Bruce Luyendyk: Wild Antarctic Expeditions & Discovering A Hidden 8th Continent

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Summary
Bruce Luyendyk, a renowned geologist and Antarctic researcher, shares his passion for Antarctica and the motivation behind his expeditions. Bruce discusses the challenges and risks of working in the harsh Antarctic environment, including blizzards and accidents. Bruce highlights his scientific discoveries, such as the Antarctic ice sheet and the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. 

Bruce also reflects on the honor of having a mountain named after him in Antarctica. Overall, Bruce's experiences shed light on the importance of Antarctic research and the fascination of exploring this remote continent. In this conversation, Bruce Luyendyk shares his experiences exploring Antarctica and visiting Ernest Shackleton's hut. He discusses the unique sights and experiences he encountered in the remote wilderness. Bruce also emphasizes the adventure mindset and the importance of pushing oneself beyond their comfort zone. 

Bruce concludes by suggesting a call to adventure: experiencing wilderness and feeling alone in nature. Additionally, he recommends supporting the World Wildlife Fund as a way to pay it forward and preserve wildlife. Listeners can find more about Bruce's achievements and work on his website.

Takeaways

• Working in Antarctica presents unique challenges and risks, including extreme weather conditions and the need for specialized survival skills.
• Scientific research in Antarctica has led to significant discoveries, such as the existence of Zealandia, a sunken continent, and insights into the history of the Antarctic ice sheet.
• Antarctica's ancient past reveals a diverse flora and fauna, including evidence of tropical conditions and the presence of dinosaurs.
• The naming of a mountain after Bruce Luyendyk highlights the recognition and appreciation for his contributions to Antarctic research.

#antarctica

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Passion for Antarctica
• 8:12 Research Goals and Hypotheses
• 9:42 First Impressions of Antarctica
• 11:38 Challenges and Risks in the Wilderness
• 21:42 Managing a Team in Harsh Conditions
• 24:20 Recklessness and Accidents
• 25:43 Humbling Experiences in the Wilderness
• 31:32 Surviving Antarctic Blizzards
• 36:21 Coordination and Delays in Returning
• 41:31 Scientific Discoveries: Antarctic Ice Sheet and Gondwana
• 52:58 Views on Ancient Antarctica
• 1:00:14 Mount Luyendyk: A Summit Named After Bruce
• 1:03:14 Exploring Shackleton's Hut
• 1:06:20 Unique Experiences in Antarctica
• 1:07:20 The Adventure Mindset
• 1:08:20 Call to Adventure: Experiencing Wilderness
• 1:10:20 Pay It Forward: World Wildlife Fund

Transcript

Chris Watson (00:01.378)
That's us live. So Bruce Luyendyke, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you?

Bruce Luyendyk (00:08.422)
I'm doing well. Thanks Chris. Thanks for having me on.

Chris Watson (00:11.354)
Yeah, it's a pleasure being really excited about this. A few things I want to get into today, including this fantastic book, Mighty Bad Land, but we'll come on to that in a minute. So just as a brief and short introduction, you are a renowned geologist, a distinguished professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, and you've done some really groundbreaking scientific work and expedition work.

in Antarctica and that's some of what I want to kind of navigate a little bit today including the book which we'll delve into. Can I just start with why Antarctica? Where did that come from? The passion that you've got for Antarctica?

Bruce Luyendyk (00:59.002)
Yeah, when I look back on my life and my career, I wouldn't have predicted I had spent half or more of it in research in Antarctica. So when I was younger, I had an experience with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is in California, and I...

had some old Navy salts who were training me to be an assistant. And, uh, they started telling tales about, uh, Shackleton. And I was in college at the time and I had not heard of Shackleton. So that floored them. You're going to college and you don't know about Shackleton. So, so they, they told me the story and I met it with disbelief.

I kind of forgot about it. Um, but I, I was so, I mean, anybody who hears that story is really flattened by the whole notion of it. But then later when I was in, uh, in Santa Barbara, as a prof, I, uh, happened to read the, by accident, Shacklin's book and I got, and I started digging a little bit deeper into my psyche.

But I still kept it in the background until I started working in New Zealand. And in New Zealand, I had a colleague, Dave, who ended up being an ARCA colleague. And we were working on the, in the Alps of New Zealand on a particularly tough problem of the origin of the mountain, some of the mountain ranges there. And if you've been in New Zealand, it's green for a reason, because it rains a lot.

Chris Watson (02:50.731)
Okay.

Bruce Luyendyk (02:51.982)
It rains, there's lots of stuff growing, and the rocks are all beat up and weathered. And we were talking about how frustrating this was to try to do this work. And like, and Dave says to me, well, you know.

then these same types of mountains might be in Antarctica because Antarctica and New Zealand were once stitched together in Gondwana. And you know, in Antarctica, it's not, we don't, there aren't any rain. It doesn't rain there. And the rocks are pretty pristine and they're exposed and there's no traffic and et cetera. So why don't we go there? So I say, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's go to Antarctica and figure out.

these mountains in New Zealand, which we can't figure out. So that led to the process of trying to organize a project and getting funding to the U.S. sponsorship to go to this spot in an article called Marie Birdland where New Zealand once was hypothesized to have been attached to. And

Chris Watson (03:39.943)
Hmm.

Bruce Luyendyk (04:04.906)
where mountain ranges might have had the same history there and in New Zealand. So that's the long answer to that short question.

Chris Watson (04:18.543)
So why 30 years later then did you come out with a book?

Bruce Luyendyk (04:23.93)
Yeah, right. Well, actually, let me correct myself. I probably told somebody 30 years. It's actually, it was 20 years because it took me 10 years to write the book. So during, when I was working in Antarctica and being a professor, obviously I was dancing as fast as I could and working hard.

Chris Watson (04:33.919)
Is it 20?

Chris Watson (04:38.126)
I'm out.

Bruce Luyendyk (04:53.774)
But I kept on nagging on me some of the stories about some of the experiences I had. And when I retired, I started to learn how to do creative writing and took classes in local community college on creative writing and kind of retreaded my approach to writing. And as I started writing just little pieces,

I discovered that I could have a book, but I really needed to know what my experiences meant to me. And for all those 20 years, I hadn't taken a really hard look on what they meant to me. But when I was in the process, because I had time, because I had retired, I kind of got a better feeling of what...

what it meant to me and how to, that I had a story, it'd be a story that I wanted to share. So, yeah, I couldn't write it when I was working so hard and then I really didn't know how to write either. So, I had to be retired to learn how to write and learn what I, learn what the effect was on me, this experience. So that's the long answer to that short question.

Chris Watson (06:20.76)
And the name, because your work here, that expedition was in West Antarctica, wasn't it? And it was in Marie Birdland, but the book is called Mighty Badland, a bit of a play on words. Can you tell us the thinking behind that?

Bruce Luyendyk (06:35.554)
Sure. Yeah. It takes place in Marie Birdland and Mighty Badland is a whimsical take on Marie Birdland. And I didn't make it up. I heard it mostly used by Kiwis and by people in the US NSF who had either

been there or heard about it. It's kind of in a notorious spot in Antarctica for storms and blizzards. It's in the coastal, near-coastal cyclone belt. So there's some pretty, there's some stories of some really extreme stuff. And it gets mighty bad. So that's where it comes from. Mighty bad land.

Chris Watson (07:34.882)
Yeah.

Bruce Luyendyk (07:34.994)
I didn't, I didn't, the book originally didn't have that title, but my publishers say, why don't you brainstorm on something a little more, you know, catchy than I said, well, yeah, you know, everybody tells me about mighty bad land. And that's, he says, that's it. That's it. That's the title.

Chris Watson (07:54.07)
The subtext of that I think just looking at it in my desk, a perilous expedition to Antarctica reveals clues to an eighth continent. So what was your primary research goals then on that first expedition?

Bruce Luyendyk (08:08.806)
Yeah, on the first expedition, we were testing the idea that New Zealand had broken off of this part of Gondwana and left behind Marie Byrne land as it drifted off north during continental drift. So the way we did this, the metaphor I use is think of it before this rifting and drifting took place as a newspaper.

And then the newspaper gets torn. She got part of a sentence on one side and the other part of the sentence on the other side. So if you match it up correctly, you can read the entire sentence. So in this case, the sentence would be the geological features on the Marie Bertalan side matching up with the geological features on the New Zealand side. So that was the main hypothesis testing that notion.

Chris Watson (09:04.65)
And we'll come on to that later. I've got some stuff I want to talk about in terms of the achievements and some of the research that you uncovered on that. But moving on into the experience of Antarctica then, so going there for the first time, thinking all these years later, Bruce, I know you went, I think, nine times after what's recounted in this book, but can you recall what it was like, your first impressions when you landed? And...

Antarctica, I mean, obviously freezing. But what was that like?

Bruce Luyendyk (09:35.848)
Yeah.

The, in my book, I start off with my first impressions. And even when I read it today, about what I said about that, I think I gave it a really good try, but it's kind of almost impossible.

The first impression I had was from the cockpit of the New Zealand Air Force Hercules when we were crossing over the Southern Ocean and then we see the continent. And we see serious, serious mountains that are in the distance buried by ice. So there is a lot of ice and it goes to the horizon. And there's these huge mountains that are obviously underneath it.

and the scale of that. And I mean, where do you see that? I mean, and the scale of it. It just floors me. And even as I talk about it with you right now, I just, it floors me, the whole concept of this vacant continent and buried by this enormous sheet of ice. So enormity and scale and uniqueness and

Chris Watson (10:39.594)
No.

Bruce Luyendyk (11:04.254)
Otherworldly and all these types of adjectives come in mind.

Chris Watson (11:08.598)
Yeah. And then to get there, go through survival school, you know, get prepared, get your team ready, but then having to, you know, fly out to even more wilderness within that continent out into, I think it was the Fosdick Mountains. What was that like when you got there, when you get dropped and you were, you know, you were hours away from, you know, there was no flights or helicopters coming to pick you up?

Bruce Luyendyk (11:37.344)
Right.

Chris Watson (11:37.542)
You were hours away, weren't you? So that was proper alone in the wilderness. What did that sensation feel like when you got there?

Bruce Luyendyk (11:46.29)
So...

Bruce Luyendyk (11:49.738)
Before we went to Antarctica and before we went to McMurdo Station and before we went to survival school, of course, I read books and we talked to veterans, of course. And so they start telling you stories. And you're thinking, yeah, they're making this up. And then you learn no.

than not making anything up. But in like the survival school, for instance.

Bruce Luyendyk (12:31.246)
It impressed me as really I got to be an expert at this stuff. I mean, I got to be an expert on self-arrest. I got to be an expert on crevasse rescue and Z pulleys. And really I have to, it's like three days. So that guy is unnerving. And then to get where we were going to do our work.

get in the Hercules and you're loaded up with all your gear. And then you're flying over nothingness for just ice, rock and sky for three or four hours. It's like, I don't know, flying from, gonna get geography right. Maybe across Australia from coast to coast and there's nothing after you leave the airport, there's nothing. And then when you land, there's nothing. And.

The landing itself, the process of landing itself was exciting because they hadn't been there before. So to test the landing area, they do what's called the ski drags and where they skim along the surface looking for crevasses that opened up and if nothing's opened up, well, that looks okay, let's land.

Chris Watson (13:30.53)
Okay

Chris Watson (13:48.41)
I mean, I thought there's a few very descriptive sections in the book that talk about that. And I think even it gives me that, just the thought of that, because you don't have runways and airports out there, you are in the middle of the wilderness and for a craft of that size and carrying those types load, I mean, that's got to be pretty unnerving at the best of times.

Bruce Luyendyk (14:11.494)
Yeah, it's quite a feat. And the pilots of course love it. It was just so challenging. They just love this stuff. Well, we haven't been there before. Oh, that's great.

Chris Watson (14:18.399)
near.

Chris Watson (14:26.526)
And I think with the instruments as well, with the aircraft, because you're so close to the pole, I think there's a challenge there in terms of how their navigational systems work, aren't there? And they have to divert to like a kind of grid system.

Bruce Luyendyk (14:39.658)
Yeah, they use, as opposed to the Meridian and Latitude system that we're familiar with, they use a grid system where, you know, Greenwich, Meridian, through your neighborhood, that's the, that's the north south that goes through the continent. And the east west is 90 east, 90 west. And everything else is a grid that lays over the pole. So all the directions are relative to that.

Chris Watson (14:45.409)
Mm-hmm.

Bruce Luyendyk (15:10.858)
And in the days that we were there doing these early expeditions, nobody was using GPS to navigate, at least not there. So they were using inertial, uh, guidance and sunsights, which I found out is, depends on lots of stuff and it's accurate to a mile or two or something like that. So you obviously have to have visuals. To, uh,

when you land or when you finally decide where you're at. So, yeah, I guess compared to what we do today and navigating it's a real seat of the pants stuff in a lot of regard. And takes a lot of skills and pilots to pull it off.

Chris Watson (15:55.038)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (15:59.986)
I think all the logistics that go with it as well, because you're on a scientific expedition, aren't you, in some of the loads in terms of the rock and samples that you're gonna have to capture and take back. There's quite a lot of logistics and planning going into that. I think one of the things that really struck me was the fuel drops as well, because it's such a long way to go, the put in, put out flight scheduling and then having to drop fuel and then.

essentially go on hunt for that fuel to make sure you got that. I mean, that's something I'd never really, never really heard. Cause I've interviewed a lot of people that have been to Antarctica over the period and some wild and wonderful stories. And that was one thing that really struck me. Like you said, you're essentially flying the distance of like coast to coast in Australia and you're going out there and you're dropping fuel in advance for you to make sure that you've got what you need when you're out there. I mean, that is.

That alone must be both exhilarating and terrifying In equal measures.

Bruce Luyendyk (17:00.89)
Yeah, there's a little bit of, you know, that stomach feeling, kind of like, oh, well. Yeah. So really you bring in everything. So, you know, if you need a paperclip, you don't have it, you're not getting it. That type of thing. And of course you have to have fuel, which I only learned about like two days before, I think, that they were going to air drop parachute.

Chris Watson (17:08.97)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (17:18.959)
Yeah.

Bruce Luyendyk (17:30.154)
drop fuel barrels in and then we had to find them. So yeah, it's just like, that's part of the, it's part of the experience that keeps you going that you're not really relaxing. You're kinda, you gotta be on your game to make sure you're paying attention and following the correct directions and

doing the right steps and is just, it kind of gets overwhelming, especially in my position where I mean, a lot of the other, my team, we're doing the hard work, but of course I was a leader. So the buck stops with me and the thing gets messed up.

Chris Watson (18:02.665)
Nah.

Chris Watson (18:16.917)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (18:22.21)
Yeah, did they get, it's part of the survival school because did they give you training not only on, you know, like, you know, arresting yourself if you were to fall into a crevasse or whatever, you know, safety measures. Did you get, you know, field and tracking expertise? Did they train you on that, how to, because I can imagine the weather patterns would change so quickly there. So any markers or anything that you laid out, you know, that could be.

destroyed or change very quickly. And obviously with the instruments and the difficulty navigating and stuff. Did you get training on that in advance? No.

Bruce Luyendyk (19:00.21)
No, no, I never thought about that question. That's a, that's a good question. And I'm thinking about it quickly here. I don't know how they would have trained it, but you know, of the six people, four of us were geologists and two of us were mountaineers. A lot of which from Scotland, by the way. That was Cain.

Chris Watson (19:20.689)
Yeah.

Yeah, Cain, I remember. I was going to ask, I was going to say, so hopefully that's gone some way to helping you understand my Scottish brogue.

Bruce Luyendyk (19:32.554)
Right. But we, I guess we were, we didn't feel like we couldn't do that. We figured that we would do it. And I also think that the NSF, when they decide on a project, first of all, the, is there a scientific, worthwhile scientific goal that can be achieved here?

That's for starters and can we fund it, but are these people up to it? Um, and I know the first time we applied for the funding, the people who reviewed the, our proposal didn't think we were experienced enough. They thought we were too green for something as challenging as Antarctica. And then the second time we got reviewed, they didn't send it to those guys. Somebody else thought we could.

thought we could do it. So yeah, I hadn't thought about that aspect. Definitely was assumed you could do it.

Chris Watson (20:37.333)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (20:40.814)
Yeah, and the added responsibility, I think you touched on there. You know, you were the leader as well. And I think you obviously, you know, I appreciate the honesty and the candour that's in the book as well. You know, you were talking about your age at the time and some of your kind of health concerns and then being the leader of a group with a scientific, you know, scientific, you know, objective and then a very harsh.

imperialist environment. I mean, it must have been a lot to, to kind of manage internally and externally. You know, how did you find that managing the team in such harsh conditions?

Bruce Luyendyk (21:24.923)
The thing about the group we were with, that I was in charge of, you probably heard the expression hurting cats. So that wasn't that bad, but the...

Chris Watson (21:39.904)
Yes.

Bruce Luyendyk (21:49.162)
Two of the geologists we brought with us as a student, and mine Christine and Steve, had very specific expertise that we needed. And so...

Bruce Luyendyk (22:03.57)
It would not be smart for me to come up with an agenda for these people who know more than me about this specific topic. So what we would do is what I did and what Dave and I did is we set up the goals, you know, the main points. And then we knew that we had the people with us who could figure it out without being managed that closely. Matter of fact.

for at least half of this first expedition, Steve and Christine came up with the exploration plan because we needed them to do that. That was expected of them. So once everybody would agree with the main goals and I'd take responsibility for them, then everybody would...

do their jobs that they were dedicated to. So yeah, this rocky stuff, this rocky things going on, we disagree about some details and that's in our book, of course, on my book, but, um, everybody knows the responsibility of that, um, you're in this team and everybody has to do their part and wants to.

Chris Watson (23:28.054)
Yeah, and on that there were quite clearly some challenging situations in that and I'm not going to give all the details away on that because I do encourage anyone to go and pick this book up, it's a fantastic read. I mean I thoroughly enjoyed it and it's a re-reader, I think for anyone that's interested in the Antarctic, it's definitely worth a read. Talking about the Scottish guy Cain, there was a bit of a...

an incident with a snowmobile. Do you think that was a bit reckless?

Bruce Luyendyk (24:02.722)
I did at the time, but when I reflected on it only a short time later, I realized that the assumptions he made were reasonable and the actions he took were reasonable and he wasn't being reckless. It was just...

Antarctica stuff. If that happens. Uh, I figured that out rather quickly when I was reminded by another teammate, like these are accidents. We're going to have accidents.

Chris Watson (24:32.373)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (24:42.974)
Yeah. I can imagine they can be quite humbling in an environment like that, and tension can be quite, quite taut, I would imagine. So, I think not long after that, you had the crevasse incident as well. Was that, that must have been awfully humbling in bringing home the expanse and the wilderness, and how fragile.

you and the team were out there, without going into the details because I said I'd like people to read the book but you know how did that feel at that point in time when that fall happened to yeah I won't give the details away but

Bruce Luyendyk (25:31.35)
Yeah, that was definitely the most frightened I've been in a long time.

I think that...

Bruce Luyendyk (25:43.966)
What happens, and I heard this, other people say this, that people, uh, spent time in Antarctica in the, in the deep field, but like when we were, you got to watch out for when the weather is really good and it feels warm and sunny and it's, you know, beautiful to die for. You really got to watch out and still be careful.

I mean, it's easy to be careful when you're being beat up by a storm, or you've got to climb a glacier or something like that. It's easy to be on your game, but you can't get off of it when it's, when Antarctica takes a vacation, then it takes a nap. You've got to stay on your game. So I think that's what I learned from.

that experience. And I've heard other people say the same thing, surprisingly, which, yeah, we had, you know, we had an accident when we, you know, relaxed. And then you pay for it.

Chris Watson (26:56.262)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what was it? Because each day you were going out, so if the weather's changing, I think you spoke a lot about like ice bridges and stuff like that. So, and you're on snowmobiles, so how are you checking for potential crevasses and weak ice bridges and stuff?

Bruce Luyendyk (27:20.186)
Yeah, sure. Um...

Bruce Luyendyk (27:25.25)
It's when you're, we're traveling, you mentioned the snowmobiles we used. These are not snowmobiles like you can find on ski slopes. They're like these lumbering trucks types things that pull cargo sledges with 500 pounds of gear on them. So we're only traveling, you know, a few kilometers an hour. We're going slow. It, when we're doing that, it's a visual. We're.

We have a lead, mountaineers are in the lead of a train, of two trains, and they're doing a visual. And it's best when you're doing the traveling during the low sun because the crevasses, the bridges over the crevasses will sag and there'll be a slight shadow. So it won't be smooth like a tabletop or even rutted.

With Sestrugy, it'll be sagged and you'll see the shadow. So it's, it was visual. And, uh, if we saw a visual on that and we'd avoid it typically, uh, rarely would we do get out and test it. We would just not deal with it. Period. Not even take a chance on testing it.

So I learned after the fact, and I do have a photograph of this on my Instagram feed, of crevasses that are bridged but buried by snow that's thick enough that you can't see the sag and the bridge is completely smooth. It was completely undetectable.

Then I also, so I thought that's risky. Then I also saw a few years later.

Bruce Luyendyk (29:25.474)
a satellite photo of the glacier we traveled over. And there had been a warming spell, obviously, because the glacier was smooth, except it was dotted with these holes. They were lined up. So the holes were where the bridges that were not, we didn't see had melted and...

They were now exposed as a series of holes. And I thought to myself, we just didn't know what we were doing. Or, well, we didn't know. We were lucky it wasn't that warm. But I think this

Bruce Luyendyk (30:17.674)
You take calculated risks and things like this. I mean, we don't go out to do this kind of work with the idea that we're going to risk our lives, but we go out there with it knowing we are taking risks. But you can't cover all the bases. You just can't. So that's how you prepare yourself by learning how to do rescues. Because you can't cover all the bases.

Chris Watson (30:28.974)
Hmm.

Chris Watson (30:41.73)
Yeah. Yeah, some of that rescue training had to be put into action, didn't it? So, and there has been, I mean, there has been deaths and accidents in Antarctica. I think you even touched on some of the Hercules flights going down and stuff, you know, the weather has been so bad. Talk to us about the, you know,

You know, you experience some very almost biblical style storms and you were hunkered in your tent for days, weren't you? On end, whippin the tents.

Bruce Luyendyk (31:23.538)
Yeah, that's, I think that was definitely the toughest part of my experiences on this expedition and a few others that followed is not fully grasping what an Antarctic blizzard is. I remember I told, before we went the first time, I told a woman colleague who had

was a veteran, had spent some time there. I told her where we were going and she laughs. She's, ha ha. Have you read War and Peace? You better take that with you. So, yeah, so we're in Scott Polar tents, which measure eight feet on a side. You know, a couple of meters, a couple of meters on a side, two people in it. They're built like a pyramid with.

holes, wooden poles on the four corners and no windows. And they're out of a kind of a robust, made out of a robust canvas. So the couple of things that happen in an Antarctic blizzard is of course, there's a lot of wind, really hard wind. So the, you're not going outside for a stroll, see if it's still snowing. You can tell.

And the other thing is that the canvas is snapping like rifle shots. Just snap, snap. And that's going on for days. I think in this expedition, the longest storm was

I think three days, but on the expedition that followed this, we had a storm that lasted 10 days. And then we had another storm where we had sat through probably three or four days of storm, and we thought it was over. And then when we checked in for our radio check-in to McMurdo,

Bruce Luyendyk (33:41.282)
Don't move, hold position, don't move. And we looked around and it looked as a beautiful day, but before we got finished packing up, we got walloped again in the middle of packing up. And then we were pinned down for another three days. So that made six days pinned down, reading books and...

Chris Watson (34:04.45)
face.

Bruce Luyendyk (34:09.134)
cooking and sleeping as much as possible and rewriting your notes. And I can't believe when I think when I'm talking about this now and I thought about this, I really don't know how I did it because I am not a patient person. But you really.

Chris Watson (34:11.972)
Yeah

Chris Watson (34:21.582)
I was going to say, I was going to say, I must be mentally torturous, you know, because you sit in it, because you can't, I mean, from what I gathered, you couldn't really go out, you couldn't go outside at all really, because you're just getting absolutely whipped by the weather. And.

Bruce Luyendyk (34:39.122)
That's right. Yeah. You're pretty much stuck unless you get desperate enough to, which of course we did, we got desperate enough to go outside and join others in tents to have a brunch or a meal, a little comradery and complain about the weather.

Chris Watson (34:50.74)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (34:54.005)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (34:59.629)
You actually, I think you spent Christmas and New Year didn't you out there as well and you had a little bit of a celebration which was quite nice, quite good to read a little bit of cheer and dressing up and stuff.

Bruce Luyendyk (35:14.334)
Yeah, and my Scottish colleague did a pot of ball dance on a wooden box for New Year's, which I'd never seen. Certainly never a mountaineer and mountaineer gear do it.

Chris Watson (35:25.166)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (35:30.21)
Excellent. So yeah, coming back, so that being hunkered down in the tent, I think one of the other things that struck me as well, you know, coming and jumping ahead a little bit, but in terms of your, your pullout flight, so ready on, you know, waiting for the flight to come and pick you up and it being delayed and delayed and delayed, not knowing when you're going to get back out. I mean, that must've been pretty, pretty torturous and you're feeling all alone and

out in that wilderness. What did that feel like when you were trying to coordinate your return?

Bruce Luyendyk (36:07.067)
And you mentioned a good word I wanted to bring up, which is alone. Um, not many of us get to have an experience of really being alone. Uh, of course we were six people, so we're not like alone, but we're a lone organism of six people, which are, there's no neighbors for hundreds of miles. And that's a real mind trip.

Chris Watson (36:22.133)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (36:26.35)
Mm-hmm.

Bruce Luyendyk (36:33.866)
to be that alone and to look around you and see no evidence of civilization whatsoever. No, it's not even contrails. There's just nothing. It's kind of floors you and it's kind of wonderful if it is at the same time a little nerve wracking. But um.

Chris Watson (36:53.354)
Yeah.

Bruce Luyendyk (37:03.934)
One of the things that made me feel more alone was the fact that the support system in McMurdo couldn't respond to us when we needed them, like when we needed to get the rest of our gear.

Chris Watson (37:25.155)
Hmm.

Bruce Luyendyk (37:33.826)
Took two weeks, it was supposed to be two hours, it turned out to be two weeks. And when we wanted to get pulled out, because we had other pressing stuff to do, that turned out to be a week or 10 days of waiting. And at that point, me, I had experienced the two accidents that we had. Me as the leader, the...

Chris Watson (37:38.006)
me.

Bruce Luyendyk (38:03.798)
person in charge. And I was just getting more and more on the edge, like we've got to get out of here. The longer we're here, we're risking more accidents. We just got to get out of here. And we didn't for days and days. So that was a very anxiety. It was a very anxious circumstance for me.

Chris Watson (38:16.778)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (38:25.297)
Hmm.

Chris Watson (38:30.586)
Yeah, I mean, were you ever at risk of running out of supplies or was it just more impacting on your research?

Bruce Luyendyk (38:41.51)
No, we established a depot camp where we had our main supplies and then we made, we went on multi-day trips and established satellite camps, which would take supplies with us. So the only risk we had was being too far away from our depot and running out of food or fuel and not being able to get back to our depot where we had adequate supplies.

But being, making a satellite camp had its own risks. One time we went on a trip, a satellite camp, and we forgot to pack protein in our food supply. So we were out for 10 days with just like, I think bulgur and quinoa and...

stuff like that for 10 days.

Chris Watson (39:43.086)
Jeez, that's, wow. So what were you actually eating when you were out there? So, because you, I think it was all dehydrated food that you had to melt snow and ice and rehydrate.

Bruce Luyendyk (39:53.934)
Yeah, we had dehydrated food that, you know, everybody's been camping has seen stuff like it. We had some canned food. Um, not a lot because it's heavy. We had some frozen food. Um, not a lot of it, which by the way, we had to create a snow locker to keep it frozen because

Sometimes we couldn't leave it outside on a snow because sometimes it would actually get up to freezing or a little bit above freezing. And so we had to keep it frozen for weeks, build a locker for it. So the food was, yeah, it was adequate and we made invented stuff, invented dishes and a guy with us who loved to do it. So we took

It took George making us some interesting things every once in a while. But it's pretty plain. No fresh stuff. No freshies.

Chris Watson (41:01.774)
Yeah. So, so moving on to some of your actual research, so some of the scientific purposes that you were out there. So the, you know, the, the Zealandia discovery, if I'm saying that right. So what was the, you know, what kind of impact did that have on some of your research on the plate tectonics and discovery of an eighth continent?

Bruce Luyendyk (41:30.026)
Sure. The concept of Zealandia, which has been in the news even recently, is that it's a unrecognized sunken continent that was once part of Gondwana and then moved away from Gondwana at the same time and it carried New Zealand because New Zealand sits on it.

Chris Watson (41:38.624)
Yep.

Bruce Luyendyk (41:55.246)
So, um...

It was kind of an aha moment I had when I looked at what Gondwana must have looked like in the past. And I was looking at a map that researchers at the University of Texas had made, and I realized that

Bruce Luyendyk (42:24.314)
in this puzzle they put back together and that New Zealand and Antarctica, where we were, were next to each other and that they were all part of Gondwana. And so all these pieces that carried New Zealand up to the north had to be pieces of continent. So in a paper which I wrote to explain now

how all those pieces moved around. I coined the term for the sunken pieces of continent. I coined the term, is Elandia to indicate these sunken pieces that New Zealand pokes up above and are scattered around the South Pacific. It's about the size of India when you put them all back together, it's substantial. Now, to be fair, I didn't follow up on the geological research.

which would establish, is Zealand here really continental or are you kind of like making this up type of questions. That was the New Zealand geologists who when they saw what I had done figured, hey, this is something we have to pay attention to because it means that

our country is sitting on a continent that's mostly buried. That's way bigger than the islands of North and South Island of New Zealand. And so they just simply got on it. And in 2014, Nick Mortimer and Hamish Campbell wrote a book about it, Zelandia, a popular book. And then in 2017,

Mortimer Campbell and a bunch of other New Zealand geologists wrote a publication of, scholarly publication of testing the concept. And then they just recently came out with another publication this year, digging deeper and getting more solid foundation to the notion. So I would say that Zealandia

Bruce Luyendyk (44:54.214)
You know, I kind of coined the term and started people to think about it, but the follow through, the really hard stuff was done by, you know, the A-Team, the New Zealand geologists who really got on it. Now the implications for plate tectonics are, um, when you think back about it and about the story, that it all were pieces broken off of Gondwana, it's actually not very surprising.

I mean, we actually knew it, but didn't pay attention to it. And also part of the issue was, for a long time until the 90s, the mapping of the sea floor wasn't very accurate. And that sort of highlighted the sunken, plateaued, sunken parts of the continent.

So the impact I think now is in terms of, from my perspective, is the impact on resources for the nation of New Zealand. Because the United Nations conventions say that if you can demonstrate that the continental margins of

that surround your continent are actually part of your continent, then you have claimed those resources. So that created a huge amount of territory that New Zealand could make legitimate claims under the United Nations. And that's what drove, I believe, the effort from the New Zealand geologist to nail down all the details and nail down those stories.

of Zealandia itself.

Chris Watson (46:49.798)
I think what you touched on there, I don't know if it was in your book maybe or some stuff I read online but some of the, you know, you're talking about the billions in terms of submerged potential fossil fuels and mineral reserves and stuff. It's a cat choking.

Bruce Luyendyk (47:08.358)
Yeah, I'm talking, I would talk about my pay grade here if I claim to know much about that. But what was known at the time when

When I coined an idea and a name, it was known that there were petroleum deposits on the continental margin south of New Zealand. They were being exploited. Now, whether that happens now and in the future, I don't know. If anything has changed in terms of what they know, I don't know that either.

Chris Watson (47:49.538)
So in terms of your other findings and discoveries and stuff then through your expeditions, you know, the Antarctic ice sheet for example, can you tell us a little bit around that and what's, you know, some of your most impactful scientific findings beyond Zealandia?

Bruce Luyendyk (48:06.354)
You know, two things. I'll talk about the ice sheet and then I'll talk about the Gondwana breakup. We discovered where we were working in this part of the Murray Birdland. That when we climbed up on the peaks to do our geology. We discovered evidence of an ice sheet that had scoured over the

the peaks. So, you know, simple arithmetic, you just said, well, the ice sheet ought to be thicker. So much thicker, much, much thicker. So there was much more ice. So the question is, well, when? And the follow-up research, which was spearheaded by John Stone and also

woman in the book, they were actually able to determine when.

And the story is that it was a much larger ice sheet on marine birdland, and it started to retreat about 7,000 years ago.

Bruce Luyendyk (49:27.398)
Now what's interesting about that number is that the ice sheets in the northern hemisphere, like the ones that once covered Scotland, for example, they started to retreat something like 18 or 20,000 years ago. So there's a question I don't know the answer to, and I don't know who's studying it, but how come it took so long for Antarctica to stop?

to start retreating when the Northern Hemisphere had been ahead of it by 10,000 years. So I don't know the answer to that. I have some certain people have ideas, but not me. So that was pretty stunning, I thought.

Bruce Luyendyk (50:18.614)
Then about gondwana, we had this idea, part of our hypothesis that we were testing, not only was when New Zealand and its plateaus are plastered up with, we're a part of gondwana. We've got to remember to think that, the way to think about this is, gondwana is one piece and it gets broken up. Not a bunch of pieces are there and then they move away. The gondwana gets broken up like a plate, like a dinner plate you drop.

Chris Watson (50:47.246)
Hmm.

Bruce Luyendyk (50:48.318)
It's broken. And so the pieces start moving away, which include one that's carrying New Zealand. We had, we had figured that it had to start about.

80,000 years ago and that because we knew about the seafloor record, we knew the ages of the seafloor. So the seafloor between them is 80 million years, then they started to move apart 80 million years ago. That's simple.

So we thought the mountains that we worked in and the corollaries in New Zealand must have been 80,000 or so also because that they performed during that event. Well, it turned out that's not true. They were actually forming like 20 million years ahead of that. And they weren't related to the breakup of Gondwana. They were related to something else. And

So that's a totally different plate tectonic story for the origins of those mountains, which we find on in Marie birdland and in New Zealand. So that I thought that that's a pretty 20 million years. That's a, that's a lot of time. So that's, that's a big finding that I'm pretty happy about that. We didn't know.

Chris Watson (52:08.788)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (52:16.758)
Yeah. And in terms of so why are these important then for the laymen? So what does what type of impact does your research have on the rest of the world and our understanding of how Antarctica impacts or has impacted our story?

Bruce Luyendyk (52:40.942)
Yeah, so you know this is my life, doing this kind of research. So here's my answer, and it's not I'm not being facetious.

People want to know this stuff. That's why you're talking to me. People want to know things. That's it. I mean, of course there's an impact. Like five minutes ago, we talked about Zealandia and economic resources and things like that. And then we talked about climate change with the ice sheet and, but people just want to know stuff.

Chris Watson (52:56.99)
Yeah, exactly.

Chris Watson (53:04.641)
Yeah.

Bruce Luyendyk (53:26.733)
And they really want to know, they want to know it so much that they'll spend a lot of money having people find out stuff.

Chris Watson (53:34.746)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not, yeah, it's not just now. I mean, that also gives a baseline for things, you know, in time way beyond our generations and generations to come. This will be a piece of the jigsaw for something else at another point in time as well. So it's all very valuable and important work.

Bruce Luyendyk (53:59.15)
Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Watson (54:00.458)
Yeah, pivoting a little bit, Bruce, what's your thoughts on our views on ancient Antarctica?

Bruce Luyendyk (54:10.258)
Okay, so tell me what you mean by ancient.

Chris Watson (54:16.354)
So the views that it was once a bit of a tropical state, it's tropical continent as opposed to being under ice. I mean, there's also, you know, people that think that that's maybe the lost continent where Atlantis once thought to be as well. I'm not sure I quite buy into that to be fair, but.

The thought that Antarctica may have been a tropical paradise at some point is quite, quite interesting, but again, quite, you know, quite fantasy in my opinion. I just wondered what you thought on that.

Bruce Luyendyk (54:57.726)
Yeah, yeah, sure. Um, in Artica for a lot of its known history has been kind of thought of like Mars, like, what is it? Does somebody live there? Does somebody has anybody live there ever?

HP Lovecraft and those types of stories.

Bruce Luyendyk (55:32.162)
So what we do know about life forms on Antarctica are from fossils, a fossil record, and which is there's not much rock exposed where you can get fossils. Like 95% of the continent is buried in ice and there's mountain ranges at its edges like where we were studying.

And there's a mountain range that goes through the center of it, called the Trans-Anaharic Mountains, across the coast to coast.

And the fossil record leaves no doubt that there was abundant life on Antarctica in the geologic past in deep time. Matter of fact, one of the most compelling stories about this is the fossils that were collected on the Robert Scott expedition to the Pole.

He had a team member, Edward Wilson, who was a scientist and a doctor. And, uh, they collected samples of this, um, Fern called glossopterous for the trans-Anarctic mountains. The glossopterous was a Fern that's was found all around the Southern continents, but had not been found in Antarctica.

So the find kind of solidified the notion that Gondwana existed in the past. Otherwise, how could you have the same flora on all these different continents? They had to be connected. So, and that was the one thing that Robert Scott Party found that when they found the bodies, they found the fossils with the bodies of the team.

Bruce Luyendyk (57:33.782)
So the ice sheet that buries Antarctic now, we have a pretty good notion that it's started to form around 35 million years ago. Before that, there was a flora and fauna, which included the sauropods, like the dinosaurs and other fauna. And there might have been mountains with mountain glaciers, but there was not an ice sheet.

So the ice sheet started to form about 35 million years ago. Now, in contrast, the ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere where we are living started to form about 2 and 1 half million years ago. So Antarctica started to be covered in ice long before the Northern Hemisphere. So and then the fossils that I just described to you are like 100 million years old. And you can go farther back, the ages of rocks on the Antarctic continent.

Chris Watson (58:30.806)
Mm-hmm.

Bruce Luyendyk (58:31.926)
You can deduce that for most of the time that we know about, in Antarctica, it didn't have ice. So why did it not have ice? Well, a couple of reasons. One, climate was warmer and Gondwana was further north. It wasn't at the poles. So it was in more temperate areas.

Chris Watson (58:52.23)
Ah, right. Ah, that makes it so that, yeah, so I probably didn't, I didn't piece that. So, so yeah, so obviously with it, yeah, where it was geologically placed on, yeah, right.

Bruce Luyendyk (59:05.506)
Yeah, it moved.

So, and then certain things were happening, which would take a lot of time to explain, about 35 million years ago, that the climate was changing, the carbon dioxide content, the atmosphere was changing, and that set up the formation of ice on the continent. And it's stuck around pretty much more or less for 35 million years. I mean, it's gotten bigger, gotten smaller, bigger, smaller, but it's kind of always been there since then.

Chris Watson (59:40.838)
It's fascinating, it is thoroughly fascinating. Every time I can't like talking to yourself or reading something, there's just this one little thing that you just pick up on. It just starts to, it starts to build the story. It's fascinating. It really is. And with all of that great work that you've done, how does it feel to have a summit named after yourself in Antarctica?

Bruce Luyendyk (59:55.63)
Sure.

Chris Watson (01:00:06.162)
Mount Luyendyke. Am I saying that right? Sorry if I'm butchering the pronunciation. Luyendyke. How does it feel to have a summit named after you?

Bruce Luyendyk (01:00:10.64)
That's close. Lion Dike. Yeah.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:00:18.534)
Yeah, you know, I don't know if it's, um, made it to the maps yet, cause it would happen in 2016. But when it does, it'll probably people will say, why did they name that mountain after the race car driver? So I'm not related to it. Not related to them. So where we were camping the first year.

Chris Watson (01:00:25.793)
Yeah.

Chris Watson (01:00:32.59)
I'm gonna go to bed.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:00:46.25)
And we had over Christmas, we had a terrible storm. It was at the base of a peak called 1070. Didn't have a name and a number. And years went by and it didn't more work in Antarctica. And then a couple of my graduate students went out on their own like Christine Sittewey. And...

Bruce Luyendyk (01:01:13.748)
They, Christine and another one, another student, Christopher, who are now professionals.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:01:22.438)
had this feeling of gratitude of getting being brought into the world of Antarctica and they nominated me for my name for peak 1070 um which and I didn't suggest it so it just really uh it just floored me that they did it I can tell you that

Chris Watson (01:01:44.776)
Yeah.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:01:52.288)
Um.

More people are congratulating me about being named, I was a mountain named after me, than having a bunch of papers and a bunch of discoveries. They care about the mountain.

Chris Watson (01:02:11.102)
That's validation. I mean, for all the great work you've done, if you think all those times you've used, because I think you were probably a little bit hard on yourself in the book. There were certain things, like the candour, the honesty, I think you're probably a little bit hard on yourself and to think that team and that unit and Christine giving you that recommendation, that commendation all these years later and that, you know, there's certainly something in that. So congratulations.

Chris Watson (01:02:40.53)
an astonishing achievement. Astonishing achievement. There's not many people I think I'll ever speak to that will have such a plaudit and such an award.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:02:40.982)
Thanks so much, Chris. Yeah. Thank you.

Chris Watson (01:02:58.578)
So I want to be respectful of your time, Bruce. It's been incredible. I've really enjoyed the conversation so far and we're coming up on time and what I'd like to touch on. Just a couple of things actually. Before I do that, actually, there was something I did want to ask you about. Ernest Shackleton's room. I think you've seen that, didn't you?

Bruce Luyendyk (01:03:23.01)
Yeah, we were on what's called the shakedown trip before we went out to the mountains to get all over our gear, sorted out and figured out. And Christine actually organized a trip over the sea ice up to Cape Roys where the hut is, where Shacklin's hut from his expedition in 1907-8.

nine, I think, pretty much. Yeah. When he tried to reach the poll. So I thought that was cool. Yeah. But then we get there and I just find out that she has the key. Get in. Which I didn't know that. So it's been, it was been, it had been locked up because the

New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust had been doing some restoring on it, but very minimal stuff because when we went around it, it looked like they had just moved out. We walked in there and things were like, yeah, they stepped out, they'll be right back. I mean, the cots were set up, the skis were there, the boots were there, the food was set up.

I mean, this and that wasn't introduced by the restoration teams. It was the original stuff left there. So it's like walking into a private museum and, um, which hardly anybody gets to see. I mean, it's not, it's not trivial to get there. It's it actually takes some work to get there and.

Chris Watson (01:05:09.9)
Yeah.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:05:17.682)
You got the key is another thing. I don't know how she did that.

Chris Watson (01:05:20.572)
Yeah, I mean that's seen history. I mean that's like history is as cliché as it sounds like frozen in time because it came across that, like you said, the food and their supplies and their equipment as if they had just gone out for the day. And it was, yeah, incredible.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:05:35.371)
Yeah.

And then in the space was a little cubby hole where Shackleton stayed. It was his own private room. And that floored me to see that space because of course I idolized him after reading the books and hearing the old Navy salts telling me the stories. I get that chance to like close that circle.

Chris Watson (01:05:56.117)
Yeah.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:06:07.218)
Yeah, that was pretty overpowering to say the least really. Very much so.

Chris Watson (01:06:08.218)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that having a, you know, Mount Linedeik named after yourself, you've been out there and you've probably seen some things that people, nobody else on the planet has ever seen or will ever see again, some unexplored views. It's really something. And it's a lot of it, as I said, is documented in this book, which I'll show again in a link to it in the show notes.

It's a fantastic read. So, you know, as we are coming up, what do you hope readers would take away from the book, Bruce?

Bruce Luyendyk (01:06:48.433)
Yeah, so...

Bruce Luyendyk (01:06:53.314)
I am not an adventurer. I'm a scientist and an explorer. Now...

I don't think of myself as an adventurer, but it's obvious that this is an adventure. And why is it an adventure? It's because it's something you do where you test yourself.

You're not really sure you can do it. You really think you'd like it if you did it. And you're 51% convinced you can do it.

So if you can get to 51%

then you should do it. And then you are on an adventure.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:07:48.09)
And when you get done with it, like what we did, what I did, what I said to myself was, that was hard.

But we did good. So let's do it again.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:08:11.303)
Right?

Chris Watson (01:08:13.448)
Excellent, excellent. So we are coming up on time finally, closing traditions, of which I have two on the show, one of which is the call to adventure, which is your opportunity to suggest an adventure, an activity, a trip, something to get people inspired to get out there and explore.

have some sort of adventure. Doesn't necessarily need to be to West Antarctica. It could be something of your, whatever you recommend. So what would you give the listeners as a call to adventure, Bruce?

Bruce Luyendyk (01:08:52.314)
I would say that it's really important to experience wilderness because you start thinking about different things when you do that. So for instance, where are they now that you can experience that? Some places in Alaska, for sure. And some places in Patagonia, for sure.

I mean, these are places where you can get to them and you can get into them. And then you can learn what it looks like and feels like to not have.

any civilization around you and to be alone.

So that would be my call to adventure. Find a wilderness and get into it. And let yourself feel alone.

Chris Watson (01:09:54.638)
Excellent, that's a recurring theme with some of my guests, that wilderness and that introspection. So thank you. And then finally, the pay it forward segment. So this is an opportunity for you to suggest or recommend whether it's a project or a charitable cause or anything worthy of awareness that we want to get people involved with or aware of. So what would you say is a pay it forward suggestion?

Bruce Luyendyk (01:10:24.902)
Yes, one of my favorite charities is the World Wildlife Fund. There's also a UK foundation that's similar to this called the World Wildlife Foundation, but World Wildlife Fund is probably something everybody's heard about as big. But they're addressing the issue for me of wildlife is

decreasing the numbers, the types of wildlife on our earth are decreasing. And I think we know the reasons why, and I think we know that what we should do.

Myself, what I do is give money, but people who are younger, there's a number of avenues where you could participate in something that preserves or encourages the preservation of wildlife. And that's what that would be my pay it forward statement.

Chris Watson (01:11:37.786)
Excellent, excellent and very important and some very worthy causes. Thank you. We will get all of that listed in the show notes, including links to your book. And as a final kind of wrapping up, where can people follow along, Bruce? Where can they find out more about you, your achievements and some of your work?

Bruce Luyendyk (01:12:03.614)
Sure. I have a website. That's bruceleinndyke.com. Just one word, dot com. And from there you should be able to find a Facebook, Instagram, learning YouTube. And yeah, I have a okay social media presence.

Let's start with bruceleinandike.com and you'll find a lot of stuff. And, and hopefully with your permission, we'll have the podcast on it someday soon.

Chris Watson (01:12:41.91)
We will absolutely. It's been an absolute pleasure Bruce. Thank you for your time.

Bruce Luyendyk (01:12:48.526)
Oh, it's been fun. Great questions. I love to talk about the topic, obviously.

Chris Watson (01:12:53.062)
Yeah, I could talk for hours, but yeah, what a respectful of your time. So so thanks, Bruce. And what I'll do is I'll click stop. And if we just hang on to see processes. Yes.