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

Please click here to 'Follow' the show - it really helps get the show to a wider audience (which I really thank you for!).

Bruce Luyendyk once watched the sun set over mountains buried beneath an ice sheet the size of a continent — a landscape so alien he says it is genuinely impossible to describe. He was six people in a world with no neighbours for hundreds of miles. He was also, somewhere beneath his feet, standing on the evidence of an entirely undiscovered continent.

He didn't know that yet. That would come later.

In 1989, Luyendyk led a geology team into Marie Byrd Land — one of the most notoriously violent corners of West Antarctica — to test a hypothesis about how New Zealand had broken away from Gondwana millions of years ago. What they found in those frozen peaks would eventually lead him to coin the term "Zealandia": a submerged continent roughly the size of India, hiding in plain
sight beneath the South Pacific. He didn't write about any of it for 20 years. This is that story.

Mighty Bad Land is part expedition memoir, part scientific revelation, part honest account of what it costs to lead a small team in one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth — where you can be pinned in a tent for six consecutive days while the canvas snaps like rifle shots, and where a warm, sunny afternoon is precisely when you need to be most afraid.

Chapters

00:00 Bruce Luyendyk & Antarctica — introduction
00:59 Why Antarctica? Shackleton, Gondwana & the New Zealand connection
04:23 Writing Mighty Bad Land — 10 years from field to page
06:20 First expedition goals: testing the Gondwana newspaper tear
09:04 First impressions: arriving on the ice
11:46 Into the deep field: survival school, ski drags & wilderness landing
14:39 Navigation near the pole: grid systems & inertial guidance
17:00 Fuel drops, logistics & the weight of leadership
21:24 Team dynamics, accidents & lessons from the Fosdick Mountains
25:43 Pinned down: six days inside a tent during Antarctic blizzards
35:30 Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds — stepping into frozen history
41:01 Coining "Zealandia" — the discovery of a hidden eighth continent
48:06 Ice sheets, Gondwana breakup & the deeper scientific findings
54:00 Ancient Antarctica: the fossil record, a tropical past & the ice sheet
59:39 Mount Luyendyk — a summit named in Antarctica
1:06:48 What readers should take away from Mighty Bad Land
1:08:13 Call to Adventure: find a wilderness and let yourself feel alone
1:09:54 Pay It Forward: World Wildlife Fund

What You'll Learn:
• Why the most dangerous moment in Antarctica isn't the blizzard — it's the beautiful, sunny day when you let your guard down
• How Bruce and his team detected hidden crevasses by reading shadows on the ice — and what a  satellite photo years later showed they had unknowingly walked over
• The fossil fern Glossopteris — how a single plant found with Scott's frozen expedition team  proved that Gondwana existed
• What "Zealandia" actually is, why Bruce coined the term, and why New Zealand's geologists ran  with it decades later to stake a UN resource claim the size of India
• How Antarctic ice sheets started retreating 7,000 years ago — 11,000 years after the Northern   Hemisphere — and why that gap is still scientifically unexplained
• What it felt like to step inside Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds, with his boots still set out and his private room intact, as if he'd simply stepped outside for a moment

BRUCE LUYENDYK | Geologist, Explorer & Author
Website: bruceluyendyk.com
Instagram: @bruceluyendyk
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bruceluyendyk
Book: Mighty Bad Land: A Perilous Expedition to Antarctica Reveals Clues to an Eighth Continent
(Permuted Press, 2023) — available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster
Pay It Forward: World Wildlife Fund — wwf.org (UK: wwf.org.uk)

ABOUT BRUCE LUYENDYK
Bruce Luyendyk is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California Santa Barbara, elected Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He led
multiple expeditions to Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica beginning in 1989, during which he and his team found evidence of a far larger ancient ice sheet and made discoveries about the breakup of Gondwana. He coined the term "Zealandia" for the submerged continental mass underlying New Zealand. In 2016, the US Board on Geographic Names honoured him by naming a summit in Antarctica
Mount Luyendyk. His memoir, Mighty Bad Land, was published by Permuted Press in 2023.

For full show notes and links, visit: adventurediaries.com/go

Transcript

[CHAPTER: Bruce Luyendyk & Antarctica — Introduction — 00:00]

[00:01] CHRIS: That's us live. Bruce Luyendyk, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you?

[00:08] BRUCE: I'm doing well. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me on.

[00:11] CHRIS: It's a pleasure — really excited about this. A few things I want to get into today, including your fantastic book Mighty Bad Land, but we'll come to that in a moment. As a brief introduction: you are a renowned geologist, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California Santa Barbara, and you've done some really groundbreaking scientific and expedition work in Antarctica — which is what I want to navigate today, including the book. Can I start with: why Antarctica? Where did that passion come from?

[CHAPTER: Why Antarctica? Shackleton, Gondwana & New Zealand — 00:59]

[00:59] BRUCE: When I look back on my life and career, I wouldn't have predicted I'd spend half or more of it researching Antarctica. When I was younger, I had an experience at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Some old Navy hands were training me as an assistant, and they started telling tales about Shackleton. I was in college at the time and had never heard of him, which floored them completely. They told me the story and I was initially a bit disbelieving — and then I kind of forgot about it. But anyone who hears that story is utterly flattened by the whole notion of it.

Later, when I was a professor in Santa Barbara, I happened to read Shackleton's book by accident, and started digging a little deeper into my own fascination. But I still kept it in the background until I started working in New Zealand. There, I had a colleague — Dave — who ended up being an Antarctic colleague as well. We were working in the New Zealand Alps on a tough problem about the origin of certain mountain ranges. As you've probably seen if you've been to New Zealand, it's green for a reason — it rains constantly, the rocks are all beaten up and weathered. We were talking about how frustrating it was to do that kind of work there. And Dave said: well, these same types of mountains might exist in Antarctica, because Antarctica and New Zealand were once stitched together in Gondwana. In Antarctica, it doesn't rain, the rocks are pristine and exposed — why don't we go there? So I said, yes, that's a great idea. Let's go to Antarctica and figure out the mountains we can't figure out in New Zealand. That led to the process of organising a project, securing funding, and getting US National Science Foundation sponsorship to go to a part of Antarctica called Marie Byrd Land — where New Zealand was hypothesised to have been attached during Gondwana.

[04:18] CHRIS: So why, 20-odd years later, did you come out with a book?

[CHAPTER: Writing Mighty Bad Land — 10 Years from Field to Page — 04:23]

[04:23] BRUCE: Let me correct myself — I may have told somebody it was 30 years, but it's actually 20, because it took me 10 years to write the book. When I was working in Antarctica and running as a professor, I was dancing as fast as I could and working very hard. But certain stories kept nagging at me — experiences I hadn't really come to terms with. When I retired, I started learning creative writing: took classes at a local community college, completely retrained my approach to writing. As I started writing small pieces, I discovered I could have a book, but I really needed to understand what my experiences actually meant to me. For all those 20 years in the field, I'd never taken a hard look at that. But in retirement, with time on my hands, I got a better sense of what it all meant, what the effect on me really was, and that I had a story worth sharing.

[06:20] CHRIS: And the name — your work was in West Antarctica, in Marie Byrd Land, but the book is called Mighty Bad Land. A bit of a play on words?

[BRUCE: 06:35] BRUCE: Sure. It takes place in Marie Byrd Land and Mighty Bad Land is a whimsical take on that name. I didn't make it up — I heard it used mostly by Kiwis and by people at the US NSF who had either been there or heard about it. It's a notoriously rough spot in Antarctica for storms and blizzards — it's in the coastal cyclone belt. It gets mighty bad there, hence the name. When my publisher suggested I brainstorm something catchier, I mentioned it and he said immediately: that's it. That's the title.

[07:54] CHRIS: The subtitle reads: A Perilous Expedition to Antarctica Reveals Clues to an Eighth Continent. What were your primary research goals on that first expedition?

[CHAPTER: First Expedition Goals — Testing the Gondwana Newspaper Tear — 08:08]

[08:08] BRUCE: On the first expedition, we were testing the idea that New Zealand had broken off from this part of Gondwana and left behind Marie Byrd Land as it drifted northward during continental drift. The metaphor I use is: think of it, before the rifting and drifting took place, as a newspaper. Then the newspaper gets torn. You have part of a sentence on one side and the other part on the other side. If you match it up correctly, you can read the entire sentence. In this case, the "sentence" would be geological features on the Marie Byrd Land side matching up with geological features on the New Zealand side. That was the main hypothesis we were testing.

[09:04] CHRIS: We'll come on to your achievements and research findings in a moment. But moving into the experience of Antarctica itself — going for the first time, thinking about it all these years later: you went nine times after what's recounted in this book. Can you recall what it was like? Your first impressions when you landed?

[CHAPTER: First Impressions — Arriving on the Ice — 09:35]

[09:35] BRUCE: In my book, I start with my first impressions. Even when I read it now, I think I gave it a really good try — but it's almost impossible to capture. My first impression came from the cockpit of the New Zealand Air Force Hercules as we were crossing over the Southern Ocean. Then we see the continent: serious, serious mountains in the distance, buried by ice that stretches all the way to the horizon. The scale of it just floors me. Even talking about it with you now, I'm struck again — this vast, vacant continent buried by an enormous sheet of ice. Enormity, scale, uniqueness, otherworldliness — all those adjectives come to mind at once.

[11:08] CHRIS: And then to get there, go through survival school, get your team prepared, and then fly out to even more wilderness — into the Fosdick Mountains. What was that like when you were dropped there and there were no flights or helicopters coming for you? You were hours away from civilisation. What did that feel like?

[CHAPTER: Into the Deep Field — Survival School, Ski Drags & Wilderness Landing — 11:46]

[11:46] BRUCE: Before we went to Antarctica, before we reached McMurdo Station, before survival school — of course I'd read books and talked to veterans. And they start telling you stories. You think, yeah, they're making this up. And then you learn no, they're not making any of it up. In survival school, for instance, it really impressed on me: I've got to be an expert at this. Expert on self-arrest. Expert on crevasse rescue and Z-pulleys. And this is only three days. That in itself was unnerving.

Then to get to where we were going to do our work: you get in the Hercules, loaded up with all your gear, and you're flying over nothingness — ice, rock, and sky — for three or four hours. It's like flying coast to coast across Australia with nothing but blank space after you leave the airport. And when you land, there's nothing. The landing itself was exciting because they hadn't landed there before. To test the surface, they do what are called ski drags — they skim along, looking for crevasses. If nothing opens up, that looks all right, let's land.

[13:48] CHRIS: I think there are some very descriptive sections in the book about that. Just thinking about it gives me that stomach-drop feeling — you don't have runways and airports out there. You're in the middle of the wilderness, and a craft of that size with that kind of payload is landing on untested ground. That must be unnerving.

[14:11] BRUCE: Yeah, it's quite a feat. The pilots loved it, of course. It was so challenging — that's what they lived for. "We haven't been here before? Oh, that's great."

[14:26] CHRIS: And with the instruments as well — being so close to the pole, the navigational systems work differently, don't they? They have to use a grid system?

[CHAPTER: Navigation Near the Pole — Grid Systems & Inertial Guidance — 14:39]

[14:39] BRUCE: Yes — instead of the meridian and latitude system we're familiar with, they use a grid system where the Greenwich Meridian runs through the continent, 90° East and 90° West mark the axis, and everything else is a grid laid over the pole. So all directions are relative to that. In the days of those early expeditions, nobody was using GPS to navigate there. They were using inertial guidance and sun sights, which is accurate to perhaps a mile or two. Obviously, you need visual conditions to confirm your position when you're landing. Compared to how we navigate today, it was real seat-of-the-pants stuff — it took a great deal of skill to pull it off.

[15:59] CHRIS: All the logistics as well — you're on a scientific expedition. You've got samples and rock cores to bring back. The fuel drops really struck me: you're flying the distance of coast-to-coast Australia, and you're pre-positioning fuel by airdrop. I'd never really heard that before.

[CHAPTER: Fuel Drops, Logistics & the Weight of Leadership — 17:00]

[17:00] BRUCE: Yeah, there's definitely that stomach feeling. You bring in absolutely everything — if you need a paperclip and you don't have it, you're not getting one. I only found out about the fuel drops about two days before, I think — that they were going to parachute-drop fuel barrels in, and we'd have to find them. That's just part of the experience that keeps you on your game. You can't fully relax. You have to be paying attention, following the correct steps. And it gets overwhelming, especially in my position as leader — the buck stops with me.

[20:40] CHRIS: Did they give you training not just on self-arrest and crevasse safety, but on field navigation and tracking? Because the weather patterns must change so quickly, and any markers you laid out could be erased very rapidly.

[19:00] BRUCE: No — and that's a great question. I've never thought about it quite that way. Of our six people, four were geologists and two were mountaineers — both from Scotland, actually.

[19:20] CHRIS: Yes — Cain. I was going to say, hopefully that's gone some way to helping you understand my Scottish accent.

[19:32] BRUCE: Right. But I think the assumption was that we'd figure out the navigation. And the NSF, when they approve a project, asks first: is there a scientifically worthwhile goal here? And are these people up to it? I know the first time we applied for funding, the reviewers didn't think we were experienced enough — too green for something as challenging as Antarctica. The second time, different reviewers approved it. Definitely an assumption was made that we could handle it.

[CHAPTER: Team Dynamics, Accidents & Lessons from the Fosdick Mountains — 21:24]

[21:24] BRUCE: The group I was leading — you may have heard the expression "herding cats." That wasn't quite it, but the two geologists we brought as students — Christine and Steve — had very specific expertise we needed. It would not have been smart for me to come up with a rigid agenda for people who knew more than me about their specific topic. What Dave and I did was set up the main goals, and then trusted the people we'd brought to figure it out without being closely managed. For at least half of that first expedition, Steve and Christine came up with the exploration plan, because we needed them to do that. Once everybody agreed on the main goals and I'd taken responsibility for them, everyone got on with the job they were there to do.

[23:28] CHRIS: There were some challenging situations I won't give all the details of — I want people to read the book. On the subject of Cain the Scottish mountaineer — there was an incident with a snowmobile. Do you think he was being reckless?

[24:02] BRUCE: I did at the time. But when I reflected on it shortly afterwards, I realised the assumptions he made were reasonable and the actions he took were reasonable. It wasn't recklessness. It was just Antarctica. If something like that happens, I figured that out fairly quickly when a teammate reminded me: these are accidents. We're going to have accidents.

[24:42] CHRIS: And not long after, you had the crevasse incident. That must have been humbling — really bringing home how fragile you all were out there.

[25:31] BRUCE: That was definitely the most frightened I'd been in a long time. And what I've heard from other people who've spent time in Antarctica's deep field is that you really have to watch out for when the weather is beautiful — sunny, feeling almost warm. That's when you let your guard down. It's easy to stay on your game when a storm is battering you or you're climbing a glacier. It's when Antarctica takes a nap that you have to be most careful. That's what I learned. We had an accident precisely when we relaxed. And then you pay for it.

[26:56] CHRIS: So each day going out on snowmobiles — how were you checking for crevasses and weak ice bridges?

[27:25] BRUCE: When we were travelling, we used the snowmobiles — not the kind you'd find on ski slopes; these were lumbering, truck-like machines pulling cargo sledges with 200 kilograms of gear. We were moving very slowly. The mountaineers led in a train formation, doing a visual assessment. The best time to do that is when the sun is low, because a bridged crevasse will sag slightly and cast a shadow — it won't be smooth like a table top. If we saw that visual, we'd avoid it entirely. We didn't test suspicious areas; we simply didn't go near them.

But I learned afterwards that crevasses can be bridged by snow thick enough to completely conceal the sag — completely undetectable to the eye. And a few years later I saw a satellite photograph of a glacier we'd crossed; there had been a warming spell, and where the buried bridges had melted, there were now holes lined up in a row. We simply hadn't known what we were doing — or rather, we were lucky it hadn't been warmer. You take calculated risks in this kind of work. We don't go out intending to risk our lives, but we go knowing we are taking risks. You can't cover all the bases. That's why you prepare by learning how to do rescues.

[CHAPTER: Pinned Down — Six Days Inside a Tent in Antarctic Blizzards — 31:23]

[31:23] BRUCE: The toughest part of my experiences on this expedition and several that followed was not fully grasping what an Antarctic blizzard really is. Before we went the first time, I told a female colleague who was a veteran where we were going, and she laughed. She said: "Have you read War and Peace? You better take that with you." We were in Scott Polar tents — about two metres on each side, two people to a tent, built like a pyramid on wooden poles, no windows, heavy canvas. In a blizzard, you're not stepping outside for a stroll. And the canvas snaps like rifle shots — SNAP, SNAP — going on continuously for days. On this first expedition, the longest storm lasted about three days. On the expedition that followed, we had one that lasted ten days. And on another, we'd sat through three or four days of storm, thought it was over, were halfway through packing up — and McMurdo came on the radio: don't move. We looked around; it was a beautiful day. But before we finished packing, we were walloped again. Pinned down for another three days. Six days total — reading books, cooking, sleeping as much as possible, rewriting notes. I really don't know how I did it, because I am not a patient person. But you have no choice.

[34:39] BRUCE: You get desperate enough to go outside and join others in neighbouring tents for a meal or a bit of company — just to have a brunch and complain about the weather together.

[35:14] CHRIS: You spent Christmas and New Year out there as well, didn't you? A little celebration in the middle of it all.

[35:14] BRUCE: Yes — and my Scottish colleague did a Highland sword dance on a wooden packing crate for New Year, which I'd never seen. Certainly never seen a mountaineer in full mountaineering gear do one.

[CHAPTER: Shackleton's Hut at Cape Royds — Stepping Into Frozen History — 35:30]

[35:30] CHRIS: Coming up a little bit later in your timeline, there's the issue of your pullout flight being delayed and delayed — the anxiety of waiting to be extracted. But before I get to that, I actually want to ask about Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds. You got access to it, didn't you?

[01:03:23] BRUCE: Yes. During our shakedown trip before going out to the mountains — a period to get all our gear sorted — Christine organised a trip across the sea ice to Cape Royds, where Shackleton's hut from his 1907–09 expedition stands. I thought that sounded great. But then we get there, and I find out she has the key. Completely unknown to me. It had been locked up because the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust had been doing some restoration work on it, very minimal. But when we went round and in, it looked as though the occupants had just stepped out and would be right back. Cots set up, skis there, boots there, food laid out — none of that placed by the restoration team; it was the original material, left there. Like walking into a private museum that hardly anyone gets to see. Getting there takes real effort, and having the key is another thing entirely. I don't know how Christine managed that.

[01:05:35] CHRIS: It's history frozen in time, quite literally. The food and supplies and equipment, as if they'd just gone out for the day.

[01:05:35] BRUCE: Yes. And tucked inside was a small cubbyhole — Shackleton's own private room. That floored me. I'd idolised him after reading the books and hearing those old Navy hands tell me the stories. Getting the chance to close that circle, to stand in that space — it was pretty overpowering, to say the least.

[CHAPTER: Coining "Zealandia" — The Discovery of a Hidden Eighth Continent — 40:19]

[41:01] CHRIS: Moving to some of your actual research findings — the Zealandia discovery. If I'm pronouncing that correctly. What impact did that have on your understanding of plate tectonics?

[41:30] BRUCE: Sure. The concept of Zealandia — which has been in the news even recently — is that it's an unrecognised sunken continent that was once part of Gondwana, which moved away from Gondwana at the same time New Zealand did, and which carries New Zealand on it, because New Zealand sits on top of this submerged platform. It was an "aha" moment when I was looking at a reconstruction of Gondwana made by researchers at the University of Texas, and I realised that New Zealand and Antarctica — where we had been working — were once neighbours, all part of Gondwana. And so all the pieces that carried New Zealand northward had to be pieces of continent. In a paper I wrote to explain how those pieces moved around, I coined the term "Zealandia" for the sunken continental pieces that New Zealand pokes above and that are scattered around the South Pacific. Put them all together and they're roughly the size of India. It's substantial.

To be fair, I didn't follow up on the geological research that would fully establish whether Zealandia truly is continental crust — the hard work of proving it was done by the New Zealand geologists. When they saw what I had done, they realised: this is something we have to pay attention to, because it means our country is sitting on a continent that's mostly buried. Nick Mortimer and Hamish Campbell wrote a popular book about it in 2014, and then in 2017, Mortimer, Campbell, and a group of New Zealand geologists published the key scholarly paper formally testing the concept. They've continued deepening the evidence since. I coined the term and started people thinking about it — but the real follow-through was done by New Zealand's A-Team of geologists.

[46:49] CHRIS: I think you mentioned in the book, or somewhere I read, that there are potentially billions' worth of submerged fossil fuels and mineral reserves involved.

[47:08] BRUCE: That's somewhat above my pay grade, but it was known when I coined the concept that there were petroleum deposits on the continental margin south of New Zealand, and they were being exploited. The more significant driver for the New Zealand geologists was the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea: if you can demonstrate that the continental margins surrounding your landmass are genuinely part of your continent, you can claim those resources under international law. That created a huge territory that New Zealand could legitimately claim — which I believe drove the very thorough scientific effort to nail down all the details.

[CHAPTER: Ice Sheets, Gondwana Breakup & the Deeper Scientific Findings — 48:06]

[48:06] CHRIS: In terms of your other research findings — the Antarctic ice sheet and the broader Gondwana story?

[48:06] BRUCE: Two things. First, the ice sheet: when we climbed up on the peaks to do our geology in Marie Byrd Land, we found evidence that an ice sheet had once scoured right over those peaks. Simple arithmetic tells you the ice must have been much, much thicker than it is today. The follow-up research, spearheaded by John Stone and others including a woman colleague in the book, was able to determine when — and the answer is that a much larger ice sheet over Marie Byrd Land started to retreat about 7,000 years ago. What's striking is that the ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere — like those that once covered Scotland — started retreating about 18,000 to 20,000 years ago. So Antarctica lagged behind by 10,000 years or more. I don't know who is studying that question today, but it's a profound one.

[50:18] BRUCE: Second, about Gondwana: part of our hypothesis was not only that New Zealand's geological features were connected to Marie Byrd Land's, but that the timing of that breakup mattered. From the seafloor record, we knew the seafloor between Antarctica and New Zealand is 80 million years old — meaning the continents started moving apart 80 million years ago. We expected the mountain ranges we were working in to have formed around that same time. It turned out that was wrong. They were actually forming about 20 million years earlier — making them unrelated to the Gondwana breakup and telling a completely different plate tectonic story. Twenty million years is a lot of time. That's a finding I'm very proud of.

[52:16] CHRIS: Why does this matter to the layperson?

[52:40] BRUCE: My honest answer is: people want to know this stuff. That's why you're talking to me. Of course there are practical implications — Zealandia and resource claims; the ice sheet and climate change. But at the most fundamental level, people just want to understand the world. They want to know things. And they want to know them so much that they'll spend serious money having people find out.

[53:34] CHRIS: It's not just about now either — it builds a baseline for understanding that will matter for generations to come.

[53:59] BRUCE: Exactly.

[CHAPTER: Ancient Antarctica — Fossils, a Tropical Past & the Ice Sheet — 54:00]

[54:00] CHRIS: Pivoting a little — what are your thoughts on views of ancient Antarctica? The idea that it was once tropical?

[54:10] BRUCE: What we know about ancient life forms in Antarctica comes from fossils, and the fossil record leaves no doubt that there was abundant life there in the geological past — in deep time. One of the most compelling stories is the fossils collected on Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to the Pole. A team member, Edward Wilson, who was both a scientist and a doctor, collected samples of a fern called Glossopteris from the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. Glossopteris had been found on all the southern continents but not yet in Antarctica. That find solidified the idea that Gondwana had existed — otherwise how could the same flora appear on all those separate continents? They had to have been connected. And those fossils were found with the bodies of the Scott party.

The ice sheet we see today started forming around 35 million years ago. Before that, there was flora and fauna that included dinosaurs and other creatures. Mountain glaciers may have existed, but there was no ice sheet. In contrast, the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets only started forming around 2.5 million years ago — so Antarctica has been iced over far longer. Why? Partly because the climate was warmer in Gondwana's era, and partly because Gondwana itself was further north — not positioned over the pole as it is today. It was in more temperate latitudes. Then around 35 million years ago, the climate shifted, atmospheric CO₂ changed, and the ice sheet formed and has persisted, growing and shrinking, ever since.

[CHAPTER: Mount Luyendyk, the Book's Message & Closing Traditions — 59:39]

[59:39] CHRIS: How does it feel to have a summit named after you in Antarctica — Mount Luyendyk?

[01:00:10] BRUCE: That's close. It's pronounced Lion-dike. And I'm not sure it has made it onto the maps yet, since the naming happened in 2016. But it will — and when it does, people will probably assume I'm related to a certain racing driver, which I'm not. Where we were camping in the first year, we had a terrible storm over Christmas at the base of a peak that only had a number: Peak 1070. Years went by. Then some of my graduate students — Christine and Christopher, both now working professionals — had a feeling of gratitude for being brought into the world of Antarctica, and they nominated my name for Peak 1070. I didn't suggest it. It completely floored me that they did. More people have congratulated me about having a mountain named after me than about all the papers and discoveries combined. Apparently people care about the mountain.

[01:02:11] CHRIS: That's real validation. For everything you've done, having your team come back years later to give you that kind of commendation — there's something very meaningful in that. Congratulations.

[01:02:40] BRUCE: Thanks so much, Chris. Thank you.

[01:02:58] CHRIS: I want to be respectful of your time, Bruce, but I did want to ask about Shackleton's hut first — which we've now covered. So, what do you hope readers take away from the book?

[01:06:48] BRUCE: I'm a scientist and an explorer — not an adventurer in the conventional sense. But it's obvious that what I did is an adventure. Why? Because it's something you do where you're not really sure you can succeed. You really think you'd like it if you did. And you're 51% convinced you can do it. If you can get to 51%, you should do it. That puts you on an adventure. And when it's over, what I said to myself was: that was hard. But we did good. So let's do it again.

[CHAPTER: Call to Adventure — Find a Wilderness & Let Yourself Feel Alone — 01:08:13]

[01:08:13] CHRIS: Our two closing traditions: the Call to Adventure — your suggestion of a place, activity, or experience to inspire the listeners.

[01:08:52] BRUCE: I would say it's really important to experience wilderness, because you start thinking about different things when you do. Places like Alaska or Patagonia — you can get to them, you can get into them, and then you can learn what it looks like and feels like to have no civilisation around you and to be truly alone. Find a wilderness and get into it. Let yourself feel alone.

[CHAPTER: Pay It Forward — World Wildlife Fund — 01:09:54]

[01:09:54] CHRIS: And the Pay It Forward — a suggestion for a good cause or something worthy of awareness.

[01:10:24] BRUCE: One of my favourite charities is the World Wildlife Fund — WWF. There's a similar UK organisation called the World Wildlife Foundation, but WWF is one most people will have heard of. They're addressing the issue that matters most to me: the numbers and diversity of wildlife on our planet are declining. We know the reasons why, and we know what should be done about it. For those who can give money, it makes a difference. For younger people, there are lots of avenues to participate directly in wildlife preservation. That's my Pay It Forward.

[01:11:37] CHRIS: Excellent — very important work. We'll get all of that in the show notes, including links to your book. And finally, where can people follow your work, Bruce?

[01:12:03] BRUCE: My website is bruceluyendyk.com — just one word, dot com. From there you'll find Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And hopefully, with your permission, we'll have this podcast episode there soon too.

[01:12:41] CHRIS: Absolutely — it's been an absolute pleasure, Bruce. Thank you for your time.

[01:12:48] BRUCE: Oh, it's been fun. Great questions. I love talking about this topic, obviously.

[01:12:53] CHRIS: Yeah, I could talk for hours, but I want to be respectful of your time. Thanks, Bruce.