then contain the heat inside the only technical thing you need to know about is how those fumes are released outside if it's sealed you can actually succumb to the fumes so romantic spiral walking to work today in a stormy winter weather made me realize I have zero survival instincts drop me alone in the middle of the Arctic and I will give up within a day if the average person was dropped into the same area that I operate in it would be a rapid decrease in their mental and physical state there is a thing called Arctic shock and that's the reality of where you are the coldness that engulfs you the wind that whips around you the realization that you're not going to be able to go into a building for the next two to three weeks can be quite intense on you so Arctic shock kicks in and basically that means that your body is telling you to give in in a very very early stage so failure would be very very quick for them unless you have that backing of experience so simple beauty us so we're not going to talk about Antarctica melting well I've actually brought in some ice which is melted over course of 12 Years from Antarctica and from the Arctic Circle as well so this is ice from the geographic North Pole and this is ice from the geographic South Pole in Antarctica the ice is melting so fast and it's one of the most rapidly heating places on the planet so so much research is being taken out there with different teams from around the world and when it comes around to the Arctic Circle because it's an ocean obviously there's very very different patterns there but with the Arctic it's very very different altogether because it's an ocean with land masses around it like Russia and Canada and places like that so you've got ice Crossing all the way from Russia all the way to Canada but that ice is depleting and this ice melts the sea levels rise but how does that work because in Ice Cube in a glass if the ice melts it stays the same level but because the ice is so vast it's got its own gravitational pull and it draws in water from or oceans from around the planet and as it gets to the top of the world it freezes and that's why you get this beautiful ice Mass on top of the planet but because the world is heating up this ice is melting and it's now dispersing the water back around the planet it so sea levels rise and that's an explanation of what's happening at both poles to the naked eye this looks very very clear both poles but in the Antarctic one you've got ice which is sat on top of land mass so it's pure ice sat on top of there in a pure area and on this one you got ice from the ocean the Arctic Ocean so I would imagine it's got um salt content within this one though I haven't tested it but they are very very very different in their context hch silence says how do we make fire in the snow well in my world as an Explorer I don't make fires we haven't got any trees we got nothing to burn and it'd be wrong of me to burn anything out there anyway environmentally so what I use to heat up my food is a little cooker we use fuel and we light that and it sets off the heat for the food but also heat for the tent as well so it warms me up at the same time and I go out and collect uh snow and ice and I melt that down boil it up and that's what I add to my food so actually the heater is a main source of survival Kora writes what was your most unexpected Arctic experience one of the most memorable was you expect to see a polar bear in the Arctic but one day a little lemon just decided to walk into the tent and it was a total shock a lemon is a little rodent and he just walked in like it well it was his home I took some photographs and uh didn't touch him at all and then he walked out and as I saw him walk out he sort of walked off into the ice and then just disappeared over a little bit of ice and I thought how does he survive in this uh Wilderness so those are all the questions thank you very much for them it's made me think about who I am as Explorer it's put me on my back foot you've occasionally made me smile as well so thanks for watching Polar Explorer support [Music]

2024-12-30 17:05

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