Last Updated: Wednesday, 16 April 2008, 12:32 GMT
Date of first transmission: 2008-04-15T22:32:00-00:00 (audio available for approximately 1 week)
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Other Episodes
Gabrielle descends into an icy crevasse with glaciologist Julian Scott and Discovery producer Martin Redfern.
Discovery in Antarctica
Episode 3: Water and Ice
Antarctica may seem a vast, silent, unchanging continent. But ice does not stay still.
Gabrielle Walker joins glaciologists discovering how it moves and flows and what is happening to it. In places, beneath the ice there is water – melted by the pressure, by geothermal springs, even by active volcanoes we never see.
There are even vast lakes of fresh water beneath thousands of metres of solid ice, perhaps containing life forms that have been isolated there for millions of years.
But just how is the ice moving and what does the future hold?
Could the flow of ice accelerate with global warming, leading to the collapse of the Western Antarctic ice sheet and a catastrophic rise in world sea level?
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