Wednesday 31st December & Thursday 1 January, BBC Radio 4
6.00-9.00am and 4.30-5.00pm
Jarvis Cocker edited the last Today Programme of the year, 6.00-9.00am on December 31st, highlights from the show are available to listen again online.
The next day & year, voyager Quentin Cooper hosted a special The Material World Cape Farewell Show on New Year’s Day, with a programme billed as a ‘science-meets-art-meets-a-fair-bit-of-music special from the cold but not quite as cold as they used to be waters off the west coast of Greenland’.
Listen again online The Material World on BBC Radio 4 ›
Join us on Friday 9 January 2009
Join Arctic voyagers Shlomo, Lemn Sissay and Quentin Cooper for an evening of Arctic stories and performances at Southbank Centre, guided by local Uummannaq resident Ludvig Hammeken. Uummannaq is the most northerly settlement we visited during the expedition, home to our Inuit guide Ludvig, 1400 people and 3000 howling dogs. This unique place will inspire a day of school workshops and evening of film and performance at London’s Southbank Centre.
Read blog posts from Uummannaq ›
BBC Radio 4 The Material World journalist Quentin Cooper photographed at midnight as he watches phytoplankton dancing in the wash of the Grigory Mikheev, against a backdrop of Northern Lights.
Ambushed outside Meeqqat Angerlarsimaffiat (the Uummannaq Children’s Home).
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The sound just isn’t right. Despite the undoubted talents of all involved, what’s coming out of the speakers is a meaningless din. A lot of noise without even a clear base line. And, no, it’s not just that I’m getting older and this isn’t for me – everyone agrees that something is badly, possibly terminally, awry. The venue is the prime candidate for blame – an echoey acoustic nightmare which drowns everyone’s efforts in its own throbbing. But my travelling companions aren’t just creative, they’re determined. They adjust amps, tweak pitch, even change the tempo…. until finally the instruments and their surroundings are in harmony – and the steady beats coming out of the boom-box build up into a sweeping epic track: one which takes hours to record and reveals the layout and geology of miles of sea-floor beneath our ship.
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Well after an eventful trip out here including radar problems at London delaying our flight by 4 hours leaving us with 2 minutes to spare before Heathrow stopped all outgoing flights for the night (bit of a close shave that one), and luggage chaos as 43 people and 1500kgs of kit descended on 3 airports in 24 hours, we’ve made it! Whilst on the small plane from Iceland to Greenland, numerous photographs were taken of the eastern Greenland coast moving up over the icecap itself.
The fantastic aerial views of the glaciers feeding down from the icecap provoked a multitude of questions about glacier behaviour, stress and strain distributions and icecap thickness and age. A quiet discussion with a few people about the above questions soon resulted in filming and recording by both the American film crew and Quentin Cooper from Radio 4.
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