Secrets of the deep brought to life
Blue Planet II’s producer Orla Doherty reveals the delights – and dangers – of exploring the icy waters of Antarctica.
Dawn was breaking over Antarctica as I awoke. For close to three days we had been at sea, having set sail from the southern tip of Argentina on our research vessel, Alucia. Nothing could have prepared me, though, for the breathtaking sight of icebergs ahead of us. It was like a winter wonderland.
If you tuned into last Sunday‘s episode of Blue Planet II, you can probably picture the scene. But absorbing this landscape from the Alucia was something else.
As producer of The Deep episode, I had been planning this expedition for two years. Yet you can never quite predict exactly if an operation as complex as this will succeed.
The logistics were no small feat: for this five-week mission we had in tow two submersibles, a helicopter, an impressive amount of kit and a crew of about 50.
While we had waited on the southern tip of Argentina, eager to begin the last stage of our journey, Alucia’s captain had been watching the weather, waiting for the perfect moment to depart. Get it wrong and you face a rough ride across the Drake Passage, one of the world’s most unforgiving stretches of ocean. Fortunately, he picked the right time and ours was a smooth crossing.
And now here we were, cruising through Earth’s most hostile and remote continent, soon to explore parts no person had ever visited before, two-thirds of a mile beneath the icy waters.
As Sir David Attenborough said on the programme, no human had ever descended into the depths that surround Antarctica – until now. I was to have a front-row seat at the frontier of scientific discovery.
The appeal of spending 500 hours beneath the waves, for up to eight hours at a time, may be lost on some. But I would live down there if I could.
For my 30th birthday, I treated myself to a scuba dive while on holiday in Thailand, and from the moment I first put my head underwater, that was it: I could no more stay in London, away from the water, than I could give up breathing. So after a year winding up my affairs, I spent the following decade studying the remote coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean with an NGO, coming off the ship every couple of years.
‘‘How could you spend 10 years on a ship?’’ people ask me. My question to them is: ‘‘How could you not?’’ My family is from the rugged coastline of Donegal, in Ireland, so perhaps the connection was in my DNA. In any case, at 31, there was nothing to stop me taking off.
When I eventually returned to London and television, I heard that Blue Planet II was in development – and four years later, here we are.
What a journey it has been: exhilarating, enchanting, exhausting – and often perilous.
Enclosed beneath the waves in a nine-tonne, battery-powered submersible, just a couple of metres wide, a mere seven inches of acrylic were all that protected the pilot, cameraman and me from pressure 100 times greater than at the surface. Our air supply was cleaned by a scrubber that kept carbon dioxide at safe levels. When these began to rise, or the batteries lost power, that’s when we had to return up. And perish the thought you might need to answer a call of nature while submerged – there were no provisions for that. Luckily, we always managed to hold out.
We take risk extremely seriously and, as producer, it is my job to assess protocols and procedures thoroughly. But there were some we only discovered once submerged.
We did not know that rocks could fall out of the melting base of icebergs and plummet towards our sub. Yet out of danger came discovery: our scientists realised these rocks were vital to deep sea life in Antarctica, providing an anchorage on which life could thrive.
But it wasn’t until water started leaking into the sub, at a depth of 450 metres, that the true risks of what I was doing hit home. It wasn’t terror I felt, as much as resignation.
‘‘If this is going to blow,’’ I reasoned, ‘‘there’s nothing I can do.’’ Thankfully, within 20 minutes, the pilot had isolated the leak and shut down the problem. He asked if we wanted to ascend, but I declined and we stayed down, filming for two more hours. Every moment in the deep sea counts.
If I seemed calm to viewers, perhaps it is because I’ve spent a long time at sea and after a while you grow accustomed to the danger, and navigating your way through it in any way you can. If you live on the water, you can expect drama. But if you trust your team, you keep your head.
What the people didn’t see were the long hours spent waiting for something to happen.
You can momentarily forget where you are and it somehow becomes normal to be in this dark void, illuminated only where you choose to shine a light.
The days we came back with nothing, my sense of disappointment was crushing. Personally demoralised, I also felt I had let everybody down. But then come those amazing times, where you return to the top bursting with excitement at the discoveries you’ve made and the thrill of having added to the sum of human knowledge.
Discovering the methane volcano was one of those days. We were working in the Gulf of Mexico when our expedition scientist whispered to me one night: ‘‘Orla, there’s a place about 100 miles west of here where little bubbles come out of the sea floor. You might like it.’’
Of course, I had to see it. ‘‘We’re going west,’’ I told the team, and they all said: ‘‘You’re crazy.’’ We were filming the brine pool, and they thought we should remain there.
But go west we did, and a day later we were diving on a submarine methane volcano no one even knew was there, our jaws on the floor and our spirits skyhigh. The next day, we returned to the same site, but there wasn’t a trace of it. It was as if it had never happened. Only the footage shows it did. It’s entirely possible no one will ever see again what we saw that day.
There’s no doubt that the oceans are changing at an unprecedented rate – but at the same time there is hope. With international co-operation, whales have been brought back from the brink of extinction. We have the power to effect change, for good or for bad.
7.30pm, Sundays, TVNZ1.