Peter Barrett

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This transcript is based on a video-recorded interview deposited at MarE3, JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan), with post-editing by the interviewee.

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Interview of Peter Barrett by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 July 29, online. [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is July 29th of 2025. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC, and I’m with Peter Barrett in an online interview. Thank you very much. First thing, can you please say your name, your affiliation and position?

Peter Barrett (PB): My name is Peter Barrett. I am an Emeritus Professor of Geology and Founding Director (1972-2007) of the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

BMR: For how long have you been working in Antarctic research?

PB: Well, even before Antarctic research, I feel like I prepared myself in a way that I now realize, by being very interested in exploring and mapping caves with friends in my teenage years.  I think it was actually that experience that got me selected to go with an American group to the Antarctic. That in itself is a bit of a story, because I never intended to go to Antarctica. I was more interested in caves, but my friend Vic McGregor, both caving and room mate at university had been to the Antarctic the year before (1961-62) as a field geologist with the NZ Antarctic Programme and met some Americans at McMurdo Station. They wanted him to go with them to survey the Ellsworth Mountains the following season. But he hadn’t finished his thesis, and I had finished mine. So, he said, “Why don’t you go?”. I applied and they took me.

That was three months in the Ellsworth Mountains with seven people I hadn’t met before. And they all had funny accents – I didn’t, of course – but they were very good to me. We got on well, and I was quite handy because I had a motorbike that I maintained, and in the mountains we travelled by motor toboggan powered by a Briggs and Stratton 300cc motor not too different from my 650cc Triumph motorbike. But I also had a Master’s degree in Geology, though the geology of the Ellsworth Mountains was very different from anything I had seen in New Zealand.

BMR: May I ask you, going backwards in time: Where are you from? How was your childhood like? What did your parents do for a living? Just to give us a bit of background.

PB: I was born in 1940 in Hamilton, New Zealand, and grew up on a 200 acre dairy farm out of town.  My dad ran the farm and my mother was a schoolteacher. They met because she came to teach at the local school. I grew up the oldest of four children. My father never said very much, but he was always down in the farm doing something as farmers do, so I just followed him around. And I realized, later in life, that actually that was a very good way of learning.

The land was originally swamp covered with Kahikitea forest, but cleared by Dad and his father in the 1920’s and 30’s for dairying. But he kept 10 acres of the bush, just enough for us kids to almost get lost in. As we got older, we could do jobs like cleaning out the pig pens each morning, and driving the tractor for various tasks, so both fun and experience. At high school I loved chemistry, so I had a little chemistry lab in the back of the garage. I also found a book by Ion dries called Fortunes in Minerals, and the chemical testing involved. So I decided to study geology.  

About the same time [~1955], Dad walked us through a limestone cave nearby that ended with hole to the sky.  That led to me joining the local caving club (note: Hamilton Tomo Group) with two High School friends, leading to weekend caving trips to discover new caves in the limestone country of Waitomo, world famous for its glowworm caves. And we explored and mapped several cave systems. We continued at Auckland University, where completed an MSc thesis on the limestones of the area around Waitomo, which I’d knew from the inside of the caves. Cave exploring in those days involved the use of steel-wire aluminium-rung ladders in 10 m sections as many cave entrances were shafts from 10 to 100 m deep. By the early 1960s these were adopted by the NZ Antarctic programme as crevasse ladders – another aspect of my experience that might have got e onto the expedition to the Ellsworth Mountains expedition. –

BMR: How come that you went to the US for PhD?

PB: Before I went to Antarctica, I was going to do a PhD on caves but the year after – when we came back from the Ellsworth Mountains, Vic, who first got me to the ice with the US programme, organized an expedition through the New Zealand program for just four of us: him and me, and a couple of colleagues. One surveyor, three geologists to complete mapping a piece of the Central Transantarctic Mountains along the coast that had been left out by the survey that he had done two years previously.

 We became the Southern Party of the New Zealand Antarctic Programme, Southern party. We were young, all 22 or 23 years old, but all had several years of NZ Alpine, tramping or caving experience, – We spent two months in the field mapping an area of around 2000 square km, and had to report by field radio twice a week. We had a wonderful time camping in tents, travelling by toboggan, climbing up ridges, sampling and note-taking. One of us did fall into a crevasse, but we rescued him with one of those ladders.  And then six months of report-writing.  I think it was that experience that persuaded Ohio State University to take me on as a graduate student. That was helped by the recently appointed Deputy Director of the Institute of Polar Studies, who had been lecturer in Physics at Victoria University, w and knew that people with a C average for their BSc degree from a NZ University might be worth considering, especially as I had by then published two papers from my Masters research on the Te Kuiti limestone, one in an international journal

The first two years at OSU (mid-1964 to mid-1966) were mainly taken up by course work but even more critical was planning a thesis. For the six months I was writing up my 1963 field work on the Beacon sandstone that caps the Transantarctic Mountains, I had the good fortune to share an office at the NZ a Geological Survey in Lower Hutt with George Grindley, legendary NZ geologist who was the first geologist to visit the Beardmore Glacier area since Scott. He had been there with a 1960-61 survey party mapping the geology of the Beacon Sandstone, and had just published a paper that included comparisons between Antarctic geology and that of the other Gondwana continents. That made me really interested in the wider context of the area, so an Australian student, John Lindsay, and I submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation, supported by my supervisor, Prof Charles Summerson, and it was funded. We had two three-month seasons of work, exploring, mapping, working through the stratigraphy, and the history of a 2,000 meter of strata. This represents the history of this fragment of the Gondwana supercontinent from around 390 to 180 million years ago, with the basaltic lavas on top that resulted from the beginning of the break-up of Gondwana in this region.  

BMR: What was it like to be in Antarctica? What attracted you the most to continue going there one season after one season, applying for more projects?

PB: Well, it was the physicality of it. Actually, being in a place that I was comfortable with. You have to learn to be comfortable; you have to be able to look after yourself and stay safe. And that was a bit of a challenge, but it was really the intellectual side of it, discovering the story from the layers that record the history of the region. I was working on old river plains and swamps and forests, with logs a meter thick, 250 million years ago. Below them you could see layers of glacial deposits, because there was a very extensive glaciation 300 million years ago across Gondwana. And, of course, seeing sort of ferns, and tree stumps in sand, river sand, in the middle of a frozen continent is a bit of a curiosity anyway. That was really good grounding, I think, for the work that I went on to later.

BMR: I’ve read about the fossil that you and your team found in Antarctica, but I’d like to hear that story from you.

PB: From listening to George Grindley, the geologist who did this review in his office before I went to the Beardmore, I knew the other Gondwana continents all had a vertebrate fauna – quite varied, including dinosaurs – and that in Antarctica nothing had been found, even though the exposures are very good. So, it was always in my mind that I should keep an eye out for vertebrate fossils. In my first season down there I thought I had, and I brought back a little sort of rock-like piece of rock, which I thought might have been one. But my thesis supervisor said, “Sorry”.

But in the latter part of the second season, I was working my way up, measuring layer by layer there, came to a bluff that was made up of a lot of pebbles, river gravel, and just looking around on the river gravel, I could see pebbles of all the types. There was just one that looked different from the rest, with a cellular surface pattern, and it was only a few centimeters across. I thought, “Uhm. Maybe this is it”. I had a field assistant who had studied vertebrate fossils and he said, “Yep. Could be”. We spent an hour trying to extract it, but.  broke up into about twenty different pieces. We wanted to be sure that we kept everything in the right place, so we made up some pancake mix, glued them together, wrapping all in toilet paper and packing in a metal tin.  The object turned out to be part of the lower jaw of a small amphibian.  It made the news, including Time and Newsweek,because it showed that Antarctica did have land vertebrates, like the other Gondwana continents, and must have once been connected with them in the distant past. However great credit must go to my colleague David Elliot, who after I returned to New Zealand led another expedition with paleontologists. to look for more and better preserved vertebrates. I was able from our mapping to tell him where the same layer was exposed at Mt Sirius over 100 km north and with a much easier landing site close by.

While the paleontologists were putting up their tents, David went across to the outcrop and found the next bone, and many others followed. Paleontologist Bill [William Roy] Hammer and his team spent over two decades discovering, excavating, preparing and describing many hundreds of vertebrate remains, including a new dinosaur species, first found by David himself.   It is a new species Cryolophosaurus ellioti, and   is now on display at the Orton Museum at Ohio State University.

BMR: How influential was this finding for your later career?

PB: Well, I’ve got to say, not very much. I mean, it gave me some notoriety, but it was what happened after my PhD, when I took up a postdoctoral fellowship, scholarship, at Victoria University, a trial run two years, because Professor Bob Clark there wanted someone to continue running their Antarctic expeditions.

Bob was a remarkable geologist in his innovative thinking. He built up the Geology Department there before I arrived, and he had initiated the first expeditions of any university in New Zealand to go to Antarctica with two third-year students – Peter Webb, Barry McKelvey – and they had gone down, doing good work, including the first geological mapping in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. At first, the Government’s Ross Sea Committee that ran the program didn’t really want to take students down so, he suggested that go and talk to the Americans to see if they could get around with them. And suddenly, the phone rang and they were invited to go with the New Zealanders.

So, by the time I arrived, there had been 14 student and staff expeditions there. But I had never worked on that part of the Antarctica, the McMurdo region. All of my work had been in the Ellsworth or the Central Transantarctic Mountains. But that was a natural follow-on for my thesis work, looking at the Beacon, and then a bit of teaching. It was really the opportunity to go on the first deep sea drilling in the Antarctic region. And my purpose, my motivation, was to see those Beacon Sandstone under the Ross Sea, because the theory was that the Transantarctic Mountains were the edge of a rift and, in fact, on the second trip we actually found some Beacon Sandstone at sea level. So, it was geologically straightforward that yes, there must be Beacon Sandstone. And here we have a drilling ship.

Peter Webb, who was one of the first two VUW students to work in Antarctica, and now working for the NZ Geological Survey, had also been chosen for the [Glomar Challenger cruise to the Ross Sea as part of Leg 28 of the Deep Sea Drilling Project. So we wondered together, “What about this huge gap in Antarctic history between the moraines that we could see today, maybe thousands or a million years old, and then the most recent bedrock in the Transantarctic Mountains – the lava flows that lie on top of the Beacon Sandstone, which were 180 million years old.”  So, how much of this a huge time gap might be represented by the strata imaged by the seismic surveys we had been shown

That cruise showed convincingly by coring three holes, each around 400 meters, that the geometry of the layers – because they were tilted – meant that we could go back in time to the oldest strata, which were over 20 million years. So Antarctic glaciation wasn’t a relatively recent phenomenon like the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets that began around 2.6 million years ago. The ice sheet had a much longer history. That’s really what led to a series of projects drilling from the fast ice in McMurdo Sound from 1974 to 1999 that Peter and I worked on together, which essentially kept us going until we retired. And our students and their student are continuing.  

BMR: What was the most challenging part of organizing and running the Glomar Challenger expedition to Antarctica?

PB: I think probably the starting point is, in the planning – and I wasn’t part of that, in a way I was very lucky to be invited just to go – and have the benefit of the planning, the people who set up the project, and this is where Jim Kennett comes in, because he was actually on the advisory group, and the only marine scientist. This was because the whole Deep Sea Drilling Project was first built around a search for the Mohole, but then translated quickly into the search for the age of the seafloor. The goal was to core to find the age of the oldest sediments on the basaltic crust drilling away from mid-ocean ridges – they should get older. So, those early voyages from 1968, as you know, were designed to test that hypothesis. Leg 28 proved it for the South Indian Ocean south of Fremantle, where our cruise began, showing that Australia and Antarctica drifted apart at 6 cm a year for the last 40 or so million years. But it also had a different goal – the history of the past climate of Antarctica.  

BMR: I was also wondering about the participation of New Zealand in the DSDP, because at that point, it was only the US running the ship, running the program. So, how was the relationship with people from New Zealand? Why you got on board, basically?

PB: I’ll always be grateful to the United States for two reasons, personal reasons. One is the support for my work in their Antarctic Program and then, to actually be invited to take part in another great experience the Deep Sea Drilling Project. Great generosity. New Zealand paid very little. It was all American money that funded the cruise. And most of the infrastructure for the very close collaboration in the Antarctic, very close collaboration, has been US-supported since the International Geophysical Year. A good start was made with US support for the crossing of Antarctica by the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Vivian Fuchs (UK) and Ed Hillary (NZ). In addition, the proximity of Scott Base and McMurdo Station have resulted in great mutual benefits.

BMR: And also, in relation to your later campaigns in Antarctica. How does it compare living and working on the drillship in Antarctica versus in an on land station or base?

PB: It’s very different. And I should say, it’s also very different from small field expeditions, with four people surveying thousands of square kilometers travelling on crevassed glaciers to map strata exposed on mountains sides, and spending their spare time two to a tent, sleeping, eating and note-writing. But, here I’ve got to mention that at the same time, even before [DSDP] Leg 28, Peter Webb had been part of the leadership group for the Dry Valleys Drilling Project (DVDP). This was the brainchild of Philip Smith, who had been with the Army in Greenland, and had been taken on by Bert Crary, Director, US Antarctic Research Program, to serve as Deputy Director. Phil was an internationalist, he was interested in projects that would bring countries together. He thought a drilling project in the Dry Valleys would help with that, and answer questions that surface geology could not. The countries were the United States, New Zealand, and Japan, and each had a key role. The New Zealand Government had a very good rock drilling team, the Japanese had very good laboratory equipment for a laboratory at McMurdo station, and the United States provided the logistics. They had planned 14 holes in the Dry Valleys into valley floors to bridge the time gap between the debris on the surface and the 180-million-year-old basalt capping the Beacon sandstone on the mountain peaks behind the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Peter Webb was the New Zealand science representative for DVDP, which was being planned at the time he and I went aboard the Glomar Challenger for DSDP Leg 28 on 28 December, 1972.  

By the time we came off the ship ten weeks later we were convinced of two things. One was that it would be a long time before the Glomar Challenger went back to the Ross Sea (we were right – it took 46 years). The other was, we had to organize the drilling ourselves – by using the sea ice as a drilling platform.

Fortunately, the drill rig that had been purchased for DVDP was from Longyear drilling, a Canadian company with a history of innovation, including the use of their rigs for drilling bedrock beneath Canadian lakes covered by winter ice, so our plan was feasible in concept at least. The project leadership was also sympathetic and the drillers keen for the challenge, so it was agreed that after the 14 planned DVDP holes, DVDP-15 would be drilled on the fast sea ice 12 km off Marble Point.   

The first hole, in November, 1975, was less successful than hoped for a couple of reasons. University of Nebraska geologist Sam Treves and I were co-chief Scientists, but we had to get permission from OPP in Washington, D.C. to drive the 100,000 pound tractor-train 50 km across the sea-ice from McMurdo Station to the drill site.  We did get out there, on 1 November, and began drilling. But only 60 meters had been drilled before the ice showed signs of cracking, so it was time to leave.  But having got that far we were able to persuade them to have another try.

This took four years, with NZ taking the lead, but still with US logistics support, the Longyear rig, and Peter Webb as US science leader. In 1979, we drilled about 230 meters below sea floor (m bsf) recovering cores of glacial sediment 15-20 million years old, with the drill string kinking at the sea floor – a drilling problem to resolve, and with hundreds of meters of strata below unsampled.

So, Peter Webb and I designed another drilling project, the CIROS Project with an inshore drillhole, in Ferrar Fiord, drilled in November 1984 (CIROS-2), successful but only just (another story), and an offshore hole in November 1986 (CIROS-1), spectacularly successful having paid attention to the three previous attempts.  The drillers cored to a depth of 702 meters below seafloor (915 m of drill string from the rig floor, 950 m being the rated limit of the mast). Core recovery below 50 m was 98%, with the lower hundred meters recently found to record coastal Antarctic climate transition from pre-glacial to glacial times between ~36 and 33 million years ago. Not quite into the Eocene warm period, but still capturing the early history of the ice sheet.

Since then, two major Antarctic drill projects, the Cape Roberts Project (1996-2000), and ANDRILL (2006-08) have added much more detail, especially ANDRILL for the warm Pliocene ~ 3 million years ago and the warm Mid-Miocene 14-17 million years ago. In summary, it was that first failure (let’s be honest) that got us started, with some amazing successes (and failures) over decades.

BMR: Was there something that you learn on the Glomar Challenger, or in your involvement in the DSDP, that was later valuable or useful in your career?

PB: Oh. What we learned in the Glomar Challenger was a very good way of handling cores. Just practical. There were, I still remember them – it’s now computerized, I guess – but they had… The cores’ length were 1.5 meters long, and we had a pad page that had a scale and columns which you sketch the core, and then you divide it into the different rock types, and write descriptions in triplicate – because there was no photocopy, in those days. But there was a typewriter. So, it was the process of the core handling that came up; it was cut in two 1.5 meter length in a tube. It was then run through a saw, split in half, there was an archive half and a working half that you could sample, it went off to the paleontology laboratory. So just the whole process, it was so good and I was so impressed to see all this happening. We just had to replicate that in Antarctica, which we did. And, it worked.

I suppose the other thing that comes to mind is that I’m just describing what we did, but we had to learn to plan and we had to learn how to team together. How do we select the best scientists, etcetera, available. That’s true of any large organization and project, and there’s a lot of skill and experience required. We were quite young at that stage, but we did learn rather quickly. And pretty fortunately, really, sort of… I pause because we’ve had one or two incidents with difficult decisions but that’s how we learn. It’s all been a rewarding experience with amazing advances in how the earth system works – greatly enhancing in recent years by advances in Earth System computer modelling. I met Peter Webb in Columbus last month – they were just wonderful times.

BMR: With your interview I will share the movie of ‘Challenger Sails South’. How did you get the idea of filming? I think it’s one of the first films of the Glomar Challenger at work – and I’d even say one of the only videos of the Glomar Challenger.

PB: Yeah. Well, I did that because I remember getting a Super-8 camera because, when I was in Columbus doing my PhD in the 60s, actually filming for myself was cheap. It was affordable. Then, coming back to Victoria, I saw there was a film school, a one-day film school, a sort of an adult education thing, where a local director gave us this wonderful Bolex 16 millimeter hand-wound up camera and you could shoot five minutes. It had three lenses that you rotated, close up, medium, telescopic, and we had to choose ahead of time. I tried that out on the first expedition that I led from Victoria. I made a little film just called [DVD-15?] Antarctica, about the plane landing and putting up tents, cooking a meal, and then measuring rocks and discovering fossils, and coming back. Oh! And the toboggan[?] breaking down, and coming back. That ran for 12 minutes.

Then, when I went on the Challenger, when I knew the goal was working with John[?], we said, “Okay, we could film us, too”. So, I had done 18 rolls of Kodachrome, 18 five-minute rolls. And I don’t know quite how I did it, but never mind, it was done. I came back and I had a tape recorder, as well, to capture the sound of the air conditioning, the squealing of the winch, and that sort of thing. When I came back, I’d used up all of the film and we just set about to make it to tell the story, and we ended up with a film 22 minutes long, which is a cutting ratio of – I used a little over 20% of the film available, which is pretty unusual because actually, another film I was involved in, 120 hours was edited down to an hour.

But it was fun, because we had to make up stuff. Like, there’s a ping pong match in the film. And so, we had to capture the ping on the blade, and as you break the pipe, when you’re taking the core out, the water sprays everywhere. And the sound for that, we took it from flushing the toilet. And all of this wasn’t done on a computer. It was physically. We were cutting, cutting and splicing both tapes. So, not quite as much fun as the trip itself, but still a lot of fun.

BMR: That’s incredible, actually. Now, you know, now we make videos [of the expeditions] and with just click, click, click, you put together a video. I cannot imagine how much work goes into this analog filmmaking. Did you distribute the film somehow? How did you make sure that it was viewed, how did you share it?

PB: It was screened — we did a call to New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation that run television in those days. They screened it on national television. We launched it with the National Film Unit, the archive. We actually sold it to a film Library in Sydney and I was going to the Gondwana Symposium in Calcutta and I went to Delhi, so they have a copy in there.

So, not a wide distribution, but now I’ve shared it with a number of friends and colleagues through a Vimeo site that we have. And there’s some little bits of it that show up, for which we give permission. For the 60th anniversary of SCAR, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, they have a ten minute film and it’s got about 40 seconds of the Glomar Challenger from this film. So, it sort of got around a little bit.

BMR: Just after the DSDP Leg 28 and also Leg 29, how influential were those expeditions for New Zealand’s science?

PB: Well, the more influential in global science than in New Zealand’s science, specifically, because Leg 28 showed the antiquity of the Antarctic ice sheet. It wasn’t just a [?] of the four glaciations that people thought where on the northern hemisphere. Now, of course, we know there are many more.

Leg 29, in particular, cored in the deep ocean between Antarctica and New Zealand to capture, really, the history from the microfossils. It was just at a time when we were learning through oxygen isotopes and using them as a proxy for temperature. These are isotopes from the microfossils, from the calcite in the microfossils. This is where Jim Kennett, as a scientist, as a paleontologist, who really led New Zealand to go to the States because he thought much more attention should be paid to the oceans. And he got this just because of his knowledge of marine microfossils.

He was also co-chief on the ship, designing the cruise and where the holes should be placed. So, he made sure that they cored in places that, when you put them together, represented the entire time from near the present day, going back around 50 million years. And, he took samples for that entire interval. He personally picked the microfossils to be analyzed. At the same time, there’s the scientist Nicholas Shackleton, who’s developing an oxygen isotope lab at Cambridge. He telegraphed from the ship to say, “I’ve got these samples. Can you run them?” And he, of course, said, “Yes”. That produced a wonderful collaboration – the first temperature history for the last 50 million years. It shows temperatures were much higher 50 million years ago, but they declined. Then, there’s a little bit of a drop around like 30 million years ago, decline, another bit of a drop around 14 million years ago, decline. And that pattern has now been verified by tens, hundreds of thousands of measurements, but it just came from that cruise in 1973. And, to me, that’s – Oh, such an advance in thinking.

BMR: After the DSDP expedition, what has been your role in leading, organizing, securing support for Antarctic expeditions?

PB: I was director of the Antarctic Research Center in Victoria [University] from – well, we actually set it up two years after 1972, after they thought I could probably do the job. And I continued doing that until 2007. That involved, first of all – not on my own – but just talking with staff and students and working out a plan for each expedition, which was quite diverse and included a lot of work on Erebus volcano, and a very able graduate student who led that, [?], and other staff people as well.

But then, when it came to these expeditions, I again worked collaboratively, and worked particularly with Peter Webb and with other people as well, in other countries. I think the Cape Roberts Project had six different countries. So, you know, we were able to reach agreement on, and sort of share resources, and where we had overlapping interests to be able to accept that two countries could have scientists that would do similar things but work together. I mean, this is all written up both in detail but also in summary, so that people don’t have to wade through a lot of stuff to get to the exciting results.

Then, I think one of the things that both Peter Webb and I are pleased about, are the younger people that we passed the mantle on to, particularly in Italy and Germany. And, you know, in the US, New Zealand and the UK, as well. They are now leading these projects.

The next big one was the ANDRILL Project, which produced that really crucial result, a recognition from the drilling that the West Antarctic ice sheet had collapsed 3 million years ago many times, when the CO2 levels were only 400 parts per million. That was Tim Naish – nice pal. And this year, there’s the next generation drilling through an ice shelf, at the [?] of the Ross Ice Shelf which are [?] and Tina van de Flierdt, and now this year Molly Patterson from the US is going back there. It’s twice as hard to drill through an ice shelf and then through water into the seafloor, where they’re during this year. The ice rise right in the middle is going from six hundred meters of ice into sediment, for recovering the core.

BMR: And how has been the relationship to the ocean drilling programs, like the ODP and IODPs, afterwards?

PB: Well, that is collaborative in that we have people that have worked on the ocean drilling program, and also have been involved because we’re talking about a team of, you know, 40 or 50 scientists. And also, this not just the people who are on hand. There are also the people in laboratories around the world that double or triple that number. In fact, the International Continental Drilling Project is co-founder of the SWAIS2C Project that grew out of the Antarctic drilling that started off with Leg 28.

BMR: Another thing I would like to ask you, comparing going to Antarctica the beginning of your career and in the most recent expeditions. How doing science in Antarctica has changed? In any sense you’d like to approach it.

PB: Changed enormously. One of the sad things about discovery is that once you have done it, you can’t do it again. So much is known about the Antarctic. So, there’s been quite a shift from having expeditions on the ground to gathering information remotely, whether it’s by aircraft or satellite. I would only qualify that by saying, when it comes to ships at sea, it hasn’t changed quite as much because voyages are voyages, and take the same time – perhaps a little more comfortable.

I think the bigger frustration that all of us feel is that the discoveries we’ve made, the awareness, our understanding of the Antarctic, both continent and ocean, but globally, the reality of the warming planet from fossil fuels, is that this is increasingly dismissed. And this is… It does seem to be a global phenomenon, at least on the Western world. That’s pretty frustrating. But we still, I think, have to do whatever we can to… It’s not to scare people, but just to insist that we need to minimize; we still need that conversion to, basically, electrifying our energy directly.

BMR: A bit in line with that, what is for you one of the most important learnings about the Earth’s climate that you take from all these years?

PB: I suppose, in a nutshell, we’re warming the planet in a few decades after it has been cooling for 50 million years. We’re going to be back to Eocene temperatures, as they were 50 million years ago, by the end of the century, certainly. And, we won’t feel the consequences right away, simply because it takes time to melt ice sheets. But the melt is inevitable. Sea level will eventually be 60 meters higher than it is today. So, it’s time to plan, if anyone notices this.

BMR: What are the big questions that are still to answer by studying Antarctica?

PB: I think a lot of focus now is on being able to more accurately predict the rate of change. The end game is clear, but we don’t know how long it’s going to take. How long do we have to plan? And that’s, simply, just the sea level rise issue. But there’s also the way in which higher CO2 levels impact the whole biosphere. And recently, particularly in the Southern Ocean ecosystem, with the – you might know that [sea-ice?] ecosystem is fed at the bottom of the food chain by algae that grow under the sea ice. What effect does it have when there’s no sea ice? The algae, they might still be algae, but would they be the same? They probably won’t. Fish and eventually whales have to eat something. And it’ll evolve, but how will it evolve? There are people working on this. This is where I think, there’s the big frontier. But it’s not instead of doing science in other places.

In that respect, I’ve got to mention a wonderful film that’s come out. Have you heard of ‘Mighty Indeed’? It’s a documentary in the Edge Film Festival and won the prize for best film and Best director, of three generations of women scientists who’ve been studying the sea ice and revealing the importance of the sea ice algae, at that part of the food chain in the Southern Ocean ecosystem and along with, at the same time, drawing attention to the loss of sea ice in recent years.

BMR: I will check it, of course. One of my last questions is, what are you most proud of in your career?

PB: Well, I don’t sort of think like that. I’ve always enjoyed just doing interesting stuff with good people. And I’ve been very lucky to have been able to do that. Yeah, certainly nice that this is appreciated, but I’m not too sure about the pride thing.

BMR: Maybe I can rephrase the question. What’s the most valuable that you’ve got from your career?

PB: Well, probably it’s being able to communicate the climate problem. I spent the best part of ten years working on a film with a colleague, Simon Lamb, and it’s called ‘The Ice. Inside Story of Climate Science’. It won some awards. We also got a one-hour version, a one-hour and quarter version, and in 2015 it was broadcast on American public television four hundred times. This was a year of Paris. We sent two copies to Pope Francis. I didn’t get to meet him, but I did get to meet the Anglican Apostolic delegate to the Vatican. And I did get a message back from the Pope’s secretary. Simon is a remarkable photographer, and his colleague David Singleton, wonderful BBC producer, and we had a bit of a team here. We launched it on Earth Day in 2013 in 200 places around the world, 8 places in Antarctica. So that was quite satisfying. But – CO2 keeps rising. At least I feel like, you know, we’ve done something.

BMR: I mean, I’m convinced that you and the entire community have done a lot, but I also see that it’s very discouraging to see that things don’t change so substantially as to make a visible shift.

PB: Yeah. I think I’ve got to also mention that I really enjoyed being part of the Antarctic Research Center, here – I’m in my office. But I just never imagined that I could be as successful, and that that success comes from Tim Naish, my colleague who first went to Antarctica in 1998 during a joint project, very insightful. He’s now actually chair of the World Climate Research Program. And then, he passed it over to, after a few years, to Andrew Mackintosh. He’s gone to Sydney and it’s a program there. And now, Rob McKay, who is my last PhD student, who’s doing a remarkable job. He’s a good scientist, good with money, and good with people.

BMR: I had the chance to interview him a couple of weeks ago. It was great. Is there something that I have not asked you that you would like to explain?

PB: Nothing that comes to mind… Except, maybe, I do have a bit of pride in one aspect. I’m proud of having been on both sides of a major scientific debate, where I believed one side – it was called the Sirius Debate, named after Mount Sirius and deposit, and it used to be that people thought the Antarctic ice sheet was very long lived, but I astute discovered some diatoms only 3 million years old in these deposits, which implied the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet 3 million years ago, and which I really believed for about ten years, and published a paper in Nature, actually (laughs) supporting it. And, then I realized that the diatoms were so few in number, they must be contaminants. And so, I then spent several years explaining this. That’s pretty much how it’s panned out.

So, yeah, that was quite hard work, but… It’s given me an insight into how any of us can be utterly convinced that we have to follow the evidence, and when the evidence changes, we should change, too.

BMR: That’s definitely something unique.

PB: It’s not common. If only our leaders followed a greater respect for the evidence, instead of simply asserting that they are right, the world would be a different place. A better place, let’s be honest. Yes, we can do better.

BMR: Well, thank you very, very much. It was very nice meeting you.

PB: Well, I want to thank you first of all for the opportunity to talk. And I will be interested in the body of work that you’re putting together. Thank you.