Fire on the Amazon, fire in the Arctic, heatwaves in India, drought in California – around the world reports are coming in of weather extremes and changing climate patterns. What is it like for people directly involved?

Prof. Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University brings stories from varied places, from melting permafrost to parched farmland, and shows the direct impact on many lives.

Prof. Wadhams is the world’s leading expert on sea ice. He has made more than 50 expeditions to both polar regions, working from ice camps, icebreakers, aircraft, and, uniquely, Royal Navy submarines (making six submerged voyages to the North Pole. He was director of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge from 1987 to 1992 and professor of ocean physics there from 1992 to 2015.

“My interest in the polar oceans had been stimulated when I first went to the Arctic in the summer of 1970, aboard the Canadian oceanographic ship Hudson, which was carrying out the first circumnavigation of the Americas. The ship was ice strengthened, and needed to be.  Sometimes the ice pushed right up to the coast and we had to break our way through densely clustered floes of heavy, thick multi-year ice, and eventually, when we were in the middle of the Northwest Passage, we had to be rescued by a heavy Government icebreaker, the John A. Macdonald….

“Today a ship entering the Arctic from Bering Strait finds an ocean of open water in front of her. The Northwest Passage is now easily navigable, and by the end of 2015 a total of 238 ships had sailed through it.”

– A Farewell to Ice (2016)