Season 5 Episode 1 Transcript The Land of Ice and Fire

Alok: Let me take you on a journey. To the coldest place on earth, and its last and greatest wilderness. On a voyage to Antarctica…

Hello and welcome back to A Voyage to Antarctica, brought to you by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. I’m your host Alok Jha.

In an explosive start to season five, I’ll be talking to world-renowned volcanologist and filmmaker Clive Oppenheimer. More people have been to space than have set eyes on the depths of Mount Erebus in Antarctica – the continent’s highest active volcano – but Clive has been back to Erebus 13 times: to better understand what is happening in the fiery depths below the ice and answer big questions about life on our planet – and beyond.

For 30 years, Clive has been based at the University of Cambridge, where he is Professor of Volcanology. His research seeks to understand how volcanoes work and to probe the connections between eruptions, climate and society. He has conducted fieldwork around the world, either at the crater's edge peering in with assorted monitoring devices or hunting for the far-flung deposits of Earth's greatest eruptions.

His books include: Mountains of Fire and Eruptions that Shook the World and he has also made two documentary features with legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog: Into the Inferno for Netflix and Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds for AppleTV+.

Alok: Clive, when most people think of Antarctica, they're probably thinking of, you know, a big flat white continent of ice. It's very cold, unchanging in many ways, the direct opposite of volcanic activity, which is, you know, hot and active and all of those things. How do people react when you tell them that you study volcanoes in Antarctica? Are they surprised?

Clive: People are often surprised. And for exactly that reason, it's a dissonance conflating the frozen continent with hot magma. If you are hot magma. You don't particularly care whether the outside temperature is minus 30 or plus 30. So volcanic and tectonic processes go on regardless of the outdoor environment.

And indeed, there are dozens of volcanoes in Antarctica, and many of them associated with a rift system, a bit like the East African rift system.

Alok: why don't you set the scene for us? Where are the volcanoes in Antarctica, roughly speaking?

Clive: Some of them are deep beneath the ice and we know very little about them. It's very difficult to study them as well because of their remoteness and their burial beneath a couple of kilometers of ice. There are many volcanoes along the rift system, the West Antarctic rift system, which is a bit like the rift valley in Eastern Africa.

That's where I've worked. The most active of those is Mount Erebus, but there are a number of others that have had eruptions over the last couple of thousand years or so. Again, we don't know a great deal about them. They're not well monitored, but there have been studies using ice cores and also marine sediment cores, where you can identify.the ash layers from some of these Antarctic volcanic eruptions.

Alok: in your many travels to Antarctica, have you visited all of these volcanoes that we know about and studied them?

Clive: Oh no, not at all. I wish I’d Been to a few more.

Alok: How many have you ticked off?

Clive: Well, on Ross Island, where Erebus is located, there are some extinct volcanoes, there's, uh, Mount Terror, I did hop up there, to the summit there, once.

Alok: Mount Terror? Is it really called Mount Terror? Like, as in, Terror as in Terrifying, or Terror as in the Earth?

Clive: Terror as in Terrifying, and it comes with the name Erebus. Erebus connotes the underworld. Both volcanoes on Ross Island are named after the ships that were commanded by Sir James Clark Ross.

he reached. This part of Antarctica in 1841, and it's always puzzled me that while he named many other mountains and ridges and capes and islands after luminaries of the Royal Society or Queen Victoria, his wife to be, friends and sponsors, he named these two volcanoes after the ships. In which he sailed the Erebus and the Terror, and the ships were converted Navy bomb vessels.

These were ships used for shore bombardment. They were built very, very solid so that they could withstand the recoil from mortars. And the Navy liked to give its warships infernal names. So, I mean, there is an Etna, and a Stromboli, and a Heckler, a Fury.

I think Erebus, probably the intention was to imply opposing side where they were headed. They were headed for the underworld when they faced off.

Alok: It would be good to talk about what got you interested in volcanoes in the first place before we come back to Antarctica and your work there.

Obviously, as a child, anyone loves volcanoes.

Just, where did you get the interest to study these sort of behemoths of fire?

Clive: I grew up in London. I did a dinosaur phase, as again, many kids do. And it was the Geological Museum, as it then was in London, that I think captivated me and steered me towards a career in geology.

They did have a Mount Etna simulacrum that erupted with coloured lights every five minutes or so. So that was my first introduction to volcanology. I studied geology. At university I was very interested in earthquake seismology, that's geology happening right now, and I think a bit more by chance I ended up studying volcanoes.

I traveled in Indonesia in a gap year before going to university. I'd seen active volcanoes in Java and Sumatra, elsewhere in the archipelago. So I think that's sewed a seed. And when I was applying for PhDs.I saw a project advertised at the Open University to use satellites to monitor volcanoes from space and it promised field work.

Alok: When are we talking? Is it the 80s, around that sort of time, when satellites were starting to be used for these things?

Clive: That's right, this was late 80s when I started. And particularly my role then was to see whether we could measure temperatures on volcanoes from space.

Alok: And for those who are listening, who only know about volcanoes when they erupt. Just explain to us what it is about volcanoes that is interesting to scientists, what role have they played in the history of the earth and what are we understanding about them now?

Clive: Volcanoes are apertures to the Earth's interior, and they clearly bring hot materials to the surface. They also bring a lot of volatile elements, gases, carbon, dioxide, water vapor, sulfur gases. And they're responsible for the Earth's primary atmosphere, and they still modify it today. They can change the climate even today, a very large eruption can put enough sulfurous dust into the stratosphere that it will cool the Earth's surface. So they're an integral part of the Earth's environment, the oceans, the cryosphere, the atmosphere and the biosphere. And I often think even when I make my coffee in the morning and I look at the packet and the beans have been grown in Java or Sumatra or Ethiopia, I wonder which side of which volcano those coffee plants were growing on. And I think about the nutrients that came through the weathered ash and lava on that volcano and how I'm part of that cycle of elements that at a grander scale is plate tectonics, is volcanism, the cycling of chemicals through the earth's interior into the atmosphere, into the oceans and back again.

Alok: we're talking about enriching the atmosphere, enriching the water, enriching the soils. in a way that allows them to be changed and for things to grow eventually as well. I mean, you wouldn't have life really without volcanism. Is that fair to say?

Clive: I've posed myself this question. Could life exist on a planet without volcanoes? And I think probably not actually, because they're part of the replenishment of the surface of a planet or moon. And many of the ideas about the origins of life actually come back to volcanic environments. These hydrothermal vents in the deep oceans, which bring hot mineralized fluids. There are very rich biota down there, which never see the light of day.

And the base of that food chain is chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis. So there are bacteria that metabolize the sulfur and the iron that come out of these volcanic cracks in the ocean. Even the idea that life may have come with a bit of a meteorite from somewhere else in the solar system. Those ingredients of life which we find in meteorites, if you wanted them to spark life, they would need to land in a geothermal environment, in a volcanic area, to have the heat, to have the fluids that would then enable these spontaneous reactions to occur.

 

Alok: And I suppose then it makes sense then that if you're going to have volcanoes all over the earth, then Antarctica, one of the biggest continents, is going to have them.

And you've been to Antarctica 13 times. I've read, and you've mentioned already, that the focus of your research is Mount Erebus. Just talk to us a bit about Mount Erebus. Can you describe it for us? Where is it? What's so interesting about it that sort of made it your muse, basically?

Clive: Erebus was discovered in 1841, during the voyages of Sir James Clark Ross, who was trying to get to the South Magnetic Pole.

He was thwarted in that. But I think very excited to find an active volcano in the southernmost part of the world, the southernmost region that anyone had ever set eyes on up to that point.

He and his men were the first to set eyes on it, and it was a great wonder for them because they saw flames leaping from its summit crater. They didn't land ashore, but they saw it from a distance from the ships. They described it, and every time anyone has set eyes on Erebus, they've seen it in action.

They've seen gases roiling out of it. They've heard the detonations deep in the crater. It wasn't climbed until 1908 by members of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod expedition, and then again climbed four years later by Raymond Priestley and others in Scott's last expedition. And they describe its activity, they describe other extraordinary phenomena on the volcano, ice towers where Normally gas vents on volcanoes leak steam into the atmosphere

in Antarctica.the steam freezes and makes these extraordinary ice towers. Some look like gargoyles, some look like penguins, oddly enough.

Alok: How big are they, these ice towers?

Clive: They might be, I'd say, Up to about five meters high, and they're often built above cave systems, both in ice and in rock, in lava tubes, and we've done quite a bit of exploration in those also as part of our work on Erebus.

Erebus is an active volcano. It has, in the floor of the crater, a lava lake. And this is the top part of the magmatic system of the volcano. We can trace its roots down 16 kilometers below the base of the crust. And so, It's a window into these deep processes. How is the volcano plumbed in to its fuel supply, its magma?

We can make very direct observations of that when we see the molten rock at the surface.

Erebus is on Ross Island.

We're south from New Zealand, Ross Island, named after Ross, of course, is where Scott and Shackleton made their bases. And today it's the hub of the largest scientific operations in Antarctica, the US Antarctic programs, Murdo Station, new Zealanders also have Scott Base There. And the fact that Erebus is just 30, 35 kilometers from the largest scientific base in Antarctica makes it possible to do very detailed work there with helicopter support.

It's not a deep site that needs a lot more logistical preparation. It's a convenient place to work once you get to Antarctica, which I admit is a long way to go. It's a lot further away than Iceland or Italy. Once you're there, you have tremendous support through the scientific operations.

Alok: There's a fantastic passage in your book, Mountains of Fire, which is about the secret lies of volcanoes, where you describe looking down into the crater of Erebus for the first time, in the way you just described now, about this incredible meeting of ice and fire.

And there's something almost alien about it. It feels like it's something that shouldn't be on this planet, but yet it is. I wonder if you might be able to read a bit of that passage for us.
.

Rounding the crest of the crater. At last, I gingerly stepped to the precipice to look Erebus in the eye for the first time, or better to say mouth as the chasm before me shaped like an upturned boat Shell was also huffing and puffing. The plunging wolves were striped and mottled with snow, pale yellow sulfur, and dark bands of rubble, freed of ice by steam vents.

The horizontal layering intersected with vertical trails of dust that had spilled from scars in the rock face. Sunken into a slope of hardened scree at the far wall of the crater was another shaft, and at the bottom of this I could make out the famed Lake of Lava. Its surface was rent with fiery scars and rifts, and folded and wrinkled like elephant hide.

Bluish fumes streamed out from the seething mass, which looked so stiff and viscous, That I couldn't help thinking that anyone who fell in would go splat rather than splash, meeting a cartoonish end. When you look at a lava lake, you are seeing the top of a column of magma connected to much larger pods and pipes of molten rock deep down.

The heat and gases emanating from the lake offer direct clues to that underworld. I knew at once I had found the ideal natural laboratory to study volcanic behavior. For Sir William Hamilton, it was Vesuvius. For Franz Junghund, Merapi. For Frank Perrett, Montagne Palais. I, too, now met my muse.

FIRST MUSIC BREAK

Alok: That's beautiful. And just remind us, when was that? And how is your sort of relationship with this epic volcano sort of developed over that time?

Clive: Well, I first went because I met Mr. Erebus, a guy called Phil Kyle, who is a geochemist and volcanologist. And I knew about Erebus. It was actually the very first volcano I worked on in my PhD, but from space.

So I'd only ever seen it with one kilometer pixels, but it was already, I think, somewhere in my dreams. And I met Phil, and he invited me down to contribute to gas observations of the volcano, many years after I'd finished my PhD. And I think it was supposed to be a one off. I was going to show him how to make the measurements, and then he would take over.

But I made sure I didn't give him all the information. So he invited me back, and I went back and I got to go 13 times. It was the time of my life.

Alok: 13 times. I mean, you've been back 13 times. You've probably learnt a lot and have written many papers about Erebus.This is an inevitable question. There must be more to do?

Clive: There's always more to do. You think the volcanoes that have had the most attention, Vesuvius, Etna, Kilauea in Hawaii. We haven't run out of research questions. As volcanologists, we're trying to imagine a region of the earth we will never touch or see directly.

So we're always making inferences from surface observations or the mathematics of how things flow or from computational or analog models in the lab or studying the rocks that are erupted from volcanoes. So yes, there's still a great deal to learn.

Alok: Erebus is clearly the volcano that holds the most special place in your heart. Just what is it about that one over the other dozens of volcanoes you have visited around the world and continue to visit? What is it about Erebus that sort of makes it the most interesting? I mean, is it the location or is it something special about the geology of that place itself?

Clive: I think it's a combination of factors. Certainly, it's been scientifically the most rewarding place that I've worked. We've been able to make very detailed observations of the motion of the lava lake, of the gases streaming out from the lava into the atmosphere from the edge of the craters. You can imagine we make our way up there, we set up some tripods, we locate instruments, point them at the lake, and second by second we're seeing the gas streaming out.

And we've observed a remarkable breathing of the volcano, the lava lake going up and down every 10 minutes. Sometimes we've had to design and build new kinds of sensors to monitor the volcano radar instruments, thermal images. And We've been able to tie those observations in the field in with analyses of the rocks.

Erebus explodes from time to time and launches lava bombs over the crater rim. We can collect them. We can make very detailed observations, for example, using synchrotron facilities, big particle accelerators where we can generate very high energy x ray beams. We can now look at the most minuscule part of a rock erupted out of a volcano.

So tying all of this together, but the other factor for me is around people. when you work on Erebus, you're on the island that was first mapped by the pioneers, by Scott, by Shackleton's men, his geologists, you're literally walking in their footsteps. I found some of their campsites when they climbed the mountain, and That creates a kind of bond, you feel part of this legacy.

The science was only done a century ago. And then there's the people in your group. When you live at the top of an active volcano, three and a half thousand meters up in a camp with 10 other people, you're in a community, you're in the wild. wild environment. And so you look after each other. We cook for each other.

Someone else will be the person who spots that you're getting some frost nip on your face. And that camaraderie is also something very, very special that other volcanoes I've checked into a nice hotel and eaten nice pizza in the restaurant. It's, it's a very different experience out in Antarctica.

Alok: Obviously, working in Antarctica is different compared to other places.

I just wonder, have there been any situations where You know, you did think, Oh, this is getting a bit hairy. Were there any close shaves in terms of the way you were working there?

Clive: Yeah, certainly not so much from the volcano, but human factors and gravity.

I'd say the two most. concerning incidents. One was doing a little bit of training on ice using crampons and we were doing this before going up to the summit of Erebus and One of our group slipped on a very slick, icy surface, took out the others, and it could have resulted in a very unfortunate accident.

I, at this point, was quite high up on a very steep bit of ice, and could hear everybody sliding behind me.

Alok: So you could see all of it happening below you?

Clive: Yes, but I was in a very precarious position, no rope, and I ended up backing down. If I'd slipped, I would have probably killed myself. So that was a worrying moment.

The other was more mundane. In a tent, actually, at the same camp where we acclimatized before going to the summit, a propane stove flamed out and flames were leaping up. The oxygen in the tent was gone in a second and I had only the air in my lungs to be able to untie the tent. entrance and to be able to fling this thing out.

I think another couple of seconds I would have passed out and not been able to do that.

Alok: I mean, all of this, of course, all of this work, all of this danger, all of this excitement. It's all to gather data about the volcano, the way it is changing, what's coming out of it, to observe it. And some of the observations you've made at the lava lake in Erebus have been really profound. And I just wonder if you could talk to us about some of the most important discoveries you and your colleagues have made in your many expeditions there.

What is it about that lake? What secrets have you managed to sort of unlock from it?

Clive: it's a volcano that's only hazardous when we go there, essentially. And so it's not like working in Italy or Hawaii, where you're maybe thinking more, how does this work tie into monitoring the volcano into operational hazard assessment?

I think some of the things that we find out at Erebus are quite fundamental about how volcanoes work. We can apply that knowledge elsewhere. Erebus erupts a magma called phonolite. Vesuvius. You know, one of the most infamous volcanoes in the world, erupts phonolite and Erebus is the only volcano on earth erupting this composition of magma currently.

So I think there's a lot that we could transfer also this monitoring equipment. We design new ways of monitoring volcanoes. If it works in Antarctica, in the extreme environment there, there's a good chance we can transfer that technology. So that's a little bit of the background to. Why go all that way?

Some of the secrets. I think for me, one of the enduring puzzles, and I don't know that we've really solved it yet, is the cycle that we observe on Erebus, which, in retrospect, I realize that Shackleton's geologists observed this too. They saw that the clouds would billow out of the summit of Erebus with a periodicity, and With our very detailed observations of gas emissions, we could see the chemistry of gas changing with a 10 minute cycle.

Ultimately, we were able to observe the lava lake level going up and down by a meter or so every 10 minutes, the volcano is breathing. And when you see a cycle like that on a volcano, the first question it begs is why? What's going on in the behavior of this volcano to give such a regular rhythm? And then the second question, why is that rhythm 10 minutes?

Why isn't it one minute or one hour? It must be telling you something. And if you can't answer those questions, then you are missing something fundamental about how volcanoes work. So. If we imagine a lava lake, it's been active for decades, probably centuries, possibly longer, without a great deal of eruption, a scattering of bombs now and then.

Most of that molten rock that comes up into the lake goes back down the pipe again. So one of the ideas we have is of convection, rising current of gas rich hot magma. up to the surface, it cools a bit, loses its gas and bubbles and sinks back down the same pipe. And we think that's tied into this rhythm that we see.

And I think one of the really nice bits of evidence we had, Erebus, I've got one here, Erebus grows crystals. Large crystals of feldspar mineral up to 10 or more centimeters long and they grow like trees. They grow concentric rings, which we can analyze in the lab. And we were able to estimate a crystal like that might be a thousand years old and we can also see in the chemical zonation that that crystal has indeed been up to the surface at low pressure and then back down the pipe several kilometers down experiencing the conditions in the magma reservoir.

It's been there for a while, then been taken back up, like going up and down on a lift. And so I think that's what I would say. These observations we've made have given us insights, given us an imagination of what's going on under the ground in the hidden depths of the volcano. And even we have insights now that take us right through the crust to the deepest roots of the volcano.

Alok: It's just so active. It feels so mobile and moving.

Clive: Absolutely. Very dynamic at the surface and dynamic at depth. Also, with a kind of stability. We think Erebus has been doing what it's doing now. A lava lake bubbling away, emitting gas into the atmosphere. We think it's been doing that, you know, potentially for millennia.

Music break 2

Alok: Tell me a bit about the legacy of the heroic age explorers, So Shackleton and Scott and all these people, what's their legacy when it comes to exploring these places that we've been talking about and Erebus specifically.

Clive: Well I think of it that they made the first maps, they collected the first rocks, they did the first geology there.

There'd been essentially no prior observations bar. Ross's observations from afar from the ships. So we wouldn't know the routes up the volcano without their work, but we wouldn't know the volcano was there had Ross not sailed there. And I think that there's a very sort of palpable sense to me how recent this new understanding is.

Okay, Ross takes us back to 1841. Shackleton and Scott take us back a little over a century. But when you think also what happened, they brought these samples, their maps, their observations back, a lot of the rocks ended up in Cambridge in London. In fact, after the expeditions, there were then two world wars.

It actually wasn't until the 50s that some of their data was written up and published by other scientists. So it's very, very recent, the body of knowledge that we have. So I feel very much, you know, what I've been doing there with my colleagues is anchored in those original observations, and I also marvel at the endurance those men had of manhauling the gear up the mountain, of getting frost bitten toes along the way, all of that endurance. And you mentioned the first ascent, members of Shackleton's team, that included Edgeworth Tannatt David, who was 50, not a young man like many on the expedition, experienced geologist, University of Sydney, his student, Douglas Mawson, they were both trained.

geologists. So they knew the kind of rocks that they were observing. They recognized that they were similar to rocks of the East African Rift Valley. And indeed, Erebus has a lot in common tectonically with its situation, with its composition, its form as a volcano like Kilimanjaro, for example. So that, and given the fact that you see their campsites very close to where Our camp is near the summit of Erebus, really roots the work we do into that legacy of adventure and exploration and discovery.

Alok: And Douglas Mawson, of course, led his own expedition to Antarctica many years later. One of the first geologists really to try and map the continent from a scientific point of view, rather than just trying to find things and to be the first to go to a certain place. Inspiring character, I think. You mentioned earlier that when you were going up Mount Erebus.

You followed the physical footsteps of Scott's expedition up there as well, and in fact found the campsites almost a century to the day that they had been used. Just describe that for me. That sounds like a remarkable thing to sort of come across.

Clive: Yes, it was one of the greatest thrills of my life. I was on Erebus in 2012, we always go in the Austral Summer, so typically arriving around Thanksgiving, spending a bit of time in McMurdo Station, going up to the summit, and I already knew that this was a significant centenary because the members of the Scott Expedition, the Terranova Expedition, had reached the summit of Erebus on the 12th of the 12th of 1912, 12 12 12, led by Raymond Priestley, the geologist.

And I was going to be there 12 12 2012, so I thought I have to somehow mark this centenary. And I thought, well, you know, it'd be great to reenact their route up the volcano. The U. S. Antarctic program wasn't going to have any of that for the obvious potential risks of, you know, why put yourself in harm's way with the glaciers and the weather and so on.

So I'm up on the mountain and I'm reading the accounts of their climb. And in Scott's book, there was a photograph labeled ‘highest campsite in Antarctica’. And I thought, you know, I wonder if I can find that campsite. There's a pyramid tent and some rocks behind it. Maybe I can. go around, I can see that's the ancient caldera wall.

Maybe if I go around it, it's quite big. It's, uh, you know, maybe two, three kilometers across. Maybe I can recognize the rocks and locate that campsite. I thought it would be a needle in a haystack and it ended up taking me about 20 minutes.

And I had the photograph. In front of me, I printed out from this 1912 image, and I'm looking at the photo, looking at the rocks, and eventually I had to just memorize this image, and then I saw it.

I saw there was a little crack in the rocks, and as soon as I saw that, I could see a semicircle of stones on the ice, which had clearly been used to hold the tent flaps down with. And at that moment, I saw them in my mind's eye and I couldn't help waving and saying, hello boys. I had this image in my head and this sense of being transported across a century.

Alok: I'm amazed that the rocks were still there in the same location.

Clive: Yep, they weren't going to go anywhere. What I later read, I got hold of Raymond Priestly's sledging diary, and he describes that when they went back down, they left behind two bags of excess food, they didn't want to carry it, and half a can of kerosene.

And I later scouted around these rocks downwind of the campsite and there were indeed bits of broken glass, bits of pemmican, bits of bread. I documented everything and it's now a historic site and monument registered under the treaty system. So, yeah, it For me, very, very, very thrilling.

Alok: You've also, beyond your sort of academic work in volcanology, you've been very prominent in talking about volcanoes and explaining their importance, as you have in our conversation now. But I suppose one thing I can't not ask you about is your collaborations with Werner Herzog the film director, and the documentaries you've made about volcanoes.

I just wonder if you could talk to me about how you met and how you ended up making some films with him.

Clive: We met on Erebus, near the crater., we knew he was coming up to make this film. He made a film called Encounters at the End of the World.

So at the end of 2005 He was there with the artist program, with the U. S. Antarctic program. He went to the South Pole. He visited the seal scientists, penguin scientists, and then he came up to our field camp for about a week. So that's where I met him. We enjoyed very much having him in the camp. He showed some of his films in our field hut.

So we had a director's commentary. It was really an extraordinary experience. The two of us got on well. It turned out we had dreamt of going to places like the Tibesti volcanoes in Chad. We had some similar dreams and at this time I was finishing a book on big eruptions of the past and I had conceived for a long time making a documentary film on that topic.

When I finished the book, I sent a copy to Werner and I wrote in it. Are you ready to make another Demented Volcano movie? And the only thing I thought twice about was do I say obscene or demented? I went for demented. I heard back almost immediately in the affirmative. He put me in touch with his production outfit in London and we took things from there and made the film Into the Inferno, which was released in 2016.

So, That's how the collaboration started. And actually the last film, Fireball Visitors from Darker Worlds, was my last reason to go back to Antarctica. And that was when I went with the Korean program and I did get to go up Mount Melbourne, a kind of sister volcano to Erebus. So that was exciting. But my main purpose was then to join the meteorite collection.

This is another great thing in Antarctica, that the greatest concentrations of meteorites for scientific analysis and exploration that they're found on the blue ice fields in Antarctica. And so I joined the Korean program and this was my first time sort of really on the mainland of Antarctica in this very, very different environment to Erebus on the blue ice.

I thought it would be boring. I thought it would just be the real flat white. And I'm even thinking for the film, this is going to be boring to look at. It's stunning. The textures and quality of light refracted through this blue ice, the wind. constantly blowing loose ice that makes these little sea snakes that slither along in front of your feet as you walk along and finding meteorites.

Every stone you find there is a meteorite. That was also a phenomenal thrill.

Alok: I'm just curious, working with Werner Herzog, what is it about volcanoes that interests him that you find intriguing? Is it a different view of this world that you have sort of spent your life investigating?

Clive: I think there's some intersections in our views, certainly my view for a very long time, possibly ever since that gap year traveling in Indonesia and looking at volcanoes and seeing that there are temples on them and offerings made to the spirits living within the volcanoes. It's always been a duality.

There's the science, there's the protecting communities from eruptions through monitoring that operational side of it. But there's also the human side, the meaning that we imbue in volcanoes, what they mean to us. That's fascinated me. And I think Into the Inferno is not a science film. If it's anything, it's a bit more anthropological.

It's looking at the communities who live on volcanoes. And I think the public, we're fixated on the catastrophe. That's when volcanoes are in the news, when tourists have been assailed by lava bombs. or an explosive eruption has covered a community in ash. We forget that people can live on volcanoes for centuries, for millennia, between these large events, these disasters.

And that's something that I think both of us wanted to explore in the film. And our subsequent film, I think of both films, one is about the underworld and the other is about heaven and the heavens. What does a meteorite mean to us? What does an impact crater on the ground mean to the communities who live in that region?

What does it mean when we see a shooting star? How do we interpret that? That's what really fascinates me just as much as, does this rock hold some of the building blocks of life in amino acids and other extraordinary chemicals?

Alok: Just to finish something we ask all of our interviewees, why does Antarctica matter to you?

Clive: It matters to me because it's a common, so I think it matters to all of us. And I mean, this idea that we're going to head off to an exoplanet or live on Mars, we have Antarctica, an other worldly continent at the bottom of our planet. And it matters to me that it's there, that it's protected. and that it remains a place of peaceful human purposes, tourism, science, adventure.

It matters to me because it's in my bones and I find it difficult not to go back actually. I felt very adapted to the environment there. It's hard work going up and down a volcano carrying spectrometers and all kinds of gear and going up and down to put liquid nitrogen in it, collecting the data in the wind.

You're always pitted against the elements, equipment failures. I just think if I'm good at anything, it was good at that. So I miss going there. I feel I could go blindfold from the camp up to the crater rim, do the trip on the snow machine, do the last 500 meters on foot. I feel I know it like the back of my hand.

Shackleton wrote a poem that really resonates for me. I wonder if I could read you that. It sums up for me exactly how I feel. It's a poem called Erebus.

With ice field, cape, and mountain height, flame rose in a sea of gold.
Oh, herald of returning suns to the waiting lands below.
Beacon to their home seeking feet, far across the southern snow.
In the Northland, in the years to be, pale winter's first white sign will turn again their thoughts to thee, and the glamour that is thine.

And that's exactly how I feel if I see on a winter's morning, the sun low, the frost, the brilliance of the light, it transports me back there.

So yeah, it's in my bones.

That's beautiful. Clive, thank you very much for your time today.

Thanks so much.