Dr. Brian Keating
speaker
1,291 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Sep 2025
Dr. Brian Keating’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Sometimes it could take three weeks due to the weather down there. It's the most violent weather, most winds, turbulence, everything hostile. But that's a cakewalk compared to the Explorer Shackleton. Scott and, of course, Amundsen. So the quest to get to the South Pole first, which is South Pole, I should say, for people that aren't familiar, Antarctica is the seventh continent.
It's the last one to be discovered. It was only really discovered. It was thought to be there because it was thought that to balance the continents in the northern hemisphere, you needed a massive counterweight in the southern. It's so stupid. But anyway, it wasn't discovered until… 1900s, really, that they truly existed. And then it wasn't explored until 10 or 12 years later.
And the quest to get to the South Pole, it was the last unexplored, you know, non-filled in part of the map of the Earth. So the quest to get there was like going to the moon. And in fact, it exactly parallels the moon in that once it was reached for the first time, nobody cared to go back again, you know, for many, many years.
And we're only going back to the moon now, 60 years later, 50 years later. after Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 missions, right? So getting there and setting that bar, right, and making that accomplishment, sometimes that's the extent of it. Like when you have that dopamine hit of being the first to get somewhere. Scott was a British scientist and explorer. And Amundsen was just an explorer.
Amundsen, Roald Amundsen, he tried to get to the North Pole first. He lost. Somebody else beat him. And he said, well, I'm going to keep going with this skis and sled dog team that I have. And he literally went to the South Pole, 180 degrees around. So the poles are the two endpoints of the Earth's axis of rotation. There's a North Pole. There's no land there. There's no continent there.
There's ice there and Santa is there. Exactly, right? And then the South Pole is a continent. I brought a piece of it here that I collected probably illegally from Antarctica. I'll show it to you later. It's just rocks, right? So if you drill under the ice in Antarctica, you come to a continent. That's the difference between the North and South Poles.
But the South Pole is 700 nautical miles from the coast of Antarctica. The closest point of approach in the 1900s was you take a ship from New Zealand You sail due south. There's no other way to go. And you come to the continental shelf. The coastline is called McMurdo Station, which was just basically there's some sea lines there and that's it and orcas and penguins and nothing else at that time.
Now there's a whole research station. And then they got on skis and skied up 9,000 feet from sea level to 9,000 feet where the polar plateau flattens out. And they got to the South Pole and Amundsen got there three weeks before Scott. And Scott was this British naturalist, like a Darwin, but also he was a scientist plus an explorer. So he wanted to collect samples and he found flora and fauna.
There's not much rocks, meteorites. He actually discovered meteorites in Antarctica. Incredible scientist. But because he was a scientist, it cost him his life. Because he was carrying all this scientific equipment and scientific samples, and he had to ski up them. He would find it, and he's like, I'm not coming back the same way that you got there because of the wind patterns.
So he knew he'd never come back, so he couldn't leave it there. So he had to carry extra food, fuel, and men dedicated to it. Oh, and by the way, the Norwegian team, Amundsen was Norwegian. And they used sled dogs for two reasons. One, they conserved calories. They provided propulsion. And then they provided a tasty snack once you got to the South Pole.
Because once you get to the South Pole, you can ski downhill 9,000 feet to sea level, basically. And so they ate—British would refuse to do that. So they knew they couldn't eat their dogs. And they had dogs, but they wouldn't eat them. So they were the sled dogs. And when they got to the South Pole— They came within three or four kilometers, and it's totally flat like this table.
The South Pole looks like this. Go out in the middle of the ocean, freeze it, paint it white, and that's what it looks like. It's white, 360 degrees around. It's the most boring place on Earth, literally, and I've been there. So you can see things really far away. He got there. He got within three kilometers, and he saw something on the horizon. He's like, oh, bleep. And it was a Norwegian flag.
Now, can you imagine Neil Armstrong steps out of the Eagle and he lands on a Soviet flag? I mean, it would be like the most crushing. It was the most, I think, the most depressing moment in human history to come so far. And he actually said, he said, great God, this is a horrible place. And all the more so for having reached it without the benefit of priority.
So the king and queen, they were depending on him to make the first, you know, for king and country, right? Seeing the Norwegian flag. So what did he do? He was a good scientist. He said, maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they're off by 10 feet. I can say, no, they were right. The Norwegians got there first.
And because he got there three weeks later in the middle of January, by the time he turned around, the winds had died down. They were no longer at his back. He was skiing. He had no food. He died about three weeks later or three months later in March. So his body was later recovered. And it wasn't reported back to England for another six months. So they gave their lives for science, for discovery.
And to come up short to be second, it must have been the most crushing defeat in history. Wow. But it happens to be the best place to do astronomy in the world. And you get there by flying to Santiago, Chile? No. First you go to Christchurch, New Zealand. You go to Auckland, LAX, Auckland, Auckland to Christchurch. And then the U.S.
has a charter with the New Zealand Air Force, and we give them C-130 cargo planes. We have our own C-17 cargo planes, the jet-powered ones. Unfortunately, I got the C-130s, which is a four-prop plane.
And I was on a plane that had the entire winter – summer supply – sorry, the entire winter supply of bananas on this cargo plane, which is as big as this room, the cargo hold, 12 by 12 times 50 feet long. And it was filled with bananas. And at first you're like, oh, cool. This is great. Until you realize there's no bathroom on the plane.
There's just literally a five-gallon bucket and a shower curtain. There are no windows on it because why do paratroopers need windows? And then there's enormous crates of bananas. There's 12 tons of bananas. I have not touched a banana in 12 years because of that. I know I'm missing potassium or whatever.
But the point is you land on the coast and then if you're lucky, you take a flight the next day and it's a ski plane. It's the only plane that the US does not export. In other words, we export the F-35. This is a strategic asset that we will not export. So it's hard to get to.
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