Sir David Attenborough at sea
RRS Sir David Attenborough is a ship worthy of the great man’s name
Five years ago, I stood on the largely disused Government Jetty in Stanley, and watched the Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross “steam” up and down the harbour, “Land of Hope and Glory” playing, honk its horn a few times for the gathered onlookers, then sail off into the vast South Atlantic as it said farewell to the Falklands for the final time.
“Well, that was a nice thing,” I thought, “which I will never see again.”
And I was right — until the other week I was invited to check out the JCR’s successor ship, the RRS Sir David Attenborough.
This is the sort of thing which, charmingly, happens quite often in the Falklands Islands.
The Falklands are the official Antarctic Gateway, and the SDA joins a notable lineage of British Antarctic Survey vessels, dating back to 1947, which have proven critical to the study of our planet — not least the enormous amounts of water on it, liquid or otherwise, and what lives in those waters — as well as the resupply and maintenance of bases in and around Britain’s Antarctic Territory.
RRS Sir David Attenborough is just beginning its operational life, but it has already been involved in the study of changing polar systems and their global consequences. For example, it has taken samples from around the largest iceberg in the world, to assess what kinds of life can form around it. (Always good to hear about a great British ship having a productive experience with an iceberg.)
For decades now BAS vessels have been registered in Stanley, and the SDA is no different — if you ignore the stratospheric, space-age improvements over all its predecessors. An ice-breaker with nigh-on silent engines, a floating logistics hub bristling with high-end scientific gadgetry, it is state-of-the art — literally the Rolls-Royce of research ships — and was purpose designed and built “to push the boundaries of polar science and exploration”.
The colouring-in sheet I was given reliably informs me it is as long as 10 buses (129m; we don’t have buses in the Falklands), and weighs the same as 1,400 elephants (10,400 tonnes; ditto – elephant seals… but no elephants).
It can cruise unsupported for up to two months at a time, transporting people and equipment to and from Antarctica (and the Arctic, come to that), and has a full-time crew of about 30, plus around twice that number of multinational scientists and support staff, harvesting data on everything from the ocean bed to the upper atmosphere.
Costing a cool £200m, the ship comes tricked out with cranes, drones, submersibles, and other side-quest vehicles with storied names like Terror, Erebus, and Boaty McBoatface. Just one of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles on the SDA can roam 6,000km on its own, and to a depth of 6km at that!
It also has a helideck — my daughter’s main interest in which was whether she could do a cartwheel on it.
All of this enables the SDA to conduct world-leading research of a kind simply not possible on land, revolutionising our understanding of the planet, and directly influencing policy with regard to how best to protect it. (It was BAS, NB, who discovered the hole in the ozone layer back in 1985.)
The same research also contributes to sustainable management of fishing in the Southern Ocean, a matter of considerable economic importance to the ecosystems and economies of the Falklands and our Overseas Territory neighbour, South Georgia.
So on a slightly baltic Wednesday (plus ça change), we were escorted into the Royal Navy’s base at Mare Harbour, donned our mission-critical hi-viz, and proceeded to herd kids up the gangway to a reception committee of some of the world’s leading polar scientists. (Did you even know it was possible to be a “zooplankton acoustician”? I did not.)
By accident or design, our group started with the cold, hard science. The SDA was just back from a 60-day trip, water-monitoring in transects from the Falklands to Antarctica — with a particular emphasis, over this last voyage, on krill. Antarctic krill, I am reliably informed, have the same cumulative biomass as the world’s entire human population.
This, along with many other variables, such as air purity, the carbon retention of regional waters, cores drilled from the ice or seabed, is presumably the sort of thing they spend time studying in the football-pitch worth of labs that are the vessel’s raison d’être.
In the time-honoured spirit of all school trips, we learned a lot about life at sea, and about ourselves. Even in the most Southerly latitudes, one of the engineers suggested that of the three available colours of boiler suit he preferred to avoid the orange ones, because of, er, political resonances (the kids did not so much as blink). And I discovered that my pal Eloise would not make for a peaceful hot-bunking companion. In fact, she drew the line dead flat at the Cox & Box shared-cabin arrangements. Not that, as one of our catastrophically over-qualified tour guides pointed out, you spend much time in there if you’re not sleeping.
Apart from anything else, you get fed (or could) four times a day. Perhaps more if you really put your mind to it. As we strolled through, mid-afternoon, the canteen had a tray with about a dozen leftover panini. “They overfeed us,” whispered a (very trim, German?) scientist, not without a certain twinkle. This was followed hastily by an assurance — given the Falklands’ own position at the end of the supply-chain — that the SDA bring most of their fruit and veg with them.
If memory serves, their budget for comestibles comes to about £240k per season. Though I’ll admit my eye was mainly taken by the fact they have a dedicated beer store. (In case you’re wondering, at the other end of what we might call the food-and-drink process, the SDA can handle 200 “cubes” of sewage — which I think means 200,000l …)
There were a lot of stairs. “I would get lost if I worked on here,” said Freya. As we went up and down and up and down and people’s watches started telling them they were engaged in extreme exercise I noticed how the steps were cleverly angled in below the tread, so blokes with bloke-sized feet (in boots) could actually get up — if not quite down — them comfortably.
At the risk of ruining the Shackletonian romance of life in polar exploration, that’s not the only thing on board the SDA that’s comfortable.
There’s a coffee lounge, a rec room featuring a guitar, full-size electric piano, and the biggest TV I have ever seen, and things to look at on almost every wall: Antarctic and Arctic tartan swatches, art from the UK Space Agency, and, sure, the occasional photograph of David Attenborough doing things. There’s even a little library, ranging unexpectedly from Blowers to the Marquis de Sade via Shaun Bythell, the whole stock swapped out every six months or so.
Delighted as I was by that, I must confess I snootily assumed that everyone would have a Kindle. But perhaps a connectivity problem, in these parts? Nope. Comms being obviously utterly crucial not just to science but to physical security in the Antarctic, the vessel is now Starlinked up.
We finished on the bridge, where, amid all the highest tech (and Rolls-Royce insignia) that money can buy, I was reassured to see the steering wheel meticulously labelled “STEERING WHEEL”. Sensible folk, these seafarers.
Then the kids heard the NAAFI wagon jingling seductively somewhere along the quay. “Has anyone ever fallen off the boat?” they asked, as they peered vertiginously over the (heated) handrails.
The following night there was a public presentation at — fittingly enough — the Harbour Lights cinema, in Stanley. The SDA has been at work for a couple of years now: and the stats even from that short time are completely bonkers.
The splendidly named Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley sported an even more splendid shirt made from the Hawkins “climate-stripe” graphic, as she explained how the SDA was already providing “extreme insight” in our world, not least around the “Earth’s heartbeat” of Antarctica.
Dave Wattam, Head of Polar Ops, talked about the work of BAS more widely, from pole to pole, and how, perhaps surprisingly, the challenges of polar travel haven’t changed much in a hundred years (“8,000km of flat white. You need a good soundtrack.”). Last year the SDA spent Mid-Winter’s Eve off Elephant Island, the first time a British ship’s been that far South at that time of year since Shackleton himself.
Then Captain Matt Neil spoke for a bit about the challenges of running a floating hotel/laboratory/logistics hub in extreme conditions, and the incredible progression in capabilities over the years, from the Shackleton to the James Clark Ross and now the SDA.
The JCR still comes back to the Falklands every now and then, only as Nusfera, a Ukrainian-flagged polar research vessel.
As for Sir David Attenborough — she, like the man she was named after, is a phenomenal ambassador for Britain in the 21st century. Her extraordinary work continues, as does the Falklands’ pride in having her call the Islands “home”.
Meanwhile, in honour of Sir David (Actual), today the children of the Falklands’ schools released a 100th-birthday message, thanking him for being a formative inspiration to generations of young nature lovers, as well as for his considerable work over the years showcasing the unique wonders of the Falklands natural environment.
