Into the Ice

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Introduce yourself, will you? I'm Jill Heinerth, and I am an underwater explorer. What a thing to be able to call yourself an explorer That's quite a, how do you get, what credentials do you need to be able to call yourself an explorer? You know, it's funny because when I had my very first swimming lessons Apparently, like, you're supposed to jump in the pool and splash around as a young, you know, infant in the pool But I actually would exhale and swim down to the bottom and touch the tiles on the floor of the pool And the instructors were a little alarmed that maybe I wasn't strong enough to keep myself on the surface, but I think I was just exploring. Jill Heinerth was born in Toronto and says that when she was growing up, she wanted to be an astronaut. I grew up in the 60s and watched the Apollo missions. And I thought, oh my gosh, I want to do that. And my mom sat me down and said, oh dear, you know, we don't have a Canadian space program and there are no women astronauts. But I still had that intense desire to explore. And we would watch Jacques Cousteau on Sunday nights on TV. And I thought, ah, you know, there's an unexplored world. And I guess I was just chasing that dream. This is a dangerous profession. Mm-hmm. It is. Some people say it's the most dangerous profession. I've certainly lost more than 100 friends throughout the course of my career who have lost their lives on cave dives or technical dives, doing the work or the hobby that they love. Cave diving is the most advanced and technical kind of diving. Oftentimes, you have to go deep under the water to even find the opening to the cave. And when you're ready to swim back to the surface, you don't just go up. You have to retrace the way you came in, because you often can't see sunlight. So much could go wrong. Your gear could malfunction. You could get turned around in a passage and lose track of the way you came in. Cave diving is so exceptionally dangerous that Jill says divers usually can't get life insurance. For her, she says, the beauty contradicts the danger. She's one of the most experienced cave divers on the planet. She says that where many people feel fear and claustrophobia, she feels excited and curious. I've never been diving in my whole life. I should. I think this is an experience we all should have. It's extraordinary. It's, for me anyway, almost a back-to-the-womb sort of experience. It's very comforting. Jill Heinert has made it her life's work to explore places most of us will never have the chance to see. She's an explorer working with National Geographic and is the first ever explorer in residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. In the year 2000, Jill and her then-husband and dive partner Paul Heinert came up with an idea. They'd been looking at satellite photos of the largest body of floating ice in the world, the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It's about the size of France. It was developing gigantic cracks, and she wondered if it was possible to dive into one of those cracks in the ice. And then a chunk broke off completely, creating the largest iceberg in recorded history. It was almost the size of Jamaica. Scientists named it B-15, and it was moving. We pitched to National Geographic that we would go down there, intercept that iceberg, see if it dragged with it all the ecology of Antarctica. Would it become this biological engine that would drift off into the ocean? And we proposed to be the first people ever to cave dive inside an iceberg. She assembled a team of the most accomplished divers in the world and prepared to go to a place that no one had ever seen before. She knew it would be her most challenging dive yet and the most dangerous. Her life was in very real danger three times under this iceberg. and she would be saved by an animal so small, so transparent, that you can see its heart beating right through it. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. We didn't know what these environments would be like. Would they be divable? Would they be too dangerous? Would they be ever-shifting? It was all new, but, you know, there's no handbook written for the first person to do something, and so we just kept making the best choices we could each day as we learned more and more about these incredibly dangerous environments. They left for Antarctica from New Zealand and traveled for 12 days by boat across the Southern Ocean. The boat was called the Braveheart. Jill says that the Southern Ocean is one of the most terrifying seas in the world because it gets hit by massive storms that build up because there's no land for them to bump into and slow down. They just get stronger and stronger. She says that the wind was incredible and that the waves were 60 feet high. Their boat became coated in so much ice that it almost tipped over. But when we saw the first iceberg, it was like a big celebration. First we saw it on the radar, this small, you know, blip dot on the radar, and the captain all called us up to the wheeled house, and he's like, here, we're entering the realm of ice. And as we got closer and closer, this white spot on the horizon got bigger and bigger. And it was this pinnacle, this mountain of ice slicing into the sky. And it was beautiful. In fact, I shed a tear. It seems weird. But it was like, oh my gosh, we finally made it. We finally made it into the realm of ice. And there were a couple of penguins, just tiny black spots at first, but as we got closer, it was so exciting. She remembers that her heart was pounding. She says, I had a feeling of reverence. She knew she was looking at something that would never be the same again And it was beautiful It was this you know this ice cream cake sticking out of the ocean against the backdrop of the clearest skies I had ever seen. The dive team was Jill, Paul Heinert, and the diver and documentarian Wes Skiles, and on the boat, a support crew and a film crew. Their trip would last 60 days. They would live on the boat for the whole time, returning there after each dive trip into the iceberg. When they arrived at the iceberg, they first had to find a place to anchor the boat. But anchoring to an iceberg isn't like pulling up to a dock. The iceberg is moving, constantly drifting north, at about six miles per hour. When they did find a place to anchor, they started looking for cracks in the iceberg that were wide enough for a person to swim into. The plan was to do an initial dive to check things out. They knew the water temperature was about 28 degrees Fahrenheit, and they wanted to do a test to make sure their equipment would function normally in such cold water. I was scared, you know, which is good. I mean, when you're scared, you care about the outcome of your decisions, and you tend to be very judicious about your choices. So I slowly swam into this opening, and there was this cavernous void with a corner that was full of small fish and krill, this small shrimp-like creature, and a lot of plankton. So it was different than I expected. I kind of expected it just to be water and ice. I didn't expect all the life, but here we were, witnessing the very base of the Antarctic food chain, all hiding away in this cavernous void in the ice. The Southern Ocean in Antarctica is home to more than 220 varieties of fish and aquatic life. There are the penguins and sea lions that we know about, and then there are all the other creatures that are too tiny or too hidden to be on most of our radars. Unless you're there, at the bottom of the ocean, at the bottom of an iceberg. Jill says they went so deep, 130 feet down, that they pushed the very edges for such cold water, and saw things like comb jellyfish, and sea pigs, and sandhoppers, and things called feather stars, which look kind of just like how they sound. I mean, what a thing to be at the bottom of the world and in an iceberg and see these animals Yeah, the most remarkable thing that I recall I mean, there were remarkable things that happened everywhere I mean, I'd be in the middle of slushy chunks of ice and then suddenly out of the corner of my eye, boom just see a leopard seal dart by and disappear There were those fleeting moments that were exciting. But one of the most beautiful things that I think I have ever seen was when we entered a crack in the ice, didn't know what we were going to encounter, and we followed the crack down, down, down, and eventually found the spot where this iceberg had tripped up on the seafloor about 130 feet deep. and I thought, wow, this is really interesting and I looked to my side and I saw a passage descending into the berg and the floor of the tunnel was the seafloor of the ocean and the ice was white and blue, all shades of blue and at times transparent clear like a window but where it had caught up on the seafloor everything on the seafloor was yellow and golden and red. They were filter-feeding organisms, animals, sprouting up from the seafloor with this riot of color. And the contrast between both the texture of the ice and the texture of the animals and the colors just blew me away. I was transfixed by what I was seeing. I had seen nothing like it ever in my life. How quiet is it when you dive? I mean, I know you've got the air going, but how quiet is it under the water? Well, I'm using a life support system called a rebreather, so it's different than normal scuba. With normal scuba, it's kind of noisy with the bubbles. Especially if you're in a cave or under the ice, the bubbles can sound like a freight train racing across the ceiling. They're very loud. But on a rebreather, all you hear is your own respiration in and out, kind of that Darth Vader sort of sensation with a few little clicks of oxygen injection. So it's actually quite quiet on the rebreather. They'd planned to never stay in the water for more than an hour. It was too dangerous for their bodies and for their equipment. So they started heading back towards the boat. I heard these rumbling sounds and cracks and shakes, some that I could even feel inside my sternum in my chest. But I just thought, it's the ice, you know. But the first time I turned around and swam out, the doorway that we had gone into had changed. And I recognized very quickly that the doorway of the cave that we'd gone into had closed. It was now blocked with these giant pieces of ice. And the groaning and the cracks and the sounds that I felt right inside my body had been ice that had broken away and blocked the doorway to the cave. and I thought, oh no, you know, what are we going to do? Is there a way for you to talk to the people on the boat? Is there any? No, we had no communication with the people who were topside waiting for us and in fact they had seen these massive pieces of ice calve away and it had actually sent out this huge wave that had almost displaced them right out of the Zodiac, the inflatable boat that they were in. And they had thought that we were now trapped, and there was nothing that they could do. We had no way to tell them that we were okay. We were just finding a way out. And we did find a way out. And when we eventually caught up with them and got back into the Zodiac, they were sure that we'd been killed, and were so relieved that we'd made it back to the boat. What they learned was that even more than they'd planned for, the environment under the iceberg was always changing. And they just couldn't plan for what they couldn't plan for. But Jill says she remembers thinking, okay, I guess I knew more than yesterday. We'll give it another shot. So they decided to try again. We were swimming into the iceberg, and one of the things we should have maybe paid more attention to was the fact that all of these filter-feeding animals that are on the seafloor, they're like little miniature palm trees or Christmas trees and they're anchored to the bottom. And the animals themselves actually sprout from inside of a calcareous hard rock tube that they've created on their own. It's like a shell almost. And they sprout out of that with these fronds that are like feathers. And they collect things that drift by them in the water column. So small microorganisms that they can eat. And when the current is fresh and running along, then they have lots to eat. And when it gets too strong, they'll retract into that hard rock case to hide until the currents lessen. So we should have noticed this kind of riot of feeding that was occurring, but very quickly the current accelerated. And when I went to turn around to escape back the way we had come from it was only then that it was apparent that it had accelerated to a degree that I was unable to swim against The current had become so strong that it was pushing the divers back towards the seafloor and away from the exit. And really, those animals may have given me the clues earlier, but I wasn't paying enough attention. We'll be right back. Jill and Paul Heinert were on their second dive into the B-15 iceberg in Antarctica when they realized that the ocean currents were pushing them away from the surface. Wonder in these times when you're underneath the ice and it's not going right, and you're trying not to panic, but how do you not, and you see these little fish swimming by your head, completely calm and unaware that something bad is potentially happening, what the thought is? Yeah, we have to keep the emotions away from hijacking our brains. You know, when something goes wrong, we have to push away those emotions and stay pragmatic and observant so that we can take the next best step forward, you know, to get ourselves out of a problem. And that means, you know, being one with and understanding everything that's around you, like those filter feeding organisms or little fish. And I was particularly interested in these little things called ice fish. I'd been noticing them on every dive. Sometimes an ice fish is called a ghost fish. Their blood is clear. They have no red blood cells and no hemoglobin. Their blood acts like a kind of antifreeze. They only live in the southern ocean, which used to be warmer. About 30 million years ago, the ocean's temperature dropped. Most fish left for warmer waters or died off. The ice fish stayed and adapted. They were transparent. I could see their internal organs inside their bodies. And they would hide inside the ice in these little thumb-sized burrows that they'd created when the current would get strong. And I'd seen similar things happen in other dives in other parts of the world where, you know, fish hide in little cracks and crevices and burrows when the current and the tide gets too strong. They make a little house for themselves so they're safe and they can stay right there, not get pushed around. Yeah, these little ice fish create their own little burrows. And when you're swimming along an ice wall, you sometimes just see their little eyes, their little head poking out. And, you know, when they're ready to come out and feed, they'll leave the burrows. But then they'll retreat back into a place where they can be, I guess, insulated, but also protected from being swept away. in the current. Jill says she and Paul finally found their way out of the iceberg by, as she says, going with the flow of the current and looking for a different path out than the way they'd come in, which meant that when they finally got their heads above water, they had no idea where they were or where their boat was. She says that when they surfaced, there was ice all around them, higher than their heads, and they didn't know how the boat could find them. She remembers not knowing how long she'd been in the water. She says it could have been 15 minutes, or it could have been an hour. And then, she saw the boat come around the side of the iceberg and was able to yell out. This whole trip was shaping up to be much harder and much more dangerous than they'd expected. But they'd traveled all this way for a reason, to document a world no one had ever seen before. The boat was running out of fuel, and if they were going to go down again, they realized they were going to have to hurry. The three divers, Jill, Paul, and Wes, packed their cameras and prepared to go further into the iceberg than they ever had before. And once again, very suddenly, the current shifted and accelerated, and I had a small pinhole leak in my dry glove. So cold water was getting through the waterproof membrane right down to my skin, you know, chilling my hand. And it was extraordinarily painful. So I realized two things were going on. My hand was getting beyond cold and the current was suddenly getting stronger. So I turned to my dive partners and gave them the thumbs up signal that we use to indicate it's time to turn around. And that thumbs up signal is like no options, were going back. So we all turned around, and within minutes, the current was so strong that we couldn't swim against it. And we started to dive our hands into the seafloor and try and pull our way along. It was like trying to stand up against a hurricane-force wind. My arms are just quivering. I'm working so hard to pull and pull and pull to get closer to that crack that would lead back to the surface. And I remember thinking, we're not getting out of here. We're not getting out of here today. And there's nobody to rescue us. She remembers thinking, the most qualified cave diving team in the world, with the experience and skills to rescue us, is right here, trapped in the B-15 iceberg. She knew that every minute they spent getting sucked away from the opening meant a minute less of oxygen for them to use, trying to get out. The dive was only supposed to last an hour, but it was clear now that it was going to be much longer. And her hand, with that pinhole leak in her glove, was getting colder and colder. Oh, it just felt like a piece of wood on the end of my arm. I could no longer feel it, you know, and I was just pushing it down into sort of the doughy seafloor to try and find something that would help me pull forward. And you knew that if you let go, if you couldn't hold on, that you would be sucked by the current to a place that would not allow you to get back up to the surface. Yeah, there were times where I was trying to get a good handhold and my hand would just get raked backwards through the mud. And I'm kicking with everything I have and I'm pulling with everything I have and I'm not even moving an inch at a time. And my partner with the biggest camera was yelling, help me with the camera. And I'm just thinking, forget the camera. We're going to die. And it was terrifying. It would have been so easy to give up. But if I had just let go, I would have been swept away. And that would have been the end. And so I kept fighting just an inch at a time and fighting and fighting and fighting. And we finally got back to that entrance crack where we're 130 feet from the surface and we still have a long ascent. And now the current is pressing down from above. It's a vertical current that's pouring down through this crack and getting sucked into the iceberg. and I can't think of how I'm going to be able to get my way up this slippery ice face back to the surface. And I thought, we've gotten all the way to daylight and I'm still going to die here inside the ice with my partners. And then I remembered the ice fish and I thought, they may be my rescue, these tiny little thumb-sized fish. And I thought, the burrows. I'll use the burrows. These ice fish burrows their little eyes poking out from the ice looking at me almost you know mocking me I thought okay this is it And I stuffed my finger into one of these holes and thought I'll use these like a handhold, evict the little fish, push my finger in there and pull myself up this slippery face of ice until I can escape the current. And soon it worked, one finger at a time. I started pulling myself up and pulling myself up and holding myself in place. And my two partners followed. She inched her way up, hole by hole, from 130 feet below the surface, stopping every 10 feet to acclimate to the pressure. It's critically important to allow your body to readjust to the pressure much in the same way that, you know, bubbles are held within a bottle of soda pop bubbles of nitrogen gas are actually held within the tissues of our body. And we need to basically take the cap off the soda pop bottle very, very slowly. Because if you shake up that soda pop bottle and release the cap, gas under pressure will come out of the body's tissues and erupt, you know, end up in places where they shouldn't be in your body and cause a condition called decompression sickness. How hard is that? You've just gotten yourself somewhat safe. I can imagine all you want in the world is just get out of there. And now you've got to slowly make your way back up. Yeah, in an emergency, a diver who's like a technical diver has to understand that even when they see the sunlight, even when they see the hull of the boat over their heads, they can't go up. There's still an artificial ceiling. And so no matter what happens, you must figure out a way to deal with it underwater. So even though my hand was feeling half frozen and I didn't know whether I'd be doing permanent damage to my hand, I knew that I had to stay under as long as I possibly could to avoid getting bent. What happened when you got to the surface, finally? Well, I remember swimming back to the boat and grabbing onto the swim ladder. And the chief scientist from the boat leaned over and he sort of had this sort of dark, ominous chuckle. And he looked down at me. He's like, what happened? Our one-hour dive had turned into a three-hour dive. We'd been two hours overdue, so everybody on board was terrified that we'd been killed. And I said, Greg, you know, the cave tried to keep us today. And I was, you know, quite sober in my recognition that I was very lucky to be climbing that ladder back onto the boat. That same night, safely back on the boat, eating dinner, Jill heard someone shouting from the top deck. And thought, oh my God, what is that? And the entire iceberg that we had just been inside of was cracking and breaking and dissolving into these huge chunks of ice, calving away and turning into slush and chunks as far as the eye could see. It threw up this enormous wave. It ripped us off of our anchorage. And I was just speechless. The very cave that I'd been inside of was gone in a matter of minutes. A large section of the B-15 iceberg, more than a mile square of ice, had disappeared into the Southern Ocean. An entire ecosystem broke up in that moment, and I don't know what happened to the life. I don't know what happened to everything, you know, penguins on top of the ice, leopard seals swimming through the ice. Where would they go now? Did this, you know, biological engine that carried all this life from Antarctica that was now breaking into pieces, you know, where would the life go? I don't know the answer to that. They'd captured on film something no one had seen before, the largest iceberg in the world from the inside. And now it was something no one would ever see again. B-15 has continued to break apart. By 2018, there are only four pieces left. The iceberg has drifted so far that it's entered much warmer waters and has begun to melt. Scientists predict that the whole thing will be gone in a number of years. NASA scientist Kelly Brunt has said that as icebergs melt, they, quote, tend to pond with water, which then works its way through the iceberg like a set of knives. Do you ever think maybe I've tested my luck enough? Oh, yeah. I mean, I have to have these discussions with my husband. He'll sit down and say, when are you going to stop? Haven't you done enough? You know, what's next? And I have to keep asking those questions. Is it worth it? is what I'm doing positively impacting our understanding of our planet or of wildlife or of human physiology? Is it worth the risk? I'm taking the risk for far more than myself. I'm taking the risk for my husband and my family and my community. If I get lost in an underwater cave and die, somebody's going to try to retrieve my body. So it's a risk I'm taking for them, too. I always have to weigh those risks. And as I get older, I certainly think about that more. Maybe the wisdom of age, maybe more of a sense of invincibility. And I have to be careful. Isn't it so funny? The most dangerous place you could possibly imagine an iceberg in Antarctica is a safe home for others. Oh, it's so remarkable. I mean, I wondered how do these animals live in the ice? You know, do they have antifreeze in their blood? You know, that's one of the questions that scientists were interested in. How do these little fish survive in such a harsh environment? Or, you know, we even see birds on the icebergs, you know, little gorgeous white tiny birds that will, you know, land on the ice as you're sitting down beside you and you see their little heart rates just blazing away. And you think, gosh, how do they live in such an environment? This Is Love is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Learn more about the show on our website, thisislovepodcast.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisislovepodcast.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. You can listen to This Is Love, Criminal, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes, access to virtual live events, chat rooms with me and your fellow listeners, and more. Sign up at patreon.com slash criminal. We're on Facebook and Instagram at This Is Love Show. This Is Love is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love. Thank you.