The coldest place on Earth. The windiest. The driest. The kind of home only a penguin could love.
By international agreement, nobody resides permanently on the planet’s southernmost continent. As a consequence, only a handful of scientists and support staff have experienced Antarctica’s extreme landscapes and bountiful wildlife for any length of time since its discovery in 1820.
Beginning Friday, Sept. 3, however, audiences will have the opportunity to embark on a cinematic journey to one of Earth’s wildest, most misunderstood locales when “Antarctica 3D” begins screening at the Tennessee Aquarium IMAX 3D Theater.
Given the many assumptions about Antarctica’s rugged inhospitality, filmmakers say it was paramount to show how diverse, abundant and fragile an ecosystem it is.
“We looked out from the side of the boat and there were killer whales, minke whales, humpback whales, sei whales and pods of penguins swimming by,” says producer Jonny Keeling, recalling the film crew’s arrival in Antarctic waters. “It was a constant stream of animals.”
“Antarctica 3D” will be an eye-opening introduction to the continent for most audience members. However, for Dr. James McClintock, the film offers familiar views of a place that’s almost a second home.
An endowed university professor of polar and marine biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, McClintock first visited Antarctica in 1982. That three-month visit to the French sub-Antarctic island of Kerguelen left him “irreparably hooked” on Antarctica’s marine biology.
Now regarded as a world-renowned expert on Antarctic marine ecology, McClintock has returned to the southernmost continent 30 times. There, he’s researched the rich and diverse life on the Antarctic seafloor and how rapid climate change is impacting those communities.
“Over the years and my many visits to the ice, my relationship to Antarctica has deepened,” he says. “I have great respect for its beauty and the paradox of its apparent might and its deep ecological fragility.”
McClintock and a team of researchers are racing against time to document the sea life in the frigid waters surrounding Palmer Research Station, perched on an island along the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. While studying marine invertebrates, they’ve discovered a chemical compound in a sea squirt that holds promise to fight the deadliest form of skin cancer.
“This compound reduces the activity of a key enzyme that’s involved in triggering melanoma skin cancer,” says McClintock. “The compound is very potent. Only a small amount is needed, sparing healthy cells from being destroyed.”
McClintock and his colleagues have also found a red algae that produces a compound which works against several different flu viruses. “It prevents several different strains, such as the H1N1 virus, from attaching to human cells,” McClintock says.
McClintock will be at the Chattanooga premiere of “Antarctica 3D” Thursday, Sept. 2, 6:30 p.m., to discuss his work in Antarctica after the premiere screening.
Although he’s spent more time there than almost anyone on the planet, McClintock says the filmmakers managed to capture Antarctica’s beauty in ways that still take his breath away.
“The film provides a masterful painting and interpretation of the continent’s biodiversity, natural wonders and surprising fragility,” he says. “One of the opening scenes is a diver swimming along filming the seafloor near McMurdo Station, the U.S. station where I worked for 10 years and also swam under the sea ice. Captured on film, it’s as if one was there.”
Tickets to see “Antarctica 3D” are $8 for all ages. The film is presented locally by CHI Memorial and has a runtime of about 45 minutes.
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Source: Tennessee Aquarium