UKC

Well worth watching. Some stunning camera work.

In reply to Andy Mountains:
Bugger, i wanted to watch this and the wife has got bloody true blood on.

i think i need to take back control of the tv.

In reply to Andy Mountains:

Did you see them Kumar out when that roof started cracking. Scary noises

In reply to A Game of Chance:

When you say Kumar...?

Anyway - super scary stuff down in the bowels of the glacier, and in the ice lake.

However, for all that it was very spectacular, wasn't much of the science reasonably well-established? Isn't it already known that melt-water acts as a lubricant to accelerate glacier flow?

In reply to Andy Mountains: It was really good looking, but they could have turned the commentary down a little bit. And if I was being very unkind, I got the impression one or two of the scientists were hoping for a regular Springwatch/Coast/Time Team slot, so were polishing up their best TV boffin performances

In reply to Andy Mountains:

Spectacular filming and scary edge of your seat stuff at times.

One of my biggest nightmares in the Himalaya, after avalanches, was the thought of falling into a glacier stream and going down one of those ice sink holes....

In reply to A Game of Chance:

Kumar- is that an Indian rope trick?

In reply to Andy Mountains:

I thought it was a good programme but they really did try to over-dramatise it. All the dramatic music and the commentary kind of ruined it for me.

Still, incredible filming and scenery!

In reply to Hazelnuts:

I didn't understand the point of the mosquito biting exercise. it's a well known fact that mossies prefer some people to others. Having proved this by the shirts off competition what is the expedition doctor going to do with this knowledge?

In reply to Trangia:

Yeah exactly. They seemed to be trying to make everything appear as scientific as possible. There was nothing to gain from the mozzie excercise other than watching them get bitten and then declaring they'd made some sort of discovery.

In reply to toad:

And thats a problem because???

If you had the opportunity to make an impression to people who might employ you in the future would you not make the effort to impress them?

Close your green eye!

In reply to toad:

I agree, there have been a few series not unlike this in recent years that seem to end up being more about the crew than the subject. Also there wasn't anything groundbreaking about the work they were doing; almost seems more like an expensive jolly. It'd have been much better if there had more icebergs and less people.

In reply to tony:

I thought that. Some of the theories seemed obvious and I was sure I'd heard them before, stated as fact.

Regardless, it was very enjoyable to watch.

Si

In reply to Murko Fuzz:

Yeah I'd totally agree. And they were describing some of the icebergs that broke off as 'megabergs'. In comparison to some of the icebergs in the Antarctic they are Tiny!! Some of the icebergs in the antarctic are bigger than island and they were describing these little ones as 'megabergs'!

In reply to toad:

I actually think it's hard to fault the programme in anyway. I'd replace the One Show with this and extend it to 830 every night.

In reply to Hazelnuts:

But I think there is a distinction; the giant Antarctic icebergs break off ice sheets floating on the sea (none of these in the arctic), whereas these arctic ones break off glaciers.

In reply to Trangia:

That's always been a nightmare for me too!

Great programme.

In reply to Saor Alba:

For me, it was an enjoyable watch, but done slightly differently could have been really wonderful.

P.S. I'd rather watch a programme about belly button fluff than the One Show.

In reply to Andy Mountains:

Next installment is on Thursday

In reply to Andy Mountains:

Enjoyable programme. Though like some others here I would question how cutting edge some of the science is. The fact that they are undercut by the seawater I found interesting, and the diving and abseiling had me truly gripped. I agree that the presentation of some of the scientists got a bit annoying. I would probably rather have seen it anchored by Chris whatshisface, just to give it some sense of continuity.

And the mossie 'experiment' really was utterly unecessary. The programme producers had clearly taken a very good medic who was very media-friendly and felt they needed him to do 'something' in front of camera (shame, as he seems like a really nice bloke - hope they can find something more enlightening for him in the next episode)

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

You can still watch it on iplayer, I just have.

In reply to slacky:

On the other hand, in support of the OP, one could get the impression(based on that response) that you might be one of those pushy people that think what is good for them is most important (and not the best outcome for programme and the viewers in this context)

I could be wrong of course, as I don't know you, and I'm going on a post.

In reply to Andy Mountains: Seemed a bit contrived at times. Why didn`t they chuck some dye into the glacier to track the streams rather than a load of orange balls?

In reply to feepole:

I assume that they were adding some meat to the bones of our understanding of glaciers. How fast they flow into the sea is important re climate change and coming up with an accurate model of water flow etc needs that sort of detail.

Anyone else think that the diver must have been lacking any sort of imagination? I'm thinking that no normal person would swim down an enormous plug hole in a glacial lake when the plug could drop out at any moment.

In reply to Chris H:

I haven't really done any dye tracing (I've watched!) but you need specialist equipment to detect the dye (you can't see it at the dilution it would be at) and I think that equipment would need to be quite close to that very big , very unstable ice front

In reply to Removed User:

I might be wrong, but I would be stunned if they didn't already keep regular track of the flowrates of all major glaciers around the Arctic...... I could be wrong though.

The side sonar work and sea temperature analysis I did think was genuinely interesting...... though given the obvious dangers (or certainly how they were presented in the programme)I would have thought carrying this out by some remotely controlled vessel may have been a safer option!

In reply to toad: Cavers used to chuck a load of fluorescine dye down holes and see which rivers turned bright green! Not a very er green thing to do?

In reply to feepole:

Oh I'm sure they do. I'm just thinking that folk will be trying to build mathematical models of glaciers so they can predict better what happens as the world's temperature rises. I suspect that people have been doing this and found that their calcs don't match reality and this work was done to try and figure out why.

Just speculation though, I don't have any specialist knowledge of this sort of thing.

In reply to Chris H:

I understood those balls had a transmitter in them so it shouldn't have been too difficult to get fix on them once they emerged into the sea rather than trying to spot them visually.

I don't think they discovered much that was startlingly new to science. The fact that glaciers are lubricated by melt water running under them has been known for years, as has the fact that glacial lakes suddenly drain when their sink hole opens. Other than for getting some spectacular shots of the guy in a precarious position at the top of a crumbing 100m plus ice cliff why was it necessary to put the monitor right at the edge, when it was going to collapse at any second? Monitors at various points right up the glacier would have given them the flow rate, as would marker poles monitored by regular triangulation, something glacialogists have been doing for decades. What was the point of abbing into a large sink hole to discover a lateral passage - again phenomena which have been known about for decades?

The only thing which I believe was new was the discovery of the deep undercut under the ice cliffs, and as someone said above much closer observations could have been made without outrageous risk to the mariners by using an unmanned remote controlled boat, or even a remote controlled submarine.

But even so stunning filming.

In reply to Chris H:

It's a lot greener than chucking plastics full of electronics and batteries in! I once died a huge stretch of the Aire in Skipton bright green trying to trace a drain:
Me: See anything yet?
Mate at manhole in next field:No, chuck some more in.
Repeat until out of dye...

Back to the program- I enjoyed the usual game of label spotting. I could just imagine one of the female presenters looking in the mirror
"Red Arcteryx top worked for Alice Roberts, it'll work for me!"

In reply to Ann S: Brilliant :0)

In reply to stujamo:

I thought it generally good but do find the emphasis on 'danger' a bit irritating. I wonder if the BBC with all its obsession on H&S really had anyone doing anything not scoped out as reasonably safe. Just hamming it up a bit, which is an unfortunate distraction from the real star of the show - nature.

Anyway, one of the cameramen is doing some talks now and for next few weeks which may be of interest if they are nearby...

http://dougallan.com/#talks

In reply to Andy Mountains:

I found last nights program about landing on the iceberg (actually I would have called it a big ice flow - there are loads around Antarctica which are bigger - far less interesting and I didn't really gather what "scientific" evidence they collected? There are hardly going to get much in a two week expedition.

The hasty retreat from the flow when it started cracking was a bit dramatic. Lots of nice films of polar bears lazily watching them.

All in all rather disappointing viewing....

In reply to Trangia:


Good grief, you have pretty high expectations!

I don't know enough about the subject to be able to tell if it was new information or not, but the stuff about the warm surface layer being important in the process of breaking the berg up was interesting

Yes, its entertainment rather than hard science, but watching a real scientific expedition would be a bit dull, as they repeated the same observations at several dozen points around the berg. As an edited highlights type exercise I thought it was pretty good

I challenge you to find anything on mainstream telly in the last month that's been better...!

Cheers

Gregor

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:
>

Well, I was contrasting it with the dramatic, if OTT, filming of Tuesday's program!

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs: Agreed.

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

Agreed #2

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

Sorry just noticed your challenge!

I'd nominate the first program.

In reply to Trangia:

i thought they were about equal- and if anything they did more actual science on this one, though i agree with you in part, the abseil into the moulin on tuesday and the large calving incident were more spectacular than anything last night

overall, really good tv across both programmes, the bbc comes up with the goods again...

cheers
gregor

In reply to JinjaCoo: agreed, but I was referring to the witticism ;0)