A once-in-a-lifetime journey with

Antarctica’s 21st century explorers

A film by Anne Aghion Produced by Benoît Gryspeerdt & Anne Aghion

“An intriguing slice-of-life that observes the area’s staggeringly beautiful and imposing landscapes and the unique challenges experienced by those who work there.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety

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The Filmmaker

Anne Aghion Director, Producer

My work in film involves a deep quest to understand our place in the world, and the relations of people to each other in our efforts to coexist. Whether set in a landscape of post-war, healing or isolation, my films capture the raw emotions of those individuals and communities directly impacted. I achieve this by testing what I believe to be the limits of the emotionally and psychologically bearable, mixed in with a no-nonsense anchor into reality. This combination creates a unique voice which translates into all the films I have made—from post-genocide Rwanda to extreme Antarctica to post-Sandinista Nicaragua—and gives each viewer the power to evoke this quest on their own terms.

A filmmaker whose awards include an Emmy, a UNESCO Fellini Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship, Anne Aghion has been praised by critics as a documentarian who succeeds in conveying, without preconception, a strong sense of the people and places she covers. Two of her previous films, which deal with post-genocide justice in Rwanda, are recognized seminal works that have played a key “real-life” role both within Rwanda and across the globe.

Aghion was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and has received repeat grants from the Soros Documentary Fund, the Sundance Documentary Fund, and from the United States Institute of Peace.

Surviving Antarctica:

Team leader Prof. Allan Ashworth, a thirty-year veteran of field research, confessed that “Any group you take out for two and half months, anywhere, in confined quarters and difficult circumstances, if there isn’t a few times when everybody barks at each other, it would be pretty unusual.” But Aghion puts this into perspective. “We’re so conditioned now by phony television reality shows, that people keep asking me about racy things, and what the scientists said behind each other’s backs.”  Rather than devolving into an episode of “Big Brother,” she explains that “In order to survive these conditions and accomplish their goals, they have to respect each other, humor each other and be on their best behavior.  There was no trash talk and no back-biting.”

So, just how tough is it to be out there?  Adam Lewis, whose seven field seasons to date add up to close to two years’ time in Antarctica, enumerates the challenges: “The first time I went, the professor that sent me gave me a really tough talking to. He told me, ‘You can die out there. Don’t be a jackass.’   It really kind of sucks. Don’t let anyone fool you.  The food is bad. We try really hard to cook good food, but it’s really bad.  It takes hours to cook a meal because everything is frozen solid. You’re cold a lot of the time. It’s hard to sleep because it’s light, and it’s so damn noisy from the wind blowing on your tent.” And there’s the work.  “You work really, really hard. And I mean hard physical labor— hiking with heavy backpacks on rough ground, and you might do it for 12 hours a day.  If you find something good a long way from camp, you may have to carry a 50 lb. backpack full of rock samples, and maybe it’s two in the morning—because it’s light all the time and you can do that—and maybe you have five miles to walk back to your tent.

There are many days when I walk back into camp at 4:30 in the morning.   You just have to do it. A lot of people crack under the conditions.” While the film crew may not have been hauling rock samples, they were laden with equally heavy film gear, each routinely carrying between 35 lb and 50 lbs of equipment (camera, batteries, sound equipment, tripod, tapes, cables, etc.) anywhere they went—on foot. Lewis concludes admiringly that  “Allan and I had a secret bet going that Anne and the crew wouldn’t last two weeks, but they are tough cookies.” Being in the field is not just hardship, says Aghion, who is emphatic that she would go back at the drop of a hat. “The beauty and the scale of this place is unimaginable.  People tell you about it, you read about it, but when it’s in front of you it is overwhelming. Elating. Humbling.

“Antarctica is a place you can think. You get out of the rat race, you slow down.  When you’re in there you can’t be anywhere else, even in your mind, because if you don’t stay present, you’ll die within a couple of hours.”   She continues, “It is a life changing experience, and for a long time after I came off the ice, I couldn’t relate to people who hadn’t been to Antarctica.  I sought out the people I had just spent all this time with because they understood what I was talking about.” And what about the scientists? What is the lure to Antarctica after repeated visits?  Allan Ashworth, ever the reserved scientist (“We tend to be skeptics,” he says), begins by insisting that it is only the driving curiosity of researchers that draws them to this barren place. “Anne would ask if there’s some sort of romantic thing about Antarctica, and Adam and I would just look at each other. For us there’s not much more than the drive of the scientific questions.”  But then he concedes. “Maybe if we’re really truthful, we have it too in some small part of ourselves.” Lewis, at first is just as quick to shrug off “romantic notions.”

The Scientists and Their Major Find: Life in Ancient Antarctica

The scientific team featured in ICE PEOPLE is made up of two prominent professors—Drs. Allan C. Ashworth and Adam R. Lewis, who specialize in the interdisciplinary study of natural environments and their history—and two undergraduate students—Andrew Podoll and Kelly Gorz. Like trackers on a treasure hunt, their mission on this trip was to search through vast  never-before-explored ancient lakebeds and endless fields of boulders in search of tiny signs of life which would prove the existence of an ancient warm ecosystem in Antarctica, and date its demise.

They were searching for the answer to a mystery that scientists have been pondering since the early 19th century, when Charles Darwin and his friend Joseph Hooker began to question why the same plants could be found in New Zealand, Australia and the lower part of South America.  During the course of filming ICE PEOPLE, they came up with an historic find that not only might explain that phenomenon, but gives the first clear, dated picture of a relatively rapid shift in the Antarctic climate.  The results were released in August 2008, and captured world headlines.

In this and related studies in which they also participated, they discovered fossils—or more properly speaking, exceptionally well-preserved freeze-dried remains of mosses, leaves, pollen, insects and crustaceans. As Ashworth demonstrated on camera, when immersed in water, the mosses puff back up to their original size.

The first sign of these had been discovered years before by a group of graduate students, one of whom was Adam Lewis.  On a walk, they’d noticed something that looked like grass sticking out of the ground.  To their disbelief, and the disbelief of many others, it turned out to be moss—the first sign of life that had been found there.  Ultimately, that little shriveled fiber fluttering in the breeze may lead to a new understanding of the history of the continent.  More than just the fossils, the milestone discovery captured in ICE PEOPLE is the unearthing of volcanic ash alongside plant fossils, deposits which allow the scientists to date their finds for the first time, and mesh them with geological and glaciological data collected by others.  The fossils had proved previously that Antarctica was once warm enough to support life, but with the ash, they could now pinpoint with some certainty that life on Antarctica ended abruptly about 14 million years ago.  The cause was a shift in temperature of about 8°C that occurred over the course of 200,000 years—a rapid change in geological time.

Since then, the landscape on this continent one-and-a-half the size of the United States has remained completely unchanged.   Indeed, the seven people in front of and behind the ICE PEOPLE cameras were the first human beings to step foot in many of the areas they covered.  For the Marchant/Ashworth/Lewis team, the findings add another layer to accepted theory about the freezing of Antarctica.  It is generally thought that roughly between 65 million years ago and 34 million years ago, there were lush forests covering portions of Antarctica, which at one time had been connected to what are now Africa, New Zealand, Australia and South America (remember Darwin’s and Hopper’s plants).  Over the course of millions of years, those continents had broken away; South America was the last to go at the 34 million-year mark.  Suddenly, ocean waters were flowing in a circular route all the way around Antarctica, blocking the flow of heat and putting the continent on the path to its current state of deep freeze.

As it gradually grew colder, the lush forests subsided, and parts of Antarctica turned into a shrubby tundra.  A missing piece of this story is when Antarctica actually entered its current frozen state.  The new findings are clear evidence that around 14 million years ago, the continent reached a threshold temperature low, and, in the words of NSF’s Program Director for Antarctic Earth Sciences, Tom Wagner, life took its last gasp.

Climate change is a central issue touching on virtually every aspect of the future of humans on planet Earth. The knowledge gained from these findings will help to make inferences about the future. While freeze dried mosses and insects will not likely help in halting global warming, they do explain the dramatic impact that small changes in temperature may wreak; in particular these findings demonstrate that there exist “threshold temperatures” that completely alter climactic systems.