Frozen Planet

We had a blast filming with BBC Frozen Planet on Erebus 2010. I'm the guy rappelling and wriggling around with the Peli case, Nial Peters is the other one.

• Scientists are NOT "investigating a remote but tantalizing possibility that the crystals are formed by specialized bacteria" (2:20). Here's what happened. At that point nobody knew what microbes lived in the caves, and I was collecting biological samples from all surfaces in hopes of finding out. As I was collecting samples from an ice crystal, I was making chitchat to the BBC director who was there in the cave with me, telling him about how Pseudomonas syringae can nucleate snow. Months later, he emailed me asking if bacteria might cause the ice crystals to grow. I replied that no, there's no reason to think that's what's going on. When they sent us a pre-screening copy of Frozen Planet I sent a strongly worded protest but they wouldn't change it.
• At 0:46 you can hear me say "up on the wall there somewhere" which is audio from a totally different scene -- I was discussing where to put a survey point in Hut Cave.
• BBC made me do the rappel into Alien Cave (0:40) at least 10 times to get the shot right climbing up the rope each time. They kept telling me to "kick more snow down"
• One of the times we threw the rope in into the cave, it knocked off a giant icicle which hit the cameraman directly in the groin.
• The snow slide at 1:04 serves no purpose other than the BBC thought it would make a fun shot. They were right!