alexander's family cry here is a. great thing that. read or found alive is a story made for a movie is playing out in real life. cape town south africa the i can to make few other of diesel electric research vessels the sport. pilot as an officer with knowledge of these waters he still has to ship out into the atlantic and then returns to dock.

this is the very last opportunity for several weeks to call home with a cellphone very soon will be far out of range the ship is setting sail for a inaccessible area if there's any kind of emergency no one to provide any kind of help. the russian ships. to the end of a tunnel ice and snow to antarctica. the first officer will now explain the code of conduct on board there are twenty three passengers aboard the i condemn explore the rough and for some this is their first trip to the antarctic. but for one passenger it's become a familiar journey this is the twenty sixth time he's followed this route. back a nine hundred sixty four. trip we went. who was the first time

i felt so acutely just how far away. ten days and nights of ocean like. this is. as you can see there is nothing there. any of the ships just icebergs. no one to relay messages except. now. much antarctic autumn winter in the southern hemisphere begins at the same time as the northern summer several times over the short summer season the academics will approach the coast of the most remote. final voyage of the year.

two years worth of food and fuel to the ice stations and take away seasonal crews and aircraft. which. is a tanker or. a passenger ship. and an aircraft carrier. detailed navigational and operational plans are in place but also has arrived and no one can ever know just what to expect from antarctica. always comes up with surprises. you have to keep your eyes open because there's always something going wrong if it actually goes well for too long i start to worry there's no way antarctica will let you go on like that without incident it's unpredictable. bags containing polar clothing are stored in the freezer when the ship left some

petersburg four months ago the weather was rainy and damp most of the time if the banks were to get wet. they may rot in a warm hold to keep them in optimum condition the clothes are kept on ice until they need to get out of there your phrase the standard winter outfit consists of shoes. of the wind cheetah. this one is for winter. the other one is a mid season coat. and this one's for special occasions because it's so much better this time of the look they also have a vest. way to turn around but did they listen to what we said no they didn't one of the straps to be crossed otherwise they slip off your back. where we were at the same comments every single year but it's not so often that they put things right. most of the passengers on board

a driver mechanics they'll usually go through about four sets of clothing in a year. is to deliver fuel to the most remote and hard to reach stations. is ok does it look fine of course it's ok for work not your wedding. of course it's a little loose it's almost twice the size of you the other drivers have been to antarctica many times. challenging trip one thousand five hundred kilometers from the coast in summer temperatures can reach forty. but there. is a staggering minus. this route will take about forty. the trucks can only move very slowly they

carry fuel tanks to the highest arctic station which is three and a half meters above sea level but oxygen levels there equate to an altitude of five thousand meters anywhere else. mainframe. all those. factors huge gropes that can seem strong can break and snap in freezing temperatures the most difficult part is the route itself seems endless ages just to cover about sixty kilometers. and that's actually good going you can do anything you can make the time go faster speed up the process you just pray for the best and hope the truck will fail you he wanted to be over soon as possible you just want to be back home and that's it so you get back home and in time you stuff feeling

a strong desire to. the work is difficult but the guys are great and you feel good once everything is done. even now i want to go as soon as i can. say mcpherson. will come soon enough for clothes on and talk to. the ocean appears very come on the bridge of a captain the navigation officer and two helmsmen crew changes on the way. the crew watches reinforced you have to be twice as vigilant the closer you get to antarctica. for. the region is still under explored and. very

long distances. these pictures are from nine hundred eighty seven they chronicle the maiden voyage of the academics off the first diesel electric ice ship to sail to go. first trip was good a really good one. remember we were in the captain's. having. yes i remember that clearly we were having tea at the table was a. huge bang and the car fell off the table. everywhere. it was a rock wasn't shown on the chart. and in the end the rocks position was mapped.

here it is. the one hundred eighty seven obstacle course. the ship literally went through a trial of fire and ice. it was about four pm during a tea break we had cabbage pies that day i still remember that and then it all happened. this missile. fire broke out in the engine room one of the pipes burst and fuel oil spill down on to the white hot money fold there was a huge fire even now i feel uncomfortable when i hear a fire alarm to change the settings on all our clocks back at home because i can't stand the noise of. the ship went through thick and thin it's the best ship in the whole antarctic never gets the job done it's never

failed she's really an incredible ship. it's even written somewhere academic sure that if was the only ship in the world able to reach the north pole alone unaided by an ice breaker who would go to the polls quite often now but we still have a lot of respect for the arctic region it's a really harsh environment and there are nuclear icebreakers there antarctica is even worse besides we can't use nuclear icebreakers antarctica is much worse than the arctic region more severe this is my twenty six trip to antarctica and i've already been to the arctic twenty five times antarctica is much more interesting this trip is more fascinating and extensive it takes at least six months to get there the arctic region is like a relaxing walk. only takes about a month. in one thousand nine hundred five once headed for

and talked to some of his plan was to be home after six months but in the end he was away for eleven. ship and set sail later than. it was when the crew reached antarctica is cut through the ice close to the shoreline but they soon discovered that they were too close to crews reaction was well coordinated and fast . as always happens in the weather changed abruptly the ice around the ship stuck together and the vessel became trapped. imagine a sugar bowl. that's been emptied into a hollow there's tons of ice all over the place and the ships just not able to move we fought against it for many days trying to move out of there then the wind came up and the ice blocks started to shift to slightly so we were able to work our way

through the coastal ice and belt a little it almost cracked the whole we tried to head for the open sea but it was already impassable by that time before my fit well with. that was when the crew realized they'd be spending winter aboard the ship there's no way to help a vessel that stuck in an ice trap and so some of had to stay just where it was until spring their ship was weak in fact three times weaker than the academic field of this one that might just escape the ice but i'm not really sure. about a form to feel better of has it never been trapped in ice not even once it's very powerful and when circumstances get really difficult we can rely on it we believe its power will help and save us more. crew changeover in the engine room twenty two people are involved in here the crews .

really. something we have lots of cabbage. we have. two hundred. here we have. some of the.

grapes. that should be enough until we get back to. the. food. carrots different types of. according to. a week. but according to stop the yolks going off you have to turn them every two weeks. they may get a little dry at the stations because of the low humidity but they will never go bad

. on your. plane it was a plane very hard to take a. look again here the club captain that had sex with that make their lives. claim. the first. place. if you please. please if. the people.

play well with. science technology innovation all the list i'm elements from around russia we've got the future are covered. live. live. live . live. talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want.

they are growing all antarctic.

level. to discuss the details. and to evacuate the departing crews from. the action. well. we couldn't get to the barrier. there was no way. from the sea.

we haven't been able to. break through. here there were about four miles of. we were. hoping for. mother nature. to come through. we can't cut through. now and last year we couldn't get through when it was just too it was more than three meters deep then about a meter of snow on top of that they had no choice.

from the russian. there was a. huge chunk. of the ocean. four out of ten fuel tanks were left they had to conserve fuel for the hold. well wasn't although a few containers with spare parts and some snowmobiles were also lost. everyone. told. the progress. sometimes. too once we had there we were unloading fuel when they started cracking so we had to. we even had to cut it a little it was an emergency and we had to get off quickly it was impossible to turn back because that was close by lots of things happened.

we had to wait half an hour at the station the massive suddenly started cracking. huge behind. over and stopped. the other way. to pull back and. it turned out that the progress station frontal activity was at its peak for ten days and there was intense and heavy snowfall visibility was practically nothing. so we had to wait ten days until it finally stopped.

very short window of time. the only reliable means of. c. . receives its full of food and fuel supplies. some unexpected events. in the area is downloaded using a special antenna this vital information is used not just to plot the ship's course but to select the right block of ice on which to land croft. still

remember the fourteen lifting off from a cracking ice book imagine it lifts off the ice cracks right after it it was terrifying. taking its first flight. and assembled the ship will take off. from the station as usual. close to the ship. moved down to the ice but the plane is disassembled. that's when the waves came. it started swinging all the way out. i was doing something down in my cabin. sudden i heard a huge noise out there i went to check it out it was the shore. screaming

. taxed and the fuel tanks were empty water was very close within just two meters so we had that aircraft up fast and get it onto the hatch cover thank god we did it gone the other way it would have caused a lot of trouble now we'll see what the. station has in store for us. that caused all the trouble at the station may just help us here.

too quickly.

from here. to the. new. nothing can be left until tomorrow because at any moment conditions might change suddenly and without warning. in the northern hemisphere this kind of wind would be called a hurricane but here it's just a regular storm extreme weather like this is common place in antarctica. as soon as their work was done a huge storm rolled in with winds of up to thirty two meters per second the ship has no choice but to wait until it ends it may take a few days though. no longer matters the main tasks have been completed.

will be here things went smoothly surprisingly it was over very fast i didn't expect that. the academic field heads north again to africa after one hundred ninety four days for more than half a year the crew has been out on the open ocean. back of the cape town seaport there's still another twenty eight days or so to petersburg but after antarctica even here feels almost like. it was the year these whack jobs introduced the bell in help to buy debt debt and lord debt the never ending list of fines for crimes to which j.p.

morgan will never have to edm it obamacare the corporate espionage surveillance state the bedroom tax that housing bubble. unexplored antarctica what is it in this icy expanse that attracts the people who come here. with no i only go to the dock. and enter into. a new generation of polar explorers is coming. we have a new group of specialists here now all of them are young how are they going to get along with each other and i don't know. who. i used to be a bureaucrat. seriously. what adventures await in this mysterious land where they live want to the east and want to be actually doing it on top to go.

i'm. sick. mind. you and. all that. money and have a fast life like for college like a lot. right. here just like. today's high.

coming up on our t.v. morning in volgograd in the last few days a major russian city has seen a series of terrorist bombings as the funerals begin for the victims president vladimir putin vows to annihilate the criminals behind the attacks the latest from the scene ahead and what are the new stories you missed in twenty thirteen from bradley manning to get mo our t. has covered many of the stories that other news networks seem to overlook coming up we'll break down this year's most under-reported news and goodbye mayor bloomberg new york's nanny state mayor will soon be out of office but he will not leave without a bang or should i say ban these cigarettes to sugary big gulps we'll take a look at the band that will define.