Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
This white wilderness,
this emptiness, is the North Pole.
I'm standing in the middle
of a frozen ocean.
Beneath my feet, and for over 500 miles
in every direction,
there are several meters of ice.
But something significant
is likely to happen here
at the North Pole soon.
Chances are that sometime
within the next few decades,
perhaps even as soon as 2020,
there will be open water here
for the first time
in human recorded history.
The Arctic and Antarctic are changing.
Enormous masses of ice
that have been frozen
for thousands of years
are breaking apart and melting away.
Ice scientists are going to extremes
to find out exactly what's going on.
For them, these are exciting times,
but the transformation
that's being seen here
will be felt far beyond
the polar wilderness.
In this program,
I'll be trying to understand
what these changes mean,
not just to the wildlife and people
that live around the Poles,
but for the whole planet.
I'm starting my journey in the Arctic,
the far north of our planet.
It's still very cold outside
by most people's standards,
but the Arctic has been warming fast,
twice as fast as the rest of our planet.
My first mission is to find out what
effect that's having on the animals.
Although first, we have to find them.
It's April in Svalbard.
We are a thousand miles
north of the Arctic Circle
in search of the region's top predator.
We need to travel away from the land
and out over the frozen sea.
There are some tracks
right beneath us.
Over there!
I'm with a Norwegian team
which is giving the polar bears
of Svalbard their yearly health check.
- She's under us now.
- I'll come round for a clean shot.
The team works together
to give an anesthetic injection
from a dart gun
without hurting the bear.
It takes tremendous skill.
Ah, you got it!
Iâll just back off
until she's asleep.
Nobody likes to see a magnificent animal
like a polar bear
lolling about unconscious on the ice,
but it's only by darting them
in this way
and keeping check on them
year after year,
that we can be sure we know
what is happening to them
and the population of polar bears
as a whole.
Over the last 30 years,
many teams have been seeing
the condition of
their local bears deteriorate.
Although not every bear is suffering.
- How much?
Ninety-six there,
and 102 here, so that's 197, yeah.
- Is that good?
- It's not too bad.
It's a bit above average.
So she's a bear in a good condition
for Svalbard today.
The trouble is
that if this was underweight,
she would be in trouble,
not only from her own point of view
but from the point of view of her cubs,
because an underweight female
gives birth to underweight cubs,
and underweight cubs
have a great problem
of surviving their difficult first year
in these circumstances.
It can be -40 degrees centigrade
when polar bear cubs emerge
at the start of the Arctic spring
from their dens where they were born.
This mother hasn't eaten
for half a year.
She and her cubs need to fatten up fast
over the next few months
and their chances of survival depend on
what's happening beneath their feet.
These polar bears
aren't walking on land,
they're roaming across
the frozen surface of the sea.
And the bears' food lives under the ice.
Ringed seals are hunted by polar bears.
In fact, in some parts,
polar bears eat almost nothing else.
So it's very understandable
that this mother ringed seal,
who's looking at me now,
should be a little apprehensive.
That pup of hers is only about
three or four days old,
and the pup won't be able to swim
for another two or three days.
Seals have good reason
to be nervous around their holes.
They need the holes to breathe
when the sea is frozen,
but this makes them easy to find.
Polar bears can sniff out seal holes
even if they're covered in snow.
Spring is the best hunting season.
This mother's found a food store
under the snow
that was probably made by an Arctic fox.
It's a time of plenty now,
but the bear family
need to make the best of it
because the good times
are about to come to an end.
As the weather warms,
the ice beneath the bears' feet
starts to break up and then melt.
And as the ice dwindles,
so do the bears' chances
of a successful hunt.
Most of the ice is lost over
the shallow coastal waters
where most of the seals live.
It's now summer
and these bears have a choice.
Take their chances
on the shrinking ice floes
or make for the safety of the land.
It's a case of sink or swim.
Bears have always gone hungry
in the summer,
but the length of time when there's
enough ice for them to go hunting
is getting shorter and shorter
across much of the Arctic.
This is hitting cubs particularly hard
because they can't survive for as long
without feeding as their mother.
Cubs that were born underweight
are at the greatest risk.
This mother and her cubs
may well not get another meal
until the sea freezes again in winter.
There's not much to eat on land,
and the fact is that the longer the cubs
have to wait until the ice returns,
the more likely they are to die.
Longer summers with no ice
are probably the main reason
why many polar bear populations
are dropping.
To help monitor bears into the future,
this female is being fitted
with a radio collar
to track her movements.
It's an extraordinary sensation
to be so close
to such a powerful animal.
With luck, carrying that collar,
she will have more years to go yet,
and be telling us a great deal
about herself
and the rest of the race of polar bears
as they face this very uncertain future.
The future of the ice cover on the sea
isn't just an issue for the animals.
It's a big concern for the people
who live in the Arctic
and travel across the ice every day.
David Iqaqrialu is an Inuit
from the village of Clyde River
in the Canadian Far North.
There are very few roads up here,
so David and his community,
like most Inuit people,
have always travelled
across the frozen sea.
Dog sleds are the safest way
to get around
because the dogs feel thin ice underfoot
and won't lead travelers into trouble.
Old-timers like David know the ice
as well as we know the streets
in our local neighborhood.
Every spring, cracks have always formed
in the same places at the same time.
It's going to be big very soon,
after two weeks maybe,
it will be more open.
But now, cracks are
appearing where they never did before,
so David and his friend Laimikie
have taken on a new job.
They are using special GPS units
to record the position of new cracks
or weak ice.
These findings will be used by locals
for their own safety
but they're also being studied
by ice scientists
who want to predict
how the ice will change
in years to come.
The Inuit are keen to know
what the future holds, too,
because they've seen with their own eyes
the changes that the scientists
have seen from space.
This satellite photo from 1980
shows the Arctic Ocean
at the end of summer
when ice cover is at its minimum.
Since then, there's been a 30% drop
in the area covered by ice.
But these images can't tell us about
changes to the most important factor,
the thickness of the ice.
Measuring thickness
across the whole ocean
was beyond scientists for many years,
until help came
from an unexpected source.
The Arctic Ocean
is of huge military importance,
as it's the shortest route
between North America and Russia.
Since the late 1950s,
British, US and Russian submarines
have been patrolling the Arctic Ocean.
But as well as looking out
for enemy activity,
they've also been measuring
the thickness of the ice,
critical when looking
for a place to surface.
When scientists got permission
to look at the submarine crews' records,
they discovered that the ice
has been thinning fast.
In fact, it's nearly halved in thickness
since 1980.
Across most of the Arctic Ocean,
there are now just
a couple of meters of ice.
It's so thin that it could melt away
almost entirely in the summertime
and that includes
the ice at the North Pole.
If current trends continue,
then there will be open ocean here
by summer's end
sometime within the next few decades.
So, the days of the Arctic Ocean
being covered by a continuous sheet
of ice seem to be past.
Whether or not
that's a good or bad thing,
of course, depends on
your point of view.
Nobody has had a better view
of the changes to the Arctic Ocean
than the people of Barrow,
the most northerly town in Alaska.
The people here have always survived
by hunting on the frozen sea
and they celebrate this
at a festival every year.
The blanket toss was once the best way
to spot distant animals to hunt,
as lifelong resident
Lewis Brewer explains.
When we throw ourselves up
into the blanket, you know,
you get that much more of an "Ah!"
of seeing further and further out.
So, sometimes youâll jump
and hopefully you're being caught
right back into the blanket.
I'm okay!
But the old way of life
is under threat.
When Lewis was young, the sea
stayed frozen to the horizon until July
and some ice remained off-shore
all summer,
but now, it's breaking up in June
and melting away completely
for two or three months.
I used to go out on the ice
all the time this time of the year.
But we can't do that any more
because there's no more ice.
Lewis can also see
that the loss of sea-ice
is affecting the animals
he hunts for a living.
Since 2007, something very strange
has been happening
on this stretch of coastline
close to Barrow.
Mother walruses,
confused by the lack of ice,
are crowding onto the land
with their pups.
This very tight crowding isn't normal
and it's caused many youngsters
to be crushed to death.
Many Arctic animals are threatened
by the changing conditions
and that's also bad news
for the traditional hunters.
But the ice loss could be good news
for some people.
There are trillions of dollars' worth
of oil and gas under the Arctic Ocean,
but the only way
to get to them until now
has been by building expensive
artificial islands like this.
But if the sea ice goes,
it will be much easier to drill
for the huge riches below.
So the countries
that surround the Arctic
are scrambling to stake their claims.
This daring attempt by the Russians
to claim the disputed seabed
at the North Pole in 2007
caused fury among
the competing countries
and it's unlikely to be
the last such dispute.
The Arctic has never been so important,
and not just because of its resources.
The Northwest Passage,
a legendary sea route
around the north of Canada and Alaska,
cleared of ice in the summer of 2007
for the first time since records began.
This promises a much faster
and cheaper shipping route
between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
And some wildlife could benefit
from an ice-free Arctic, too.
Bowhead whales are one
of just a few whales
that can live year-round in the Arctic
because they have no dorsal fin.
This means they can come up for air
in small spaces
and travel easily under the ice.
Their unique body shape used to mean
that the Arctic whales had the seas
to themselves for most of the year,
but now, some cousins from down south
are moving in.
Killer whales are now a much more
common sight in the Arctic.
Their tall fins make it difficult
for them to travel under ice
but the longer summers
mean they can travel much farther north
and make the most
of the rich Arctic seas.
For animals and people,
it will be those who can adapt
who will thrive in a changing Arctic.
But the loss of sea-ice
isn't just an issue for the Arctic,
because the state of the ice
affects the climate of the whole planet.
Because it's white, the ice reflects
up to 90% of the sun's energy.
This is called the albedo effect,
and it's why we often see
heat haze in the Arctic,
even when the air feels cold.
The frozen Arctic Ocean
acts as a huge reflector,
bouncing back the sun's heat into space.
Throughout history,
that has helped to cool the planet,
but when the ice melts,
it's a different story.
Because sea water is dark,
it absorbs most of the sun's heat.
In the Arctic,
this can trigger a chain reaction
as the warming water melts more ice,
exposing more water to the sun's heat.
This cycle of warming,
as huge areas start to absorb
rather than reflect heat,
is the main reason why the Arctic,
a region the size of North America,
is warming twice as fast
as the rest of the Earth.
So, melting sea-ice is a big issue,
but there's another kind of ice
that could have an even more
dramatic impact on our world,
the ice that is found on land.
This is freshwater ice,
formed from thousands of years
of accumulated snowfall.
This is the front of a glacier.
Quite a small one, believe it or not.
Glaciers are like rivers
of frozen fresh water
flowing across the surface of the land.
This one, like most polar glaciers,
is flowing down from a vast
inland ice sheet,
and it's what happens
to those ice sheets
that could radically alter
the face of the planet.
The Greenland ice sheet
is by far the largest in the Arctic.
It's two miles thick in places
and six times the size
of the United Kingdom.
Every summer, some of the surface
of the ice sheet melts,
forming sapphire-blue lakes
of melt water.
More and more of these lakes
have been forming
as Greenland has warmed
over the last 20 years.
This lake has grown over several weeks,
and now it's overflowing,
carving a deep channel through the ice.
A network of channels
criss-crosses the ice sheet,
but many of them come to an abrupt end.
Huge holes like this
can open up quite suddenly,
draining the melt water away.
Alun Hubbard is a glaciologist
studying the enormous power
of these waterfalls,
which are known as moulins.
We've got this amazing moulin
going off here today.
The water's overflowing from the lake,
which is beginning to drain.
Tons of water cascading down this pipe
that is effectively plummeting
to the depths of the ice sheet
through over a kilometer
of vertical ice.
Alun is here to study
where the melt water goes
and what affect it has
on the remaining ice.
To do that, he needs to find a moulin
that has recently run dry.
Just a week ago, there was a three-mile
long, 10-metre deep lake here.
The weight of all that water
cracked the ice beneath
and the lake drained in just a few hours
with incredible force.
Thousand-ton ice boulders
were tossed about like dice.
Alun's team have found the hole
down which the lake disappeared
and they want to have a closer look.
It's not job for anyone
with a fear of heights.
As you can see, it's dry up here,
but if you listen,
you can hear the thunder of
There's a lot of water entering it
at some depth.
Alun wants to place
a sensor deep into the moulin
to discover how much water
is flowing through the ice.
As they drop, they travel back in time.
Thirty meters down and they reach
ice formed from snow
that fell 10,000 years ago,
in the last ice age.
When this lake drained
and the plug got pulled,
and the whole lot flushed down
through here,
this ice sheet, it rose by a meter
as that water accessed the bed
and force-jacked up the ice sheet.
So, we know that the water in this
whole plumbing cavity system down here,
we know that shoots
straight through the ice
and actually hits the bed
of the ice sheet.
We've hit the water!
I can see the water now.
Great.
Nice work!
This daring experiment
is measuring how the water
flowing under the ice sheet
affects the speed with which the
glaciers flow from it down to the sea.
The theory is that the water
is acting as a lubricant,
so the more water there is,
the faster the glacier flows.
To the naked eye,
glaciers don't appear to move at all.
But move they do.
These unique time-lapse images
were captured over the last four years.
Through long observations,
we now know that Greenland's ice
is flowing down to the sea
twice as quickly as it was 20 years ago.
The speed of the glaciers
affects our sea levels,
because when they reach the water,
they break apart into icebergs.
Occasionally, a real mega-berg is born.
This is the Store Glacier in May 2010.
Seventy-five million tons of ice
that had been sitting on land
for thousands of years has broken away.
Events like this
have become increasingly common
as Greenland's glaciers
flow faster into the sea.
Every single one of these icebergs
raises the sea level a small amount.
Scientists monitoring the ice sheet
predict that Greenland might add
as much as a half meter
to world sea levels
by the end of the century,
enough to swamp
many of the world's low-lying islands.
is in Greenland.
It's a staggeringly big ice sheet
but it's just a drop in the ocean
compared to that at the southern end
of our planet.
In Antarctica,
there is 10 times more ice,
by far the largest concentration of ice
on Earth.
Our exploration of the Antarctic
only began a little over 100 years ago.
The study of ice retreat here
was unwittingly begun on an expedition
led by the great early explorer,
Ernest Shackleton.
In 1916, after their expedition boat
was crushed and sunk by ice,
Shackleton and two companions set off
to summon help in a tiny boat.
They sailed over 800 miles
across the Southern Ocean
to the island of South Georgia,
on the edge of the Antarctic.
Near starving and dressed in rags,
the three men walked across the
ice sheet at the center of the island
knowing there was a whaling base
on the opposite coast
where they could summon help.
This team of Royal Marines
is re-tracing the steps of that journey
in tribute to Shackleton and his men.
But for all their efforts,
they can't exactly copy the great walk
because the ice is not as it was.
A number of South Georgia's glaciers
were photographed
by Shackleton's cameraman.
Frozen Planet saw a dramatic change
when they returned 94 years later.
Most of South Georgia's glaciers
have shrunk
since Shackleton's time,
and most of that has happened
since I first went to the Antarctic
I've been to South Georgia several times
and seen how greatly
the glaciers there have changed.
This photograph of a glacier
reaching right down to the sea
was taken just six years
before I first visited in 1981 .
Now that glacier has retreated
by 400 meters away from the beach.
Temperatures in South Georgia
have risen sharply,
but the Southern Hemisphere's
most dramatic warming
has happened a little further south.
In recent years, stronger winds
blowing over the Southern Ocean
have brought warmer air
to the 800-mile-long finger of land
that forms the northern extremity
of the Antarctic continent.
Here, on the Antarctic Peninsula,
the changing wind patterns
have driven temperatures up
by nearly three degrees centigrade
over the last 50 years,
of the rest of the planet.
The rapid warming is having a big effect
on the birdlife.
The Adélie penguin is the most
southerly nesting of all penguins.
And like the polar bear,
up in the north,
their lives are dependent
on the sea-ice.
Adélies spend their whole lives
near ice.
These birds have spent the winter
feeding at the ice edge
but now it's spring
and they've started a long trek
over the frozen sea towards land.
They're heading
for areas of exposed rock,
where they gather to breed in colonies
that can be over 100,000 strong.
But it seems that Adélies don't find
the conditions on the Peninsula
to their liking any more.
Seventeen years ago,
when I was last in the Antarctic,
there were large colonies
of Adélie penguins
all along the Antarctic Peninsula.
Now warming temperatures
have meant less sea-ice
and Adélie penguin numbers
are in decline.
Many colonies have been emptying fast.
It may be that penguins are starving
or it may be that they are heading south
to colder climes, where there's still
plenty of ice on the sea.
But as in the Arctic,
while ice-loving animals
are feeling the heat,
animals that like it a bit more cozy
are moving in.
The bright orange beaks
of gentoo penguins
are a much more common sight
on the Peninsula these days.
I always used to know them as residents
of the slightly warmer islands
north of the Antarctic,
but they've moved south in numbers.
There are thought to be 10 times
more gentoos on the Peninsula now
than just 30 years ago.
The Peninsula has warmed a great deal
but the same is not true further south.
The Antarctic continent is smothered
by the world's greatest ice sheet,
one and a half times the size of
Australia and up to three miles thick.
A staggering 75% of the Earth's
fresh water is locked up in this ice.
Global sea levels would rise by some
But what chance is there
of that happening here
in the coldest, most hostile place
on Earth?
The ice beneath me up here
on top of the icecap
is so thick that I am short of breath,
simply because of the altitude.
This is mid-summer
and the average temperature
is some 20 degrees below freezing,
and I can tell you
it feels much lower than that.
And even the worst predictions
don't suggest that the air
is going to warm enough to melt the ice.
But now scientists are asking
a different question.
Could the speed at which
the Antarctic ice flows off the land
be increased by a warmer ocean?
Where the ice sheet meets the sea,
scientists are going to extreme lengths
to find out.
Firing!
Andy Smith works
for the British Antarctic Survey.
What we have here is one kilogram
of pentolite explosive.
We're going to use this
to generate a shockwave
and record the echoes that come back
from underneath the ice.
Firing.
Andy is particularly interested
in mapping the underside
of the ice around the coast,
because here, it isn't resting on land,
it's floating on seawater.
So if sea temperatures
rise just a little,
it can be melted from below.
Around the coast of Antarctica,
the glaciers have flowed out
across the sea
to form immense masses
of floating fresh water ice
called ice shelves.
These freeze to the land around them,
sticking fast and acting like bathplugs,
holding back the flow of the glaciers
into the sea.
On the Antarctic Peninsula,
a one-degree sea temperature rise
has helped to break apart
seven major ice shelves
in the last 30 years.
This is the Larsen B Ice Shelf,
three times the size of Greater London,
breaking apart in 2002.
Afterwards, the glaciers
it had been holding back
started flowing up to six times faster.
In 2008, a much larger ice shelf
at the southern end of the Peninsula
started to break up.
It's an enormous event
that's never been filmed before.
Andy Smith is flying down the Peninsula
to study this phenomenon first-hand.
We're flying to a place
called Wilkins Ice Shelf.
It's an ice shelf that over
the last couple of years
has shown a very sudden
and dramatic break-up.
The Wilkins Ice Shelf
is a two-hour-long flight south
from his research base,
but Andy can start to see the evidence
of ice shelf break-up
a long way before he gets there.
As we are heading further south,
we can see more and more icebergs
in the ocean,
and most of the big ones
will be ones that have broken off
the ice shelves in this area.
Once we cross the mountains,
we should be able to see
Wilkins Ice Shelf,
and then it's not far then
to the ice front here
where it's collapsing.
As Andyâs team
reaches their destination,
the scale of what's been happening
soon becomes clear.
Here, for thousands of years,
an area the size of Yorkshire
has been covered by a sheet of ice
But now, over half of that
has broken apart.
Andy has been studying Antarctic ice
for 25 years,
but even he is blown away
by what he's seeing.
Now, that is pretty awesome!
That is remarkable!
The edge of the ice shelf
has just kind of disintegrated,
and some of the big pieces look like
they could be a mile or more in size.
It's almost like a sort of
slow motion explosion.
It all pushes outwards very quickly.
Every one of these huge icebergs
will slowly drift out to sea.
To study how fast that happens,
Andy needs to get closer to the action.
We're going to look around and see if
we can find a place where we can land,
and if we can,
we'll be able to put out an instrument
that will help us monitor
the big icebergs that are breaking off
as the ice shelf breaks up.
Landing on an iceberg
is another first for Andy's team.
This satellite transmitter
will help to track the continued breakup
of this colossal ice shelf.
The remainder of the Wilkins
looks set to break apart soon.
It's the latest ice shelf
to disintegrate
in a wave that's been
travelling southwards,
playing a major role
in the loss of ice from the Peninsula.
Next in line,
and already weakening in places,
are the ice shelves that hold back
Antarctica's gigantic
continental ice sheet.
And it would only take a small corner
of this to slide into the sea
to have major global consequences.
We've only started to see changes
in the Arctic and Antarctic recently,
so it's hard to predict exactly
what impact these changes will have,
but we can see for ourselves
that these places are changing
and on a scale that is hard to ignore.
The Poles, north and south,
may seem very remote,
but what is happening here is likely
to have a greater effect upon us
than any other aspect of global warming.
If the Arctic sea-ice
continues to disappear,
it will drive up the planet's
temperature more quickly
and the melting ice sheets
could contribute to a sea level rise
of a meter, enough to threaten the homes
of millions of people
around the world's coasts
by the end of the century.
We've seen that the animals
are already adapting to these changes.
But can we respond to what is
happening now to the frozen planet?
The increasing
unpredictability of the ice
was a big issue
for the Frozen Planet team,
who spent three years
working on top of it.
Whether on sea, land, lake or river,
the state of the ice
was the first concern
for most filming crews.
Unexpected breakups left many
a cameraman in need of a swift rescue.
Sometimes help came by boat
and sometimes by air.
I had a chance to see
the changing ice conditions for myself
when I visited the North Pole.
I flew with the team to a temporary camp
that is set up every year
in the center of the frozen Arctic Ocean
to support expeditions to the Pole.
I had never visited
the North Pole before
so this was a great highlight for me.
But it was hard going
in temperatures of -40,
so as soon as filming finished,
we flew south.
Little did we know that we had
made it out just in time.
We got back from the Pole camp
last night
and I've just bumped into
the Russian Commander
who's just heard from the camp,
and the news is that a little crack
which I'd seen in the ice
between our tent and the airstrip,
which was no more than
an inch or so wide,
has, overnight, widened to 20 meters.
Temporary breakups caused by
stormy weather and strong winds
have happened before,
but they've been getting
more and more frequent over recent years
as the ice has got weaker.
It was only swift action by the staff
that prevented a lot of
valuable equipment going in the drink.
The biggest concern was that
the ice airstrip might break apart,
but luckily it held
and everyone was able to evacuate
when the weather improved.
The Frozen Planet team's
clearest demonstration
of the power and unpredictability
of breaking ice
came when they went to film
the melting of a frozen Canadian river.
Producer Mark Linfield
and researcher Matt Swarbrick
have travelled
to the Far North of Canada.
Matt, when was the last time
we saw a car?
I don't know,
about three hours ago?
They've driven through
the vast Northwest Territory
on a mission to film the moment
when this frozen waterfall breaks apart.
The breakup when the frozen river
above the waterfall thaws
and masses of water start to flow again
can be a spectacular event,
but predicting exactly when it's going
to break is the big challenge
if Mark and Matt
want to get the best shots.
And they're not the only ones
who want to know.
When the waterfall breaks,
it can flood the town of Hay River,
just downstream, with millions
of tons of water and ice.
Mark is taking advice
from the scientist Faye Hicks,
who has the job of predicting
when the ice will break.
What happens isis you
get ice jams form upstream
and they start to dam up the water
and it builds and builds and builds,
and that can let go and that's
a much bigger wave of water,
you know, than just the normal flow.
So, it just depends upon
how dramatically it unfolds.
Faye takes her research helicopter
to monitor the situation upstream
of the waterfall.
Just 10 miles upriver,
the ice is starting to break.
The locals are concerned
because huge amounts of water
can build up if these ice chunks
dam the river
and that can lead to devastating
flooding in the town
when the dams burst.
Simon, it's moving
through there now.
Yeah, got you.
I'm on your six.
Using cameras and sonar
to assess the state of the river,
Faye makes her best guess
of when this breakup will hit
the waterfall just above the town.
As of now, guys, I think we have
about 48 hours to go.
Fayeâs prediction
of the 24th of April
is exciting news for the team.
Upstream from here,
it's already starting to melt,
and Faye thinks that we may only
have another one or two days
before this whole thing goes,
which is almost impossible
to imagine looking at it now,
but that's what she says.
With the breakup
seemingly imminent,
the team set up their cameras
in anticipation.
Over the next 48 hours, the weather
warms to well above freezing,
but there's no sign of the breakup.
The team waits and waits and waits.
Mark is concerned that the crew
have to return home soon,
so he heads into town to get the advice
of long-term resident Red McBrian.
We just have to live with it and take
whatever evasive action we can.
Red has had 50 years
of witnessing the power of the river.
Well, we're hoping that she may
break up in two or three days, even.
- Oh, no.
No, no, no.
That's too soon.
- You think it'll be longer?
Oh, no, no.
Boys, you're looking at
You're looking at seven or eight days
before she breaks of any significancy.
And if she breaks,
she can jam and hold up.
She can be
She'd be down here probably
around the 5th or 6th of May.
Right.
The townspeople are
on tenterhooks waiting for the big day,
but another week goes by
before anything starts to happen.
Finally it seems that things
might be happening.
We've just heard some cracks
from upstream,
so if we're lucky,
we might get some action.
It's 7:00, which gives us
two hours light.
Two hours light.
If it happens at night,
we're going to miss the whole thing.
Sure enough,
the town is put on red alert
that the river is about to break
in the middle of the night.
They've just called a full evacuation
of the Eye Inn where we're staying,
and if we don't move now,
we're all going to be underwater
and possibly get trapped here
for a few days.
The team have to
move out and get up to the waterfall,
hoping that it doesn't break
before it's light enough to film.
Luckily, the sun is up
before the main event begins.
That is a serious amount of ice
coming around the corner.
After weeks of waiting,
the sleeping giant of a river, and
we thought nothing was gonna happen,
and suddenly, look at this!
This is what we're here for.
Unbelievable!
Absolutely unbelievable!
Holy !
The team is used
to handling multiple cameras
but they don't usually
have to dodge 10-tonne ice floes
at the same time.
You can see it's racing over
at unbelievable speed.
The power I just
If you were here to feel this,
it's a deep rumbling sound of the river,
I can feel it up through my feet.
The power, I just can't imagine,
that could crush a house in no time.
The team takes to the air
to witness the destruction
that's unleashed,
huge ice blocks are pushed downstream
on the wave of water
released by the breaking waterfall.
This could devastate the town.
But this year,
the townspeople's luck is in.
The town has escaped flooding.
Crucially, the ice blocks did not
dam the river, it's running free,
and the date of the breakup, 6th of May.
Red's got it right again.
I don't use any of these here
gauges and mechanical assistance.
I just go by what I see on the river
as I walk it down,
and I say I walk it down,
I back and forth every day on the river
to see what's happening,
and that from that I gauge
when it's going to hit here
and what the situation's going to
be like when it does get here.
You know, when it went this morning,
I said to my students,
"Guess what the date is?"
Red told us it's the 6th of May,
and we were
You know, I'm not surprised because
we've been here a couple of times
and that's happened.
Ten days, two weeks out,
he just looks around and goes,
"5th of May," and we're like,
"How does he know that?"
It's incredible.
It's because
he just has lived on this river
and lived this breakup for 50 years.
Ice scientists are improving
the accuracy of their predictions
all the time,
but in the meantime,
the people of Hay River
have a remarkable guardian.
Red, you were
completely right this year.
Are you right every year?
No, I miss
I miss the odd one.
Yes.
1985, I missed it.