A peek under the ice

It’s the last in our run of episodes about Antarctica. We are all back home, and we promise to stop bothering the poor continent.

Alan and Thom discuss returning to an inbox of horrors and readjusting to time away.

More cable cutting in our news updates, blobfish being voted fish of the year, and the tongue-eating louse potentially being invertebrate of the year. We don’t want to say we influence the news, but it seems a little spooky.

Thom couldn’t talk about it until after the press release, but the Schmidt Ocean Institute cruise he was on had to look at the seabed under a 150-meter-thick ice shelf right as it moved out of the way. We talked to the science leads on that cruise, Patricia Esquete and Sasha Montelli. We learned about the hydrography and glaciology of that region and then the seabed and communities that were revealed when the ice shelf moved away.

Kat and Thom updated us on what it was like to join a tourist expedition ship, and we grabbed a Coffee With Andrew to learn what it was like to dive almost 5km deep in a sub.

You’re bound to leave this episode with a watery smile!

We’re really trying to make this project self-sustaining, so we have started looking for ways to support the podcast. Here’s a link to our page on how to support us, from the free options to becoming a patron of the show. We want to say a huge thank you to those patrons who have already pledged to support us:

Ryker and Kerry Jowett

Thanks again for tuning in; we’ll deep-see you next time!

Check out our podcast merch here! Which now includes Alan’s beloved apron and a much anticipated new design...

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Reference list News

Cable cutting

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/545872/the-new-threat-to-the-undersea-cables-keeping-our-internet-going

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct7yqx

Blobfish fish of the year

https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360621538/worlds-ugliest-animal-named-new-zealands-fish-year

Invertebrate of the year

‘Unique and important’: Tongue-biting louse is wonderfully gruesome | Marine life | The Guardian

Interview

Smith, J.A., Graham, A.G.C., Post, A.L. et al. The marine geological imprint of Antarctic ice shelves. Nat Commun 10, 5635 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13496-5

Helen Amanda Fricker et al., Antarctica in 2025: Drivers of deep uncertainty in projected ice loss.Science387,601-609(2025).DOI:10.1126/science.adt9619 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt9619

Ingels, J., Aronson, R.B., Smith, C.R., Baco, A., Bik, H.M., Blake, J.A., Brandt, A., Cape, M., Demaster, D., Dolan, E. and Domack, E., 2021. Antarctic ecosystem responses following ice‐shelf collapse and iceberg calving: Science review and future research. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 12(1), p.e682.

https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1002/wcc.682

Challenger 150 - Home - Challenger 150

The Ocean Census | Discover Life

Other

Journal Minerva – Diving into Relevance: How Deep Sea Researchers Articulate Societal Relevance within their Epistemic Living Spaces

s11024-025-09577-z.pdf

Credits

Theme: Hadal Zone Express by Märvel

Logo image: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute

creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA

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