hundred years seafarers sort of navigable route between asia and america in one nine hundred three roald amundsen led the first expedition to traverse the northwest passage pioneering spirit has helped usher in new eras in eight hundred fifty nine business men edwin l. drake became the first american to successfully drill for oil which became the fuel of industrialization but that same pioneering spirit has also had an environmental impact the newest method of oil extraction is hydraulic fracking a well stimulation technique in which rock is fractured by a pressurized liquid in the process chemicals are injected into the rock. mining for gold rare earths and lithium also contaminates the ground but demand for these minerals and elements is vast. and today as a result of climate change the polar ice caps are melting and that's making supplies of all oil and gas more accessible the race to conquer the arctic is awakening pioneering spirit the world over and unleashing new conflict in the process. so what have we learned when pioneering spirit meets business interests it often means trouble take the

like britain's james cook, or the ill-fated race to the south poleetween robert falcon scott and roald amundsen, or perhaps the most famous antarctic adventure story: ernest shackleton's dramatic" endurance voyage" several years later. wealked to murray in the ship's movie theatre: >> it's quite incredible actually that 100 years after the heroic age, just over 100 years since scott and the polar party died on their return from the south pole, and you've got these great stories of endurance and suffering, we can now come to antarctica effectively for fun. >> brangham: this record number of tourists coming here has beey growing steaince the ye80's when just a few thousand made the trip ever. >> when the soviet union t collapsed, the soviet fl ice-strengthened vessels became available and people realized they could actually charter those and bring those down. that was what started the whole rush in the 1990s. >> brangham: today, more and more tour companies are rollingu new fleets of luxury ships capable of navigating these icy waters. the arrival of more and more visitors to antarctica is also l

in 1912, britain's robert falcon scott and norway's roald amundsen ran a frantic, party froze and starved to death on their journey home. >> antarctica proved exceptionally tricky because all of the things that centuries of exploration by the west had had eorelied on; having nativees as guides, having rocks and being able to follow riverid being able ttify mountains, all of the sorts of markers of exploration and the indices that you had succeeded disappeared and you're left with >> brangham: but perhaps the most famous stories of ftarctica are not stories discovery but rather incredible feats of survival. british explorer ernest shackleton, a veteran of an launched his own attempt to cross the continent from north to south in 1914. he set off with 27 otheralen in a shipd the endurance. but disaster struck before theyd even reahe continent. the endurance was trapped by the sea ice that encircles antarctica, forcing the men to >> it's one of these stories where you think the worst has happened, at nothing else can go wrong and then it does. >> brangham: katie murray is a polar historian, a