A glimpse at what kept Peter Blake so awestruck

By FIONA RAE

There's an initial shock at seeing Sir Peter Blake setting off on his penultimate journey to Antarctica in tonight's Heart of Ice: Blakexpeditions.

For those of us who never met him, it's eerily as if he is still here.

But after a while the jovial New Zealander with a passion for the planet has us as awestruck as he was on his encounter with the frozen continent.

Sir Peter and his crew set off in January last year from Ushuaia in Argentina, the most southern city in the world and the closest to the Antarctic Peninsula.

This two-part documentary shows the start of a five-year voyage schedule that would have taken them around the world on a quest to, as Sir Peter says, "wake people up to what's happening".

Unlike many nature documentaries, Heart of Ice has an explicit message about the world's environment.

Antarctica is described as living barometer of change. As a pristine environment, the changes in global temperatures are obvious and devastating.

But first, the Seamaster, a remarkable vessel, has to traverse the treacherous Southern Ocean. As it heads into Antarctic waters, the crew must look out for icebergs and, at one stage of the journey, a crew member is on deck during the night pushing ice spurs away from the boat.

The documentary also comes with a few whizzy computer graphics and explanations from Sir Peter: how Antarctica was formed from Gondwanaland, how it is a component of the Earth's thermostat, sending cooling water out into the oceans.

The Seamaster, with its reinforced hull shaped so it will be squeezed upwards should it be trapped in ice, will travel to 70 degrees south, further than any other vessel before.

In tonight's first part, however, there is beautiful wildlife and underwater flora to be filmed. A crew member snorkels with seals, and humpback whales come over to have a look at the Seamaster, to the crew's awe and delight.

There are little penguins and seals taking advantage of the short summer to breed and pack on the blubber in time for the winter temperatures. And there is footage of a dangerous leopard seal snatching a tasty penguin and cruelly playing cat and mouse.

Still, even here there are signs of the destruction of the past: whale bones litter a harbour floor and a sealing boat rots quietly on shore. Sir Peter explains how the seals in the Shetland Islands were nearly made extinct in three short years in the early 1800s.

blakexpeditions.com is a good source of information for this trip, including a diary of the journey (but be warned, it is stuffed full of annoying Flash graphics that your computer may not enjoy).

According to the website, the crew intends to carry on the work begun here and is in England planning at present. For now the documentary is ample tribute to a man who saw a job and went out and did it.

* Heart of Ice: Blakexpeditions TV One, 8.30 pm

Peter Blake, 1948-2001