Diving deep for viewers
Orla Doherty reveals the delights and dangers of exploring the icy waters of Antarctica for Blue Planet II.
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.
As producer of Blue Planet II’s The Deep episode, and one other in the series, I had been planning this expedition for two years, burying myself in research with the rest of the team and working out what we might find. 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 around 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.
My television career began on Def II, Janet Street-Porter’s youthfocused channel at BBC Two in the early Nineties. But 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 left city life behind and spent the following decade studying the remote coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean with an NGO.
I came off the ship every couple of years, and then only for a few weeks at a time. ‘‘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. We were working at the very edge of human knowledge, and the unknown depths contained dangers we could not foresee.
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, while we were 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.
What the people watching at home 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. Sometimes your senses become so inured to the experience, you could be sitting on the Piccadilly line. At other times, it is like drifting through space, as if there isn’t any water there at all.
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.
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. –The Daily Telegraph, as told to Rosa Silverman
❚ Blue Planet II 7.30pm, Sundays, TVNZ1.