Return to Ross: Closing the Loop, Opening the Future

Season 2 of Thin Ice begins by revisiting the past to gain a new perspective on the future. 

Forty years after one of the most defining and disruptive moments of his life, polar explorer Robert Swan returns to the Ross Sea region of Antarctica. This time, not as a young man chasing history, but as a witness revisiting Cape Evans, the site of his original South Pole expedition, and the waters where his ship, Southern Quest, was lost beneath the ice. 

In this powerful and reflective conversation with filmmaker Oli Wheeldon, Robert shares what it means to finally close a deeply emotional chapter, and how that closure is fueling a new phase of purposeful exploration and adventure. 

You’ll hear: 

• What it felt like to return to Capt. Robert Scott’s Hut at Cape Evans after 40 years
• The emotional impact of revisiting the site where Southern Quest sank and the pristine site where the “In the Footsteps of Scott” base camp once stood.
• Why the Footsteps expedition’s hardships now evoke a sense of pride
• How Robert’s motivation evolved from adventure and history to a life mission of protecting Antarctica
• The role of his son, Barney Swan, and the next generation of climate leadership
• What’s next, including the final Antarctic voyage Robert himself will lead, a trans-Australia cycling expedition and more.

In a follow-up conversation with co-host Dan Smith, Robert reflects on how the loss of the ship reshaped his life’s direction, and why, now more than ever, we must “turn into the storm” if we want a sustainable future.
 
This episode also marks a turning point for Thin Ice itself. What began as a podcast is evolving into something bigger: a platform for exploring “The Next Great Adventure—learning to live sustainably on Earth.”

Key Themes
 

• Closure, resilience, and earned perspective
• Exploration as a path to meaning
• Stewardship of Antarctica as a shared human responsibility
• The shift from personal ambition to collective purpose
• Turning toward the challenge, not away from it

Get Involved

We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment, share your thoughts, or reach out directly: dan@thinice.earth. And visit our website — ThinIce.earth — to see pictures and learn more.

Credits

Thin Ice is a production of Robert Swan and Dan Smith.
Special thanks to Jason Fletcher and Scenic Luxury Cruises & Tours for enabling Robert’s return to the Ross Sea, and to Bernadette Desiato for making the impossible scheduling possible.
 
As always: Keep Earth wild. Be Kind. And chill out.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

The new game is afoot, and I am very excited about things, and honestly, possibly for the first time for years, because in this voyage I have managed to close some of the gloom that surrounded certain things that I've done in the past.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Welcome to season two of the night. As you just heard from Robert Swann, a new game is afoot in our new season. Hi everyone, I'm Dan Smith, Robert's co-host, and you may recall that we ended season one in December of 2025. If we talked about 10 IT to find, we'll hear how Robert has finally closed a deeply emotional look in his life, and he's opened a new path for further adventures in the years ahead. He was speaking on board this show with our friend, the amazing filmmaker Oli Quilden. I urge you to remember that name because Oli Quilden is going to be famous. As you'll hear in this conversation with Ollie, Robert's perspective has changed, but his mission remains today: calling for the permanent protection of Antarctica and promoting sustainable practices in the civilized world. Let's listen in.

SPEAKER_02 2:29

You revisited Cape Evans for the first time in 40 years. How do you feel now looking back into the winter?

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Well living for a year at Cape Evans was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. Five very different people inside one tiny small room, four months of darkness, extremely cold, and for me, I think more than the others, a a real panic about would I make the poll with, if you like, these professional people. So the pressure was very intense for me there. And going back, I remember clearly leaving Scott's hut on the morning of our departure, November the 3rd, 1985, and I went into Scott's hut and basically lay down on his bunk, which of course you're not allowed to do anymore. Looked at the ceiling and said, Okay, Captain, I am going to come back, and I'm very sad that you never were able to come back to the hut. And of course, I never made it back because the ship sank, and I never went back to Cape Evans, and 40 years later I was able to walk into the hut, of course, kneel next to Captain Scott's bunk nowadays, and basically say, Captain, I'm back. We did it. And when I say we did it, when I left that hut 40 years earlier, I really felt very much that they were with me. All of the people in that hut, all of his team were behind Roger Gareth and I making it to the pole and not dying, as Scott and his team had done. And literally at that second of saying that in the hut, for the first time in 40 years, I truly believed in my soul that I had reached the South Geographic Pole. Because it had been snatched away from me. Any joy, any celebration, it all went because we lost the ship. Gareth bravely stayed another year. I was in massive debt and somehow had to get Gareth out, and the whole thing just went on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. So to walk on that beach, there are very few things that I'm really proud of in life. And normally there are things that I haven't done, hondly enough, but maybe I instigated. And I was so, so proud to go to exactly where Jack Haywood base was for two years. Gara spent two years there, think of that. And we found one nail and two pieces of small chipped glass in an area where we had lived for all those months, all those years, and that was our promise to Jacques Cousteau, Sir Peter Scott, Lord Shackleton, Sir Vivian Fuchs, Lord Hunt, all our fantastic supporters, that we would leave it clean. And although it cost me bankruptcy, possibly a certain amount of madness, the job was done. So in that moment on Cape Evans Beach, I really felt that we'd done it. And I'd never really felt that before. And it was a great relief and a great sense of not carrying it anymore on my shoulders, and to really feel proud of what we had achieved. Maybe difficult people, maybe tough times, uh friction, people arguing, not getting on that well, but to hell with it. We did it, and maybe it took all of that to make it happen.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

You mentioned all of this is because of the ship going down, and we got to revisit that site. What was that like?

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Well, the last time I saw the ship was at the end of January 1985, standing on the beach at Cape Evans, waving goodbye to this little red dot that disappeared over the horizon, and I never saw the ship again. And obviously, the plan was the ship would return and we would all join together and clear up everything from Cape Evans, but I never saw the ship again. Brave Southern Quest had been part of my life, especially part of Peter Malcolm's life, and Captain Phippin and brilliant carpenter Mike Seaney, and of course Captain Giles Kershaw, all these incredible people that have since died. The ship was part of us, and it was everybody's home, as William Fenton has said, you know, it's not every day you watch your home sink beneath the ice. And to go back there, and I have to really thank Jason as part of the scenic team for allowing us to fly over in a beautiful helicopter, which kind of made me feel quite strange to be flying over the site of where the ship went down. And I looked down and I thought to myself, what an extraordinary team it took to do that. That as the US Coast Guard team said to Captain Phippin, very rarely have we ever seen a rescue as well organised. And that made me extremely grateful to him and his team for being that orderly. I think a lot of people look at what we did all those years ago and say, well, you know, what the hell were they doing with a ship that small in Antarctica? Well, Shackleton's ship Nimrod from his 1909 expedition was actually smaller than Southern Quest and weighed a hundred tons less. So, yes, we took a risk in going south on a smaller ship, but the reason we went south early was for political reasons that have been discussed on thin ice. So I looked down where Southern Quest was exactly, and I felt proud of the ship, the job she'd done, all those miles across the Indian Ocean, down the Atlantic, across the Tasman Sea, across the worst seas in the world to get to Antarctica. And I just felt that hopefully in 2028, through some amazing technology that we've been told could work, we should be able to see the ship. And wouldn't be that that'd be just a magnificent moment to see, you know, with a a bright light, um on some sort of camera down at 525 metres, just see her. But I felt that was her place most importantly, it would have been so easy to have lost somebody. And to lose a ship is one thing, but to have lost a person on our expedition would have been inexcusable, and that never happened. So I felt emotional. I felt it was one of those moments in life that I think again needed to be resolved because I'd never seen the ship. I'd never been to Beaufort Island, I'd never seen where. All I had was this sort of image of the ship getting crushed and down she went. And I I really felt strongly of my pride in the ship, my pride, pride in the team, and also most importantly, the pride in our captain, Captain Phippin, who could have easily used Giles with his aeroplane, we could have easily made it back to Cape Evans, even across the ice on foot, but he chose the right option, which was to say to the US Coast Guard who offered him help, yes, please come and get our team. And that was the right choice.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

Barney's been with you for this entire journey. What's it been like visiting these iconic locations with him?

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Well, they are iconic, uh, and he has always known that deep down inside I have been rather gloomy about the footsteps of Scott for all the reasons that I've talked about, you know, difficult characters, worrying about whether I could do it, the polar journey itself wasn't exactly the easiest thing I've ever done, and the loss of the ship, all those things. And he's always felt that I was a bit gloomy. But I can tell you he was part of helping me lift that gloom, and he was so happy to see, I suppose, the real Rob, which was the dream at 11, to go there. There was Captain Scott's hut. He could see inside it, to see where the hut, our hut was, and I feel he was extremely overwhelmed to a certain extent by actually seeing the inside of his father's brain, which is probably not the best place to look in, but I think he he he could see what drove me and and the history, and of course we went to see Shackleton's hut as well, and seeing the enthusiasm, which I think really affected Barney in a really positive way, the enthusiasm of the group of people that we're lucky to be traveling with, who came across and people were in tears. And you know, Aussies don't cry easy for goodness sake, and grown men, tough people in tears by the story of what we we did all those years ago, and I repeat what we did, not what I did. So I think he's he's come away with a real understanding of A, how far away it is. We go to the peninsula, we fly across in a couple of hours, or we go on a ship in a day and a half. This is a long way south to where we went, and I think he had a real sense also of those of the bravery of those first explorers, the real people, Scott, Shackleton, Armundson, and the rest of them. And I think you've got to have seen it to understand that.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

And what's next for the two of you?

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Barney has his mission in Far North Queensland, Australia, where he is restoring the oldest rainforest in the world. I think being on this ship has really helped him because the majority of people on this ship are from Australia and they have been very excited about what he's doing. He is turning that into a business. For four or five years it's been a charity and a very successful charity, he's raised six million US dollars, but he wants to turn it into a business, and I think that well I know that that's his next direction to turn climate force into a good business that's helping other people, helping the land, helping trees, and helping industries in Australia that have simply collapsed, like the cane industry, gone in his area. You know, tens of thousands of acres had just gone to nothing because the prices have gone and it's cheaper to get sugarcane from Brazil, and people are out of work, shops are closing, and Barney now has the knowledge of having restored degraded land and come up with ideas on how you can make money from your land, apart from having one crop like sugar cane. So he's very excited about that. And I'm never somebody who complains about one thing. I might moan a bit about certain things, but it's now time for me to open a new chapter. And I've always been fascinated about Australia, about the real Australia, and that's not you know Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, all the cities that go round Australia. What's in the heart of Australia has always interested me as a kid, you know, the red centre, the places where it gets to 52 degrees Celsius, and what's it like living out there? How do people survive out there? That's always interested me as a kid, and my new mission is starting in May of 2027. I am going to make a cycle ride from Darwin in the north of Australia to Adelaide in the south of Australia, and on that cycle ride visit as many schools, universities, colleges, tiny schools out there, you know, might only have sort of 10 pupils, and to really try and have an impact to help them in some way. I'm working on how that works, a work in progress, but I think it's while I'm still able to do that sort of thing, I'm committed to doing that. And of course, at the end of this year, in November, end of November 2026, we have our 2041 expedition ship, which is going to the Antarctic, very much along the lines of leadership, very much along the lines of changing the conversation that we seem to have been having on sustainability, which hasn't seemed to have worked and been pushed back a lot. How are we going to push back and bring sustainability forward more? How's that going to help business? How's it going to help employees and companies? So I'm excited about that, but that will be the last expedition to Antarctica that I will lead where I have chartered my own ship. What's been fantastic about being on this ship with the likes of Jason, who's been amazing, Jason Flesher, we've known for years, with him and his team running it, you know, we've actually been able to actually have a bit of peace and quiet and not having you know almost died in the attempt of it. The last thing in 2028, which is gonna happen, and that is that through this New Zealand man with his technology, we'll come again on this ship and go and locate and see Southern Quest with some cameras. We won't raise Southern Quest or do anything like that, but it'd be great to see it. And then I intend to spend approximately six weeks at Cape Evans again, not a year, but six weeks at Cape Evans in a tent, just like we did on Ice Station, and communicate this time to even more than 2.1 million people around the world about protecting Antarctica, especially young people, and what a place to do it from, with all the history that has surrounded the story. So the new game is afoot, and I am very excited about things, and honestly, possibly for the first time for years, because in this voyage I have managed to close some of the gloom that surrounded certain things that I've done in the past.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

I have one selfish question I'd like to ask you, just to bring it back to sort of the human factor, as possibly one of the only people on the planet that has done so much and has now certainly earned a good rest. Will you ever stop and actually take stock of what you've achieved and rest?

SPEAKER_00 19:36

I think I think it's a good question. You have to ask yourself, you have to ask people like us who have a restless problem. I I have. I feel that what has changed in me is that for most people bicycling from Darwin to Adelaide is something that they'd rather die rather than do. But for me, that will be fantastic as a rest. Not physically, not perhaps mentally thinking, why am I doing this and it's 52 degrees? But I always think that uh I I will continue to find things while I can still do them, where it's not quite as much pressure as going back home and thinking, great, I've got five thousand dollars in the bank. You know, all of those things create for me more problems than bicycling across Australia, and I I think I will gradually become a more restful or rested person, but no, I think the way the world is now it's down to people like Dan and Thin Ice, yourself and Barney and all the people that strive so hard. We can't we can't step back. We have to step it up, and I think that that's really what we're all trying to do. So, not for a while, Ollie, no.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

That's the end of Robert's conversation with Ollie. They caught up with Robert a couple of weeks later when he was back on drum and non-frozen land. I had a few follow-up questions, and it is particularly interesting to hear how Robert's motivations changed based on the experience of another quest. There you go. When you look back at that young explorer in 1986 and you compare him to the person that you are today, how have your motivations changed?

SPEAKER_00 21:40

What motivated me to do all this in the first place? Well, you know, it did go down well with girls at parties when I was 16 talking about it, but the real motivation was the history, the Scots and Shackleton, and this extraordinary. The Antarctic drew me in as that young kid of eleven. And then from the moment, and this is what was extraordinary was the loss of our ship was the change from doing it for history, etc., to doing it with a purpose to say that nobody owns Antarctica. Because one must remember, and being above Southern Quest, where she lies beneath the waves, reminded me look, why was Southern Quest there at that time of year when she shouldn't have been there? Because there's still ice, a lot of ice. The plan was the ship would wait to go in and retrieve our hut, and that we would be flown from the South Pole by Captain Giles Kershaw, but we were prevented from a political standpoint, the American government, the UK government, from taking that plane in. So remember, Southern Quest was turned into an aircraft carrier. And it was just extraordinary to realize why that ship was there. And the motivation for that was really quite bloody-minded to say that I decided when we lost the ship and we were told to leave Antarctica and bulldoze our into the sea, that that that's where the motivation to say we need to not have this place owned by anybody started. So obviously, this was in 1986, and the beginnings of the 2041 mission would be in 1991 with Jacques Cousteau, etc. But that's where my anger about Antarctica and who owns it, and people throwing their weight around politically began.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

You mentioned having visited Scott's hut uh at Cape Evans, and I know that you and Barney also went to Ernest Shackleton's hut from his 1909 expedition. When you were standing in those huts from the heroes of the heroic age of polar exploration. Did it feel like you were visiting history, or did it feel more like a connection in a long chain of people who were curious about this place and ultimately wanted to take care of it?

SPEAKER_00 24:59

You're right, Dan. I felt very much that I was in a sort of small chain of historic polar travel. I mean, they were the real explorers, but somehow we in our own small way sort of fitted into that, and that chapter of being totally connected with Scott and Shackleton, that chapter closed. I'll always be proud of what we did. I'll be hugely respectful of what they did, but that chapter closed. And we'd left it completely clean and tidy with the help of Greenpeace all those years ago, because that was a promise we made. And I think that Scott and Shackleton, who did what they said they were going to do, would have respected what we'd done.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

This will be the last question before we wrap it up. When you think about everything you've done, you know, whether it's your expeditions to the poles, your your sailing expeditions, bicycling across uh most of Africa when you were much younger. All of the people that you've met. What about people gives you some hope? Or or is there any realistic hope that that humanity can be successful in learning how to live sustainably on this planet?

SPEAKER_00 26:35

That's the essence, really, Dan, of why I'm going to bicycle across Australia in May 2027, is that it one needs to step it up. Um it's the old adage, as we always say, is you know, when a bison is in a storm, uh, a terrible blizzard blizzard, it doesn't turn its backside to the blizzard, it turns its head into the blizzard and goes straight into the storm. And why? Because the quickest way out of a blizzard is to go into it. The easiest way is to turn your back and go with it. But if you want to get out of it quick, you turn, you turn into it and you do battle with it. Visiting, having the privilege of visiting where Southern Quest was to go back to Scott's hut has re-inspired me to say, right, no backing down, let's push it on. And if that takes bicycling across Australia, if it takes whatever it takes, I will give it my best shot.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

In the break between seasons one and two, Robert and I had time to discuss what we want the nice to be when this program grows up. And we want to grow beyond a program to establish a platform where we explore the next great adventure, learning to live sustainably on Earth. So we will be exploring that topic and speaking with people who are helping to lead the way. We're building the infrastructure for that. A new website is in progress, for example. And we're doing this because we want to make Thin Ice interesting, informative, and inspiring to you. And I do mean you, the person with earbuds while you shop or handle the week in chores, or maybe you're driving to work. I don't know what you are doing at this particular moment, but we appreciate the fact that you've tuned in. And Robert and I invite you to join us on this adventure and to the exploration of protecting Antarctica and learning to live sustainably on Earth. We'd love to hear from you. Please give a like and drop a comment, or send me an email at dan at thinite.earth. I promise to read them all and I will respond to all I can. I want to share a sincere thank you to Jason Fletcher with Scenic Luxury Cruises and Tours for inviting Robert, Barney, and Ali on board for this very consequential excursion. Finite is a production of Robert Swann and Dan Smith. We thank Bernadette Dessiato for handling the impossible scheduling. Until next time, my friends, keep earthwild, be kind, and chill out.