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In January 2001 an eight-person NOVA team stood atop the highest
peak in Antarctica, having arrived by a difficult, unexplored route
over glaciers that hold clues to the future of Earth's climate. Shot
in high definition, "Mountain of Ice" recounts this expedition to
one of the most stunningly beautiful parts of the planet.
NOVA's expedition up the unclimbed east face of Vinson Massif
included Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer and was led by
noted mountaineer Conrad Anker. In 1999 Anker discovered the body of
legendary 1920s climber George Mallory on Mount Everest during a
search that produced the acclaimed NOVA film
"Lost on Everest."
Also participating in the adventure were veteran Antarctic guide
Dave Hahn, who has climbed Vinson more times than anyone else;
glaciologist Dan Stone, who was along to measure the precipitation
rates at various altitudes on the mountain and to confirm the
mountain's height; extreme skier Andrew McLean; and a three-person
NOVA crew headed by producer Liesl Clark, the only woman to climb
Vinson via this new route.
"Mountain of Ice" contrasts NOVA's experiences in 2001 with those of
Norwegian adventurer Roald Amundsen, who led the first successful
expedition to the South Pole in December 1911, and British explorer
Robert Falcon Scott, who reached the pole a month after Amundsen and
then perished with his surviving team members a few miles short of
their last food cache.
The NOVA team battled 60-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures as low
as 35 degrees below zero to obtain exclusive footage of one of the
last unexplored places on Earth. According to Clark, the greatest
challenges were surmounting a perilous 3,000-foot wall of
house-sized blocks of ice and shooting the first high-definition
aerial photography over Antarctica's highest mountains from a
Cessna-185.
With only 40-year-old maps to go on, the team was venturing into a
world almost as uncharted as that which confronted the original
explorers of the continent. The 42-pound high-definition camera was
among the 1,200 pounds of food, fuel, and equipment that the crew
carried on sleds over their 30-mile trek into the unknown.
In the course of NOVA's journey, glaciologist Stone obtained the
first ever high-precision GPS reading from Vinson's
summit—pegging the mountain at 16,067 feet, ten feet higher
than previously measured. Stone also directed the excavation of
numerous six-foot-deep snow pits at different altitudes. The pits
were sited in pairs to create a translucent wall of ice, giving a
record of the amount of snow accumulated on the continent's highest
mountains over the past few years.
Despite a rate of precipitation that classifies Antarctica as a
desert, the southern continent has 70 percent of the world's water
locked in its glaciers, which could drastically affect global sea
level and climate as the ice calves into the ocean at the
continent's edges. Stone's measurements are part of a concerted
effort by scientists to monitor the growth and movement of
Antarctica's glaciers, which so far appear to be in a state of
equilibrium, neither increasing nor decreasing significantly.
Only time—and further monitoring—will tell if this last
unknown place will affect the planet in as-yet-unanticipated ways.
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