Horizon - Antarctica: the ice forms.
This is an episode on the formation of Antarctica, following geologists attempting to explain how the ice sheet formed and the events that led to Antarctica becoming isolated and extremely cold.
It is actually the first part of a series of three, I think the other two are availible as two of the three were once upped at mvgroup. If anybody has the other two I would love to see them. This episode, though, is perfectly watchable as a standalone so don't let the fact that is part of a series put you off watching it.
The quality is quite reasonable.
Codec: DivX5
Res: 640x384
FPS: 25
Audio: 128Kb/s MP3
Runtime: 49mins
Date aired: 1997
HORIZON 1997 Antarctica - The Ice Lives
Craig MacClean is a Beach Boys fan, he likes hanging out in the California sun, and drinking the odd beer at a football game. But this winter he'll be in Antarctica working as chief of medical supplies in McMurdo General Hospital.
Antarctica's polar ice sheet is the highest, coldest, windiest, driest and most unforgiving place on earth. Dry as the Sahara Desert with less than 5cm of snow a year it is also numbingly cold. The average temperature near the South Pole is minus 49 degrees Centigrade, and winds reach over 200Km an hour.
Water in a liquid form, the essence of life, is scarce. Yet this inhospitable continent has now become the last frontier on earth - and each year a population of 3,000 colonists try to settle here. The success of life in a landscape as alien as any on this planet is a biological aberration. It hints at the possibility of extra-terrestrial life as it provides intriguing insights into the limits of living systems.
This is why many of the human visitors are biologists. They study the Penguins, the seals and the nematodes - the few other higher life forms that also survive the winter here - to try and discover how it is they have adapted to life in the freezer. But it is also why the scientists, support staff and the armed forces that make up the colonial population of Antarctica are themselves under investigation.
Craig Maclean is just one of thirty subjects - part of a human experiment that is finding out what happens to Homo sapiens on ice. Each week he interrupts his hectic schedule of bowling, Karaoke and drug supplying to test his physical and mental aptitude. There is a suspicion, waiting to be proved, that to get warm you get stupid.
But if the costs of living in Antarctica are memory loss and mood swings, the benefits are correspondingly high. A continent one and a half times the size of the USA with nothing much else to share it with. This is the advantage that has led to some extraordinary evolutionary solutions: fish with anti-freeze coursing through their veins, de-hydrating nematodes, giant sea anemones, penguins that huddle. It has also led to some extraordinary scientific techniques as the Seal Heads, Penguin Cowboys and Worm Herders traverse the continent tagging, probing and tracking.
The conclusion though is inescapable: the risk and rigours of Antarctic existence are so great that life is always limited. Everything is slow, many things are fat - the energy required to survive means that little is left for action. And it is this that provides the challenge for the next great phase of human colonisation - space - as it raises the uncomfortable question: will life in a truly alien landscape be worth living?
Technical Specs
Video Codec: Divx 5.21
Video Bitrate: 1795 kb/s
Video Resolution: 640x480
Video Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Audio Codec: LAME MP3
Audio BitRate: 192 kb/s CBR
Audio Channels: 2
RunTime Per Part: 49m
Number Of Parts: 1
Part Size: 700mb
HORIZON 1997 Antarctica - The Ice Melts
"Calamity" - "Catastrophe" - "Collapse": Antarctica is the great
unknown in the world's climate and its obscurity means that it has
always been played as the wild card in global change. But it was
Antarctica, protected by global treaty and kept pristine by
environmental protocol, that actually gave the first solid evidence
of the impact refrigerators and aerosols were having on the
atmosphere. And it is Antarctica, the last great wilderness, hard to
get to, harder to work in, that is now seen in almost biblical terms
as the source of the next Great Flood.
The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is the last Marine Ice Sheet on
earth, and how it responds to warming past and present will
determine the fate of great tranches of coast from Miami to Essex.
Complete collapse of the Ice Sheet would raise sea levels by six
meters. Yet in spite of the threat contained in this great reservoir
of water no one knows quite what keeps it in check, how the ice
sheet maintains its cycle of growth through snowfall and decline
through the calving of icebergs at the continent's edge.
'The Ice Melts' is a detective story, as scientists scattered on the
Ice Sheet try in a myriad of ways to understand the mechanisms that
control it. At Siple Dome a large deep field camp, one group of
American researchers are drilling for the climate core that will
show if the Ice Sheet collapsed during the last interglacial. Others
investigate Ice Streams, mysterious glacial phenomena that control
the flow of ice off the Sheet. Deep field near the Ellsworth
Mountains British glaciologist, David Vaughan investigates the same
thing to provide a comparison with the American work.
And as they drill and dig and core down in Antarctica, in down town
Chicago, Doug MacAyeal, prophet of the coast line's future, sits at
his desk and processes. For all this field data, this expensive,
exhaustive and detailed glaciology, only achieves its meaning when
it becomes part of a computer model. The physics of the Ice Sheet -
the sticky spots, lubrication, shear zones - are all being linked
together to show what controls the movement of ice. And when the
future is revealed by the computer it shows the stark possibility
that the growth of the ice sheet creates the seeds of its own
destruction.
Technical Specs
Video Codec: Divx 5.21
Video Bitrate: 1801 kb/s
Video Resolution: 640x480
Video Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Audio Codec: LAME MP3
Audio BitRate: 192 kb/s CBR
Audio Channels: 2
RunTime Per Part: 48m 52s
Number Of Parts: 1
Part Size: 700mb
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