Even as a little kid
I was always curious
you know what was the next yard like
what was it like on the next street over
the next neighborhood
the next town
It just snowballs
Ever since I was a kid
I was interested in animals
I really liked to get up close
and personal with animals
I was a little boy
who grew up on the shore lines of San Diego
I wanted to be Captain Nemo
I wanted to command the Nautilus
Growing up in a small town in Alabama
I never thought that I would do this
Just amazing
I think there is in all human begins
this essence of exploration
this desire to explore
We all have this hidden two-year-old in us
that wants to just kind of reach up
and really feel the world around us
I really think that there are too many places to explore
too many things to discover to sit around
If it is easy
it would have been done before
I think there are plenty of places to explore
A lot of those places
are going to be the most difficult to sustain yourself
There's so much of the planet
that is unexplored
that I can't imagine we're gonna be
out of work any time soon
July 16, 1969
Apollo Eleven escapes the earth's gravity
and sets its course for the moon
Our urge to explore has
finally outgrown our small planet
But as the people of the world look up
the astronauts on board look back
They marvel at earth
It looks as strange as the place they're headed
Below them is a planet still to be explored
The spirit of exploration is as old as humanity itself
Brave people have always
ventured out into the darkness
and come back to enlighten us
And in the last century
the pace of accomplishment has been astonishing
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay
first to summit Mount Everest
Robert Peary and Matthew Henson
first to the North Pole
Amelia Earhart? First woman
to fly solo across the Atlantic
That's one small step for man...
And a thousand years from now
they will still know the name Neil Armstrong
But has everything been discovered?
Is the age of exploration over?
This is the story of ten explorers
who believe that the spirit
of exploration still thrives
It is the story of what compels them to venture out
time and again into the unknown
lan Baker believes that at the end of the millennium
there are still places on earth
that have never been named
that have never been plotted on a map
Somewhere in this vast Tibetan jungle
he hopes to find a giant waterfall
He's been searching for over a decade
Ancient Buddhist prayer books hold that deep
within a gorge is a cascade
that shrouds the passageway to paradise
I first heard about it from a very old lama
who had spent much of his life
meditating in these very remote valleys
He had always told me
the greatest of these was a place called Pemako
in the far southeastern part of Tibet
Baker made six expeditions in search of the falls
He has never managed to reach them
He is not the first to fail
In 1924, British Botanist Frank Kingdon-
Ward tried to find the falls
only to be defeated by the terrain
Where he failed Baker hopes to succeed
He knows Kingdon-Ward was unable to
descend the sheer cliffs
along more than five miles of the gorge
Could the falls be located in this unexplored area?
Baker and his expedition partner
Ken Storm, have won the trust of local hunters
who will lead them down paths
that no Westerner has ever followed
The gorge is a treacherous place teeming with leeches
stinging nettles and deadly snakes
Why do people like Baker risk
so much to explore the unknown?
That I'm different from anybody else in the sense
that I think the spirit of
exploration is intrinsic to human nature
Exploration is really one of the very
very few things that makes us human
Once you get a taste of it
you can't go back to the simple life
I did become tensely irritated at the endless rain
being soaking wet never drying out
Leeches all over your legs
and just scratch marks all over your bodies
and face just because half the time
you're moving up through a pathless terrain
But I think anybody
who's given to a life of exploration
has to feel some sense of
embrace of this kind of wild existence
where, you know the comforts
of the civilized world are suddenly stripped from us
As a young boy, Baker loved adventure
He yearned to be the youngest
to reach the top of famous mountains
And he drew pictures
revealing dreams of mystical places
places with hidden waterfalls
My more recent explorations in the Himalayas
have been in that sense a continuation
of my earliest childhood activities
which was really to explore the forests
and marshes behind the house
There is still a first out there for Baker to claim
But reaching the great falls of the Tsang-po
is an epic journey away
Now that the weather is clearing a little bit
we're going to try to
make our way down into this unknown section
And for 75 years
it has been believed to be an impenetrable wilderness
lan Baker's expedition to
find the falls has been slowed...
...to a mile a day
In this terrain
the difference between life and death
can be a single careless step
We had on previous expeditions
seen from a long distance
what appeared to be a waterfall
But even when we were a thousand feet
above it a year earlier
we were still not able to determine whether
in fact, this was the great falls of the Tsang-po
that Kingdon-Ward had been looking for
And there was the sense that
unless you went down to the falls itself
we would never be able to
answer or resolve that question
The jungle thickens
The terrain gets even steeper
Then, finally in the distance
they hear the river falling
All of the Tsang-po pouring into the energy
Unbelievable
A century of speculation is over
They have filled in
one of the last blank spots on the map
These are, indeed, the great falls of the Tsang-po
They name it the Hidden Falls of Dorje Phagmo?
After the region's most powerful goddess
What this discovery of the waterfall has done
actually, is to evoke from people
almost a subconscious need that
we all have for magical places in the world
for a sense that there are still places to be discovered
I don't understand
why people think that exploration is finished
For me it's really just started
I think there's plenty of places to explore
A lot of those places are
gonna be the most difficult places
to really sustain yourself
within and make a real contribution
I love this expression: The last place on earth
And that's what I'm really trying to bring back
The best explorers
have always brought back to us with their words
with their pictures that last place on earth
When the film Congorilla opened on Broadway in 1932,
audiences flocked to the theater.
Most people had never seen
moving pictures of such exotic animals
You are going to see
and hear the first pictures in natural sound
ever made in the jungles of Central Africa
There will be the roar of the lion
herds of elephants millions of flamingos
and rivers alive with the vicious crocodiles
The film was made by Martin Johnson and his wife, Osa
In 1917, they quit the Vaudeville Circuit
left their New York home
and began two decades of exploring and filmmaking
When they began shooting Congorilla in 1929
wildlife was so plentiful they
needed only to drive into the bush and
turn on their cameras.
The abundance is long gone
To capture what remains, it took
National Geographic photographer Nick Nichols
weeks of brutal trekking
through the jungles of Central Africa
I have no interest in
wildlife photography for the sake of it
It's just not justifiable in this time when
we've got so many habitats
and creatures that are endangered
In our case,
we're going out in an unexplored part
of the African forest
We really know what's out there
but we want to come back
and show everybody and say "Let's save it."
The job that I do is considered
one of the most romantic jobs on earth
Everybody wants to do it
But nobody sees it for what it really is
being hot, insects diseases
People see the glamour of the finished product
or the glamour of the travel and they want to do it
But they don't really want to do it
Why do explorers subject themselves to such hardship?
You've got to have something that drives you
because you are getting into the suffering
the hardships, being away from home
So if you don't feel like you've got a mission
I don't think you can put those feet
in front of you when the going gets tough
There's difficult cultures
difficult political situations
difficult physical circumstances
and no guarantee of anything except that
there's gonna be an endless number of hurdles
that you're gonna have to pass over
to pull something out and make it meaningful
And that is enough to really deter any
but the most hardened explorer
There's fleas that burrow into your feet and lay eggs
You gotta deal with those
You may get 100 a night that you gotta deal with
There's other animals that
go into your privates and burrow away
Shuffling in the mud, looking for animals
There was heat and there is piranhas
and there is caimans and
there is crocodiles and killer bees
Then there is the mosquitos that bite you
and cause all the different kinds of malaria
Then there is flies biting
that cause blindness and elephantitis
It's just endless
It's five a.m.
And I'm going out to photograph in the fig tree
that {Neil} just rigged a tree platform in
I'm trying to get pictures
of monkeys and birds which are real elusive
I have no assurance that they'll be there
I just hope so
I studied art as a young man
I was a painter and I wasn't very good at it
As soon as I picked up a camera
and took my first photographs
when I was 18 in college
I decided at that moment that's what I was gonna do
There's something in nature
that is out of our realm of control
I'm not sure what it is
It's an essence
That's what I have been looking for all my life
Who knows how to get a frog to stand up?
It is this word "wild" which means not controlled
What's behind that is trying to
find an essence that I can't define
but we all know what it is
We all know that there's something edgy out there
that keeps us whole
because we come from wildness, too
In 1997, when Nichols was photographing tigers in India
his journey embodied the new creed of exploration
Unlike earlier explorers
he is not driven by a desire to return with animals
in cages or trophy heads...
but with pictures?
Pictures he hopes will save
these animals from extinction
When I see an elephant in a zoo or a tiger in a zoo
I'm looking at a specimen
If we had five gazillion tigers in zoos
we have no tigers
If they're not out walking around in the forest
that forest is not even whole
Tigers are part of the package, the chain
A tiger won't pose while Nick snaps its portrait
So his crew rigs intricate camera traps
to capture a tiger's image
They hope one of the big cats
will trigger the motion-sensors on the cameras
We're trying to find a way
to take pictures of tigers on their terms.
Actually, the tigers are taking their own pictures
That's what it gets down to
There's no humans here
they come along whenever they want to
We really wanted just to find a way
to get into their world
it's such a secret world
Weeks pass.? No tigers.
Go in!
Oh, my God, yes!
Yes!
C'mon!
Go in!
My mission is definitely to look at the earth
as a finite thing and say let's celebrate this thing
Let's find a way to realize
that it's so precious and so fragile
The new edge to exploration is that
we must know how the planet works
Like Nichols, Sylvia Earle is driven
by the desire to preserve what she finds
What drives me to explore?
It's the need to understand what we're doing
so that we perhaps might
be able to do better in the future
Earle is the Chuck Yeager of oceanography
a pioneer of undersea exploration
Five species of marine life have been named after her
Earle was raised on a farm in New Jersey
in a time when girls weren't expected go
grow up and have professions, let alone
become explorers.
For me, my playground was the sea
I knew from the moment
I first saw a horseshoe crab
sort of crawling up a beach
in New Jersey that I had to know more
about where it came from
and how it lived
and how it spent its days and nights
And I've been intrigued with that ever since
Seventy percent of the earth's surface is water
but most of it remains as unexplored as
the New World was to Columbus
No place on the planet is more difficult to explore than the deep
There's nothing more frustrating for a biologist
a scientist such as I
than to go down to 150 feet or even push the limits
and go over to the edge of a drop-off
into the sea and know that you just have to stop
People have always dreamed of exploring the ocean
But for centuries anything
below a few hundred feet was impossible to reach...
...until William Beebe and
Otis Barton invented the bathysphere
a steel ball they hoped
would take them a half-mile below the surface
It took four years of testing
before the bathysphere was ready
Finally in 1934,
Beebe and Barton jammed themselves in
not knowing if it would be submarine or a coffin
As they were slowly lowered into the depths
the pressure built up
to more than 1,300 pounds per square inch
It was so cold, Beebe recalled
it was like sitting on a cake of ice
But they did it
The bathysphere went a half-mile below the surface
The record stood for 15 years
Building on the accomplishments of Beebe and Barton
Earle has pushed the limits of underwater exploration
In 1979, untethered and alone
she dove to over 1,200 feet
It was as daring a feat as the early space walks
Back in 1970,
it was uncommon for women
to do some of the sorts of things
that I found myself hankering to do
There were no women astronauts going to the moon
In fact, there were no women astronauts at all
at that point in time
And aquanauts were also an iffy sort of enterprise
Earle was one of five women
selected to join a team of aquanauts
who lived and studied in an underwater laboratory
anchored in the Caribbean
They called us aquabelles, they called us aquababes
They had a hard time calling us aquanauts
I didn't care what they called us
as long as they let us go, and they did
Earle has never let anything stop her
Her passion for the ocean is too strong
For me the lure of the deep is the lure of the unknown
It's that curiosity that all children have
but scientists never lose
you just have to know what is going on
In order to satisfy that curiosity
Earle, like so many explorers
is at the mercy of technology
For years, she has teamed up with
engineer Graham Hawkes. Together,
theyhave helped revolutionize underwater exploration
You know, it's said that there're more footprints
on the moon than in the deep ocean
That's kind of literally true
Once you step foot in the oceans
you are just back where early man was
you're back looking at
a piece of the planet no one's seen before
When Earle and Hawkes conceived of deep flight
a new fast-moving submarine
they had to build it themselves
There is no NASA of the deep seas
You know, I was born to be an engineer looking back
I grew up with the nickname professor
I apparently was always taking things apart
Numerous rockets, numerous experiments,
numerous little explosions
My parents were both from London
My father was postman
And the small part of London Tootting
the wrong side of the railway tracks
went to the wrong schools
Hawkes was the first in his family to go to college
Over the past 20 years
he has become
one of the leading inventors of submersibles
Hawkes's and Earle's dream
is to literally swim with the fish
It's the counterpart of flying
you fly into that other atmosphere
There's this moment of discovery
that this is not just water
this is water filled with life
There are jellies, there are fish,
there are eyes all around
There you go as an explorer
not alone for a moment...
not even for an instant are you alone
Oh, my God, it's coming right at me
Oh, my gosh
Oh!? Just so close.
He was just beautiful
Funded in part by the National Geographic Society
Earle is now diving in a remarkable new machine
It is the tool
for the next generation of deep sea exploration
In July of 1969,
four simple words
expand forever the limits of human potential
The eagle has landed
The calmness of the voice
masks the terror of the moment
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
have only seconds of fuel left
when they land on the moon
Armstrong's pulse races at 156 beats per minute
That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind
The triumph seemed complete
but landing was the easier part
NASA couldn't guarantee
the safe return of the astronauts
President Richard Nixon had prepared a eulogy
in case the men were
stranded on the moon's surface
It read, in part:
"These brave men know that
there is no hope for their recovery
But they also know that
there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice."
Our greatest achievements
are often balanced on the edge of catastrophe
For 20 years, Robert Peary and his expedition partner
Matthew Henson,
had been risking their lives to walk to the North Pole
On the fourth expedition
temperatures dropped to minus 63 degrees
They were forced to eat their dogs for food
But the men relentlessly advanced and
on April 6, 1909,
they became the first to stand at the top of the world
"The Pole at last, Peary wrote in his journal
"The prize of three centuries Mine at last."
As much as Peary and Henson dreamed of the North Pole
and Armstrong the moon
explorers have dreamed of
climbing the world's highest mountain
For decades, the slopes of Everest had claimed
the life of one climber after another
Then, in 1953...
Mount Everest has been conquered by members
of the British expedition
...Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary
overcame the cold and
the thin air to stand on the summit of Everest
No one else will ever be able to claim the title:
"First to the roof of the world."
The drive to explore endures
But have today's explorers been born too late?
I'd love to have been an explorer in an earlier era
where I could have been
the first man to cross the Congo
or the first man to penetrate
the heart of Australia or climb Everest
It would have been wonderful
Exploration a century ago
was about assigning names to places
and I think it's become more about assigning meaning
You really have to push yourself to the edge
That's why it hasn't been done before
I mean, if it was easy,
it would have been done before
An explorer is someone who pursues the epic journey
a person who has a dream
who prepares to fulfill that dream
assembles a team, goes out into the ocean
overcomes the tests of the mind and the heart
attains the truth and
returns to society to share the truth
That's the epic journey
and that's what the explorer does
Deep sea explorer, Bob Ballard
has spent a career in search of tragedy and disaster
For years, he longed to find the Titanic
It was the most elegant luxury liner of its time
Titanic was built to last forever
On April 10, 1912, she set sail on her maiden voyage
Five days later
she disappeared into the cold waters
of the North Atlantic
More than 1,500 perished
People believed the ship was gone forever
and that Ballard's quest to find her was futile
But he proved them wrong
In 13,000 feet of water, Ballard found the Titanic
He made history come to life
People could see the past floating before them
a romantic era stolen away
by an iceberg and now returned
I don't go to sea
unless I am really convinced I can succeed
I have decided not to do a lot of expeditions
People say,
"Why don't you find Amelia Earhart's airplane?"
Fat chance.
I won't take on a job unless I have a good shot at it
Ballard did not stop with the Titanic
He found the Nazi battleship Bismarck...
...explored the torpedoed luxury liner Lusitania...
Contact. That's a ship
It's definitely you My only love
...and located the aircraft carrier Yorktown
sunk in the World War II battle of Midway
I have little boys come up to me
and say they wish I would stop exploring
because there isn't going to be anything left for them
And I try to remind them
that I've only seen one-tenth
of one percent of the deep ocean
so there's plenty there
This time, Ballard is exploring further back
in time than he has ever gone before...
two thousand years ago
when Roman ships criss-crossed the Mediterranean
They were small vessels at the mercy of the sea
Many of them never made it home
To help him find the sunken ships
Ballard has enlisted the help of a Navy submarine
The NR-1 was used during the Cold War
for missions so secret
the Navy still won't talk about them
Now the sub is hunting for a Roman galley
that sank to the ocean floor 2,000 years ago
Captain, ship's fit for dive
You have permission to submerge ship
Dive! Dive!
40 feet. Going down
For hundreds of years
scientists have looked in the ocean for our history
And for most of that time
they've only been able to look a very short distance
And what we're trying to accomplish is something
that has never been done before
and that is to try and excavate a ship of antiquity
that is thousands of feet beneath the sea
The NR-1 hits thick mud
The sub's arm is unable to dig below the surface
Do the wooden hulls of Roman vessels
still exist just beyond reach or has time stolen them away?
Will this be Ballard's first failure?
You can be lucky, but you work for it
You know, you cannot just go
and dig and discover something
No! You have to stay day and night and work very hard
And luck will come to you
And that's why luck cannot come to a lazy explorer
Like Robert Ballard,
Egyptologist Zahi Hawass is an explorer of deep time
He has spent a career searching the sands
of the Giza Plateau
One of his most remarkable finds began with an accident
when a horse, galloping past his excavation site
plunged its hoof through the sand
Below lay a vaulted tomb,
sealed in the time of the pharaohs
Inside, Hawass glimpsed eternity
Because of the size of the tomb
because of the unique shape of the vaulted ceiling
and also because it was cased inside with plaster
then I believe this is the man
who was in charge of
the whole administration of the workmen
This is the man who wanted to be sure that
all these people live in a good living
and they go early in the morning to work
and they come by the sunset
and they live in the village,
and at the same time
when they die, there is a tomb for everyone
Besides the foreman's tomb
Hawass and his crews
unearthed more than 250 graves
an entire cemetery of workers
For centuries,
the pyramid builders were thought to be slaves
a captive labor force cringing under the whip
This discovery shattered that myth
For explorers like Hawass
the possibilities of discovery seem limitless
The sands of the desert are constantly shifting
Artifacts, hidden from one generation of archaeologists
can suddenly be revealed to the next
In 1998, a team under Hawass's supervision
made a startling find: A tomb, unseen
untouched for thousands of years
It is beautiful, the painting is so beautiful
It is very rare
We discover a lot of things
every day, everywhere in Egypt
But everything,
almost 99 percent of what we discover, is robbed
This is unique, and this is rare,
because of one thing:
This is intact
Beneath a limestone lid, they discover a sarcophagus
This is wonderful
The symbol of resurrection
Under the glare of television lights
they struggle to remove the heavy lid
Have the contents inside decayed and rotted?
They crane forward, peer inside and a gift from the first
millennium B. C: A mummy dressed in a shroud of bead work
portraying the gods of the afterlife
Hieroglyphs around the coffin tell a
story from the final glory days of
ancient Egypt. Buried here is a
nobleman, a member of the pharaoh's court
His name was lufaa
He is the director of the palace
He was near to the king
The king lives in the palace
This is the man that is used everyday
to know the throne is fine your majesty
The ladies, or the wife, your main wife
she's not coming today to see you
You can meet this official today
the dining room is set, wine is there
we will make the party tonight
That is the man that does
all the arrangements at the palace
He makes the palace life
Hawass's explorations have given us
a more detailed picture of the past
of who we are and where we come from
An explorer is someone's
who trying to find answers to basic truths
I think all of us want to know those answers
Certainly, we want to know who we are and
where we came from and where we're going
And I think most people think about those questions
but very few of them spend a career
trying to find answers to those things
For weeks,
Robert Ballard has been searching for history
in the depths of the Mediterranean
He has not been able to find the Roman ships
he believes sank in these waters
He cannot afford to fail
A single expedition can cost millions of dollars
Hold shipwreck
Holy mackerel
At last...
Look at that!
...3,000 feet beneath the waves...
fragile amphora... jugs that held wine
dried fish and olive oil
Instead of finding the amphora sort of randomly
scattered throughout this area
they are, in fact,
concentrated in very narrow lines
one amphora after another, hundreds of them
As Ballard and the captain of the NR-1 plot the find
the final tragic moments for the Roman ship are revealed
It must have been caught in a fierce storm
They began to off-load their cargo
as fast as they could
throwing the amphoras off
one side of the ship and off of the other
This is probably the width of the ship
the separation between these two rows
Two miles of amphoras were being thrown over the side
until finally the ship
went under and ultimately sank here
Ballard deploys a scavenger sub named Jason
to bring the 2,000-year-old artifacts to the surface
Robert Ballard has proven
that we can dive into the deepest oceans
and resurrect the sunken stories of the past
The key is that you plug away
you slug away, you slug away
and then there's this moment of discovery
And it's so exhilarating
It's just the greatest natural
high known to a human race
And once you've experienced that
you want to experience it again
There is so much of the planet that's unexplored
that I can't imagine
we're going to be out of work anytime soon
Exploration really has that
element of discovering something new
You make it a discipline to observe
to document, to record what you see
The old style of explorer
it was about conquering something
about, you know, putting your flag on it
about getting control, to be the master of
I think the real difference
between adventure and exploration
is that exploration is adventure with a purpose
Michael Davie is just starting to explore our world
In 1997, at the age of 22
he trekked from Cape Town,
South Africa, to Cairo Egypt
a 5,000-mile journey that took him seven months
Davie uses a video camera
to explore more than geography
he explores culture and people
His journey epitomizes the explorer within us all
Do you think life here in Botswana is difficult?
Yes
Why?
There are no jobs
But your future, does your future look good?
Yes, I think so
Peter Pan was my hero, you know
I wanted to live a Peter Pan existence
I wanted to fly away to Never-Never Land
and run wild with the Lost Boys
I think it's every kid's dream to get out there
and bash his way through the jungle
and have wild adventures and extreme encounters
and get himself into as much trouble as possible
And now I get paid to do that
which is the greatest privilege of my life
Man, this place is just amazing, just amazing
An explorer is somebody
who has to look deeper into
things than things were looked into before
It's about going into territory
which geographically has been explored before
but emotionally perhaps has not
Mozambique at last
I just hope I don't step on any land mines
Red danger sign
Danger! Mines!
What kind of damage could a mine like this do?
Take off a lower leg or take off a limb
It's primarily a weapon that's designed to maim
rather than kill, although
there's every chance in the world
that it would kill a small child or an elderly person
One of the most inspiring people
I've ever met in my life
was a five-year-old girl named Isabel
She was a land mine victim living in Mozambique
And I think I forgot that I had the camera in my hand
and suddenly I was looking at a five-year-old girl
fighting to learn to walk again
That was an incredibly potent and
emotional moment for me
and I don't think it's one that I will ever forget
When I turned 21,
my parents and I were on a camping trip
and we were sitting around the campfire
And we decided to count the number of times
we'd moved in my 21 years
And we had moved home 36 times
And at that point I realized that
although I wanted to become an explorer of some kind
I had already spent my entire life doing that
Danger certainly adds an element of spice
to what I do and I love that
I love the sense that there's something at stake
Today is a hell of a lot tougher than
yesterday was and it's been quite scary, actually
We've been surrounded by a forest fire
I need the adrenaline, yeah, I mean
otherwise I'd still be
at law school studying contracts
Hello
What's the problem?
I don't have to quote this camera
I know my rights
I think the first time I got into real trouble
I wasn't enjoying it all
I was absolutely terrified
But once I saw myself get through that situation
I think that's probably
when the addiction kicked in
Okay, well you don't have to hassle me all the time
I know I'm foolish and I know I'm reckless sometimes
But, you know
there is a certain amount of appeal in riding that edge
You can't really understand life or
appreciate it or understand it or
the scope of it until
you've flirted with death a little but
understood the other side
Exploration is often a solitary venture
a journey to understand yourself
and your place in the world
Heidi Howkins craves dangerous places
For her, risking death on a thin cornice of snow
is how she explores life
Who could have guessed that
this little girl would grow up
to be a high altitude mountaineer?
There was one influence in her life
that might have given you a clue? Her father
She describes him as an eccentric fitness fanatic
He passed along his passion
for ultra-long distance races
But Howkins quickly got bored
She wanted something more
For me, those are just physical challenges
They're not mental challenges
Yes, sure, you get to the point where
to continue running after 24 hours
you've got to have some kind of mental urge
But it's, there's no danger
There's no risks, there's no fears
But risk and fear are at the core of mountaineering
While an earlier generation of climbers
would have been satisfied
with conquering one world-class peak in a year
Howkins hopes to conquer two? XEverest and K2
without the aid of supplemental oxygen
It really doesn't matter
that I'm female when I'm up there
What matters is that I'm a good climber
And that's a great feeling
That's something that definitely gives me a charge
lt'd be nice to share that with other women
It's just that there aren't that many of us
My legs are saying, "No more up!"
Howkins knows all too well
that once she sets foot on a mountain
she puts her life in peril
While climbing Kanchenjunga in 1997
she was struck by a massive avalanche
Although buried in deep snow
she found the strength to claw her way to the surface
In 1998, her expedition was hit by another avalanche
The slabs of snow missed her
but she was helpless as
members of her team were swept away
Two were killed
Despite the danger
Howkins returns year after year to these mountains
You have to confront your own mortality
like that every day on an expedition
if not every hour, or every minute
It becomes something that you know sort
of like your fingers and your toes
You're certain that it's there
and you're fully aware of it
You're catapulted into a totally different realm
when you're facing that fear
that terror, that mystery, the unknown
Why do climbers like Howkins scour the earth
for extreme vertical places?
Why do they eagerly seek out life on the edge?
Why do I do this if it's so cold and
so uncomfortable and scary?
Because I don't want life to be easy
You know, I find greater meaning in my life
when I go out and struggle to get something I want
On Baffin Island, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle
there is a wall of granite more than twice
as high as the Empire State building
It's not the world's highest, it's hardly even famous
But no one has climbed it
For four world class climbers
that's an irresistible challenge
I think, to me personally
true adventure requires an uncertain outcome
It's gotta have this big question mark hanging over it
It's probably the hardest piece of big wall
climbing that I've done
Maybe that's what it's all about
pushing yourself so far out there
that you can't really turn around
You have to keep going
Basically, a trip like this is a journey
It's a journey of exploration
into a beautiful wilderness like Baffin Island
I don't have a death wish, I have a life wish
And these trips bring you closer to life
than anything I can imagine
Howkins's journey is becoming increasingly difficult
She is approaching the death zone
Above 26,000 feet
the air is so thin
that the brain is deprived of oxygen
It becomes hard to think straight
Every fiber in your body is telling you to stop
to sit down, to die, essentially
You've moved beyond your survival instinct
There has to be something beyond reason
that's pushing you to continue moving
especially to continue climbing up
Howkins isn't the first woman
to try climbing both Everest and K2 in a single year
In 1995,
Alison Hargreaves had successfully climbed Everest
and had reached the summit of K2
But on her descent
she was caught in a storm and died on the mountain
Howkins herself is in trouble
Illness and weather stop her ascent
I can't describe how I really feel right now
without using four-letter words
I mean, I'm like, I've got a fever
I'm sitting at 21,000 feet
I slept for about one hour last night
and the other 11 hours
I hacked up all kinds of lung gunk
I've got bronchitis or something
She is forced to admit defeat
give up the summit, and descend
To deny that the summit is important
isn't what I'm trying to do
It's just that it's not as
important as the way in which I climb
The journey that happens on the way
to the summit is more important
It sounds cliche, but it's true
It's not whether you reach the summit, it's how
It's not what you do
it's how you do it that matters
The best explorers are always imagining
the next journey, the next goal
But what are the personal costs of such relentless?
I'm on the road a lot
It's very difficult to develop roots
to put out roots in any one community
because I'm not here for enough of the year
to really get to know people
I regret that I didn't have more time
with my children when they were young
because I chose to go out on expedition
The negative side is obviously being away from home
I love my family
And I love land
I think the most important thing
I've learned about exploring the ocean
is how much I love land
You know, I have absolutely no regrets about it
Whatever one might conventionally see
as a sacrifice is not a sacrifice
and that it really entails
not seeking out security above all else
I think my biggest sacrifices are the fact
that I'm going to die real young
because I've just been worn out
from these tropical diseases
That's my biggest sacrifice
The Llanos, wild heart of Venezuela
For the early explorers
who dared enter this untamed place
no creature loomed larger
than South America's giant serpent...
Look out, Jimmy! Hold the head, hold it!
Explorers spun tales of 100-foot monsters
intent on human flesh
Jim is black in the face, almost done for
Exploration now is very different than it used to be
Early explorers would go and conquering things
conquering people, many times even destroying
the things that they were exploring
Exploration now has a much more respectful meaning
and taste to it
A barefoot explorer,
Jesus Rivas is hunting the anaconda
not for sport,
but to understand this mysterious beast
Rivas explores a dangerous landscape
for the anaconda rules this swamp with lethal efficiency
It's meal of choice is the capybara
a giant rodent that can weigh in at over 140 pounds
The snake kills with power, not poison
It wraps its coils so tightly around the capybara
that the animal cannot breathe
so tightly that its blood can no longer circulate
It will take the snake six hours to ingest this meal
The anaconda is strong
enough to overwhelm and kill a person
Rivas, however, is obsessed with getting
as close as he can to these creatures
There's no telling how many hours of fruitless sun
I got on my head
and after six, eight hours looking for a snake
in the swamp and nothing happens
But if you're stubborn enough and if you go for
it and you try and try
and eventually you accomplish it
The time comes when you step on something
and your foot bounces back
and there's this big animal underneath you
Hurry, hurry
Are you losing your grip?
In a second, I will
Oh, it's a big mama
Come here and get a better grip
It is a wonderful animal
It is an animal that, if anything
has to inspire admiration
and awe more than any other thing
Godzilla!? We are having a ball, aren't we?
Rivas and his wife, biologist Rene Owens
have captured and studied more than 800 snakes
Their exploration
funded in part by the National Geographic Society
is a first
People ask me why it has not been studied before
And the reason is that
I don't think anybody thought it was possible
You can't find them, they are too hard to get around
we can't subdue them
they are a very hard animal to study
and that is why they haven't been studied
Wait, wait, wait here
To crack the code of this strange beast
Rivas searches for breeding balls
massive coils of mating snakes
He plants radio transmitters
to track potential mothers
Ever since I was a kid, I always loved the wild
I had this urge of going out into the wild
into the forest, into the sea, into the ocean
into whatever was a good natural habitat
Oh, you want to kiss me, don't you?
I'm not your lover
My mother, when I was a kid,
called, had this word for me
It was "pata caliente" which means hot feet
because she couldn't stop me from going out
and looking for interesting things to do
Okay, I'm gonna pull the whole thing
to see what's going on
Rivas and Owens have struck anaconda gold
a breeding ball
This is their Everest, their North Pole
To reproduce, as many as a dozen male anacondas
will wrap themselves around a single female
Rivas and Owens have just begun to
unravel the secrets of this communal mating ritual
The first time I laid hands on an anaconda
it was a large female next to a bridge
it was a massive animal
When I put my hands around it and couldn't grip it
my fingers could feel just pure muscle
It was unbelievable
It was the thing that really hooked me about the animal
Nice female
It's beautiful
Look at those colors
Out there, somewhere in the swamp
Rivas believes there are giant anacondas
beasts of monstrous proportions
He dreams of discovering such a serpent one day
I've thought a lot about what to do
if I found this animal
that is too big for me to catch
but is too big for me to let it go
I don't know what I'll do
It will be some tough fight
I don't know who's gonna win
They're all my family
Rivas is following in the footsteps
of a noble tradition of naturalist as explorer...
...people like Charles Darwin
who set sail to the Galapagos Islands
and saw birds in a whole new way
He returned to England
with the theory of evolution...
...or Jane Goodall
who lived for decades in the African wilderness
and with a patient gaze explored the world
and the mind of the chimpanzee
She has revolutionized our understanding of animals
She witnessed chimps doing things
no one had seen before like making tools
Her explorations have shown us
how closely connected we are to the natural world
Since Goodall began her studies 40 years ago
the world's population has nearly doubled
Blink and wild habitat vanishes
Explorers, like herpetologist Brady Barr
must act as emergency room surgeons
and move quickly to save endangered species
I would give anything to go back in time
and see what the planet was like
when it was more in balance
before there were so many humans on the planet
Something's wrong with the Everglades
It's an ecosystem in peril
It's dying
And the alligator is
a crucial component in that ecosystem
In the Everglades,
the 'gators breed less frequently
their growth is stunted
To find out why
he's exploring the belly of the beast, literally
You have to know
what's important in the alligator's diet
before you can get a handle on the bigger picture
you know,
what's really happening with these alligators out here
To investigate their culinary habits
Brady must first find
and catch one of these swamp dwellers? Xno easy task
Scary situations are just part of the job
just the nature of the situation
and what I do and where I go
If you're gonna work on something
that can eat you or bite you and kill you
I mean that's just
there's no way to get away from the danger
It's just a part of the business
Right there!
Okay, try to keep the light right on it
I'm gonna try to move up to it
Oh yeah, I got him, I got him
See that?
Okay, now are you ready to give it a try?
Now, when I tell you to move move fast
Okay! Lt's always a little nerve-racking
to tape the jaws up
This alligator's not that big
I've always been fascinated with alligators
even as a small child
But I grew up in the cornfields of southern Indiana
There weren't many alligators there
I went to graduate school in south Florida
where there were a lot of alligators
And I saw these large carnivores
living in close contact with humans
His explorations are proving that
this close contact is toxic for the alligator
Alligators in the Everglades grow very, very slowly
A seven-foot animal 100 miles north of here
on Lake Okechobee might be eight years old
A seven-foot alligator here in the Everglades
this alligator? Might be 20 years old
Maybe it's mercury poisoning
maybe it's quality of the diet
That's what we're looking into
Maybe it's pollution
Changes in hydrology have changed
what the alligator is eating
It's a complicated picture and, you know
hopefully we'll shed a little light on it
with this stomach content data
We're going to put this garden hose into
the mouth of the alligator down into the stomach
fill it with water and
then May Lynn's going to give it
the Heimlich maneuver just like a choking person
Hit it hard. Everything you got
I'm gonna pull the hose this time
One, two, three? Xgo!
I didn't feel anything come out
Look at this
There's a seven-foot alligator
and here's the contents of its stomach
One snail with the tissue still attached
And here is two, three remains of four snails
Before we started this research
people said, "Oh, alligators eat birds and fish and
you know, pull down deer."
We're finding they eat a lot of snakes and
believe it or not, they also eat snails
That's how these alligators are making a living
out here in the Everglades
It's a tough place to live
If I was an alligator
I wouldn't want to live in the Everglades
Paul Sereno is famous
one of the most famous bone hunters in the world
Just 41 years old
he's already made more significant discoveries
than most paleontologists make in a lifetime
Time and again
Sereno has headed out into the unknown
and come back with the bones of dinosaurs
that no one has seen before
For Sereno, 1,000 years is a blip in time
His finds allow us
to imagine history on a geological scale
history that is more than 100 million years old
How many chances
do you have to make a mark in the world
to change the way we look at a continent
the way the world was 130 million years ago
With one expedition
we really have the chance
And the only way that we can do that is
really, by performing beyond what we think we can do
This time Sereno is
on an expedition deep into the Sahara
It's a harsh landscape
Sand storms, relentless heat and gun-toting bandits
will make the next four months a brutal experience
Paleontology often finds the most remote places
because they are places that are raw earth
places difficult to live in
places often unexplored
And the more unexplored the better
the better chance you have of finding something
that nobody's ever seen before
Just getting to the fossil beds
is a grueling cross-country road trip
The journey is not just arduous
it's potentially lethal
A civil war in this area ended recently
Travelers were killed on this road the week before
I have told you that
we might require an armed guard before we left
I didn't know the details of it
I didn't know what happened last week
That was in the future then
We have items that people want
items that they have killed people for
It's a personal risk going out there
There's no question about it
If something happens
or if people feel that
whatever their obligations are
whatever their personal feelings are
that they've reached that point and want to go back
I don't blame anybody for that circumstance
I will help you leave, you know, in a timely fashion
It's the classic explorer's dilemma:
How much are you willing to risk to achieve your goal?
Are you willing to risk your life?
Although the team will need armed guards
no one abandons the expedition
no one wants to pass up
the chance of making a major find
After five days and 14 flat tires
they finally reach their destination
Okay, show me the money
Where're the bones?
Although the world Sereno
explores vanished millions of years ago
it still lives in his imagination
You've got to look at something
that doesn't look like a lake and imagine back to
what it was like as a lake
What this little fragment
here is telling you is that there were fish there
There were trees
This was an area
where there was a chance that your prize possession
a dinosaur or a crocodile or whatever you're looking for
could have gotten buried there
I think I inspire in part by example in the field
I wouldn't ask anybody to do anything
that I wouldn't be doing myself
I can take the heat
so I'll work right through the middle of the day
at 120 degrees out on the site
the bone actually reaching 150 degrees
really, really hot
I really find that exploring back in time is
one of the most fulfilling things
because it forces you to imagine
And at first, imagination sounds unscientific
After all, we're observers of hard evidence
But, in fact, imagination is what
I think is the essence of science
Dig by dig, explorers like Sereno have transformed
pure imagination into scientific fact
The team has been working 14-hour days
in heat often over 120 degrees
And beneath tons of rock... a revelation.
We have a couple of skeletons mixed at this site
That's a conclusion we've drawn after a lot of work
What we discovered
when we first started peeling back the mound here
is the hip region
and back bone of a very large sauropod
Here's the vertebrae here
Sereno thinks the animals
were the victims of a huge flood
The surging water piled
their multi-ton bodies in a stack
and the river sediment buried their bones
Although the sauropods are
a significant find, sereno is not satisfied
He sets out deeper into the desert
in search of more bones
Go this way?
Okay, go this way.
As hard-working and focussed as he is now
it wasn't always the case
As a child, he broke school windows with rocks
and even tried to derail trains
The one thing that kept him on track was bones
He's been fascinated with them since childhood
At the new site,
the team can't contain their excitement
There are bones everywhere
We've got an aranosaurus
We got therasaur
You've got a sauropod, and a therapod
Five minutes
They can leave their pick axes in the truck
Fossils are scattered around
on the surface of the desert
No one has been here to scavenge the bones
Wow! Look at those ribs! Beautiful!
Bone by bone
they uncover a predator
some kind of high-spined dinosaur with a toothy jaw
Yeah, this is a piece of aranosaurus
And then Sereno and his team
make another stunning discovery
Wow, this is great, Dave
That's a big ass claw!
It's a foot-long thumb claw
just laying there on the surface
Anybody would have stopped to pick it up
but no one was there
That's a particularly exciting moment
sort of a chilling feeling
that reveals that there are many
many places on the surface of the earth
that have not been investigated
And it's just the beginning
Bones of the animal
have been preserved in the sand and rock
Sereno thinks
they have discovered a new species of spinosaur
Not until they haul over four tons of bones
back to the lab will they know for sure
The expedition is over
but the journey of discovery has just begun
Over the next year
in this basement laboratory
at the University of Chicago
Sereno's team will
painstakingly reconstruct the animal
I had a vision of something
I would like, I think
to see this animal down low up front
as if it were almost fishing with its hand
you know, with the claws ready to grab something
? Xjust like you say, to some extent
interacting with something
it's looking, it's ready to go after something
We are literally resurrecting a world
that once existed 130 million years ago
When we set foot in Africa, in the desert
there wasn't one skeleton
or skull that was known well enough to reconstruct
from the whole Cretaceous period
That's the last half of dinosaur evolution
We now can stand among six or seven of our recreations
Wow! That is really big
For the first time in 100 million years
the spinosaur stands
It gives the public a sense of a lost world
a time without humans,
something that's foreign, strange...
a time when there were animals that weren't like us
where we didn't influence
and control the world like we do today
That's critical, I think
for understanding and also preserving our future
The beast is 11 feet tall
And from the tip of its tail to its fang-filled snout
it measures more than 30 feet
I think there is a point
in an expedition when you feel like
"We've done it!"
Unconsciously,
you realize there's tension that's gone
a tension that drove you to spend months organizing
and energizing a team to be able to accomplish that
But there is a thrilling point when you say
"We've done it again,"
and you can walk out thinking
we have made a difference
In the face of such discoveries
how can we say that exploration is finished
that it has all been done?
There are places on the planet
that we still haven't seen
There are ocean depths we haven't been to
There are species yet to be discovered
And there's always something new on the horizon
We can never know everything
To be an explorer today is
to face the greatest era of exploration ever
It's just beginning
We're just beginning to open the doors
to see how many more there are out there
I think the ultimate goal really is not
to ever fall into some false complacency
and think that we've made whatever discoveries
there are to be made and that we
our whole life, continue to be this sense of
informed by this spirit of discovery and exploration
On the cusp of a new millennium
we can pause and look back at what we have accomplished
Exploration has remade how we see our planet
But true explorers will never be satisfied
with what they see now
They will continue to rush head-long into the future
...pushing the limits of mind and body
whether they are diving into the deepest oceans
uncovering artifacts of antiquity
or saving the habitats of endangered species
Our limits will become the next generation's triumphs
One of these children might walk on the surface of Mars
Another might explore and
solve the riddle of human consciousness
The only guarantee is that in every generation
there will be a daring few who continue to dream
to be restless, and who are willing to
risk it all to explore the unknown