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By Peter Rejcek
Norbert Wu returns to Antarctica for new film, outreach
projects
Norbert Wu stands at the stern of the Zodiac, maneuvering
the slow-moving inflatable boat through a thick soup of
brash ice. The rubber squeaks against the chunks of ice,
while the steel prop on the outboard grinds down the bigger
pieces and spits them out into the boat’s wake.
A bulky orange float coat makes his short, stout figure
appear even thicker. Wu doesn’t exactly sport a Jacques
Cousteau physique, but the stature belies a near-legendary
fearlessness that has helped propel him into the upper
echelon of natural history photographers and filmmakers
over the last 20 years.
But Wu has no plans today to jump in the nearly freezing
Antarctic waters, playground for Adélie penguins,
humpback whales and stealthy leopard seals. He’s
left that job to divers Ryan Caldwell and Martin Schuster,
who are already zipped up in their dry suits, waiting
to reach the morning’s dive site — a sunken
Argentine Navy ship, the Bahia Paraiso, just a couple
of kilometers from Palmer Station .
Their objective isn’t really the ship, which ran
aground in 1989, but to test out a new technique for filming
a krill swarm underwater. While Caldwell and Schuster
are in the water, Wu and team member Andy Day will lower
a high-definition video camera down on a rope. The divers
are to check the camera to see how well it hangs in the
water.
It’s a bid to capture something unique — a
school of shrimplike krill, a significant part of the
food web here — in a place that has become increasingly
well documented over the years.
“I have not seen good video or stills [of krill
swarms],” Wu says. “I’ve seen some grainy
black and white video that The BBC did about 20 years
ago. I don’t think it’s been done well before.”
Wu should know. Few photographers or filmmakers have
enjoyed the sort of access to Antarctica he has had over
the last decade or so. The National Science Foundation
(NSF) selected him three times to participate in the Antarctic
Artists and Writers Program between 1997 and 2000 to document
the marine environment in McMurdo Sound.
He made the most of the opportunity, creating the documentary,
“Under Antarctic Ice,” which became the first
film made in Antarctica to use the high-definition format
that is popular today. At the time, it was pioneering
work, especially for Wu, who had been strictly a still
photographer for the first half of his career.
He had enlisted his childhood friend Day — a biologist
and photographer himself — during one season to assist
with the filming. Somehow, they made it work.
“He foolishly entrusted me with this $100,000 camera,
putting it into the waterproof housing ever day,”
Day recalls, as the Zodiac floats in the placid water
while Schuster and Caldwell blow bubbles below. “I
had no prior experience of such things. The training I
got was suspect at best —but it never flooded.”
Wu laughs at the memory, particularly the reaction of
the Sony executives who lent him the two expensive cameras.
“Those guys were so nervous about me bringing those
cameras down. They were freaking out.”
In addition to the movie, Wu produced a tabletop book
with writer Jim Mastro, also called “Under Antarctic
Ice,” along with a children’s book, magazine
articles and an online field guide of Antarctic critters
that has taken on a life of its own.
“I think it’s still being used by a lot of
researchers,” he says of the site maintained by former
Antarctic dive team member Peter Brueggeman at Scripps
Institution of Oceanography . “That thing blossomed
way beyond what I initially contributed. It’s got
photographs from hundreds of contributors.”
Wu hopes to create a similar body of work with his latest
grant from the NSF through its Informal Science Education
program , with a focus on public outreach, as part of
the International Polar Year . He returned to McMurdo
Station last season and worked with a film crew from the
BBC on an episode for its nature documentary series “Life.”
He also made his first visit to the Antarctic Peninsula
that same season in 2009-10, hoping to expand the online
field guide, as well as create new material for future
books and a film. This year is the last field season on
his grant.
After his success at McMurdo, why come back?
“I wanted to see the Antarctic Peninsula,”
says Wu, who had to endure a four-day crossing of the
Southern Ocean from Chile to reach this remote location.
(He gets extremely seasick.) “It’s very different.
It’s amazing how much difference there is in marine
life and visibility there is here.”
Different isn’t always better. McMurdo Sound is
famous for its amazingly clear water, with more than 100
meters of visibility as the rule rather than the exception.
A green murkiness shrouds the underwater world near Palmer
Station, making it difficult to get the dramatic shots
that became iconic of Wu’s work out of McMurdo Sound.
An instructor and dive guide from Seattle, Caldwell says
the diving is also challenging because the team doesn’t
really know what it will find at any particular spot.
“You don’t have people from yesterday telling
you what the dive is going to be like today. In a lot
of places, you’ll get that,” observes Caldwell,
who also worked with Wu in McMurdo. “It’s a
lot more exploratory diving. When you get to a site, you
don’t know what you’re going to see.”
Caldwell says he hopes the work produced here will spur
interest in not only the Antarctic but conservation issues
as well. The science is important, he says, but programs
like those produced by Wu and the BBC get to “the
hearts and souls of people.”
“I’m amazed by the work we did in McMurdo …
being a part of it makes me feel proud of what I’ve
done, what I’ve worked for. I love this and I don’t
ever want it to go away,” he says, gesturing to the
ocean, the icebergs, penguin colonies on distant islands,
“and it’s deteriorating quickly. Outreach is
definitely very important.”
Wu knows he has to tell a dramatic story in images and
film to capture those hearts and souls. One of his goals
this season is to film predation of penguins by leopard
seals — large, sharp-toothed carnivores with reptilian
heads that have been known to chew on the Zodiac’s
inflatable pontoons.
He got his wish on a different day, when he and Caldwell
found a leopard shaking a penguin like a dog with a chew
toy. Later, sated by the meal, the leopard lounged on
an ice floe. Wu jumped in the water to film some additional
footage after only minutes before watching the power of
the spotted predator.
“I think long and hard about dangerous situations
the older I’ve gotten,” he admits. “I used
to jump in with stuff all the time — alligators or
whatever.”
The 48-year-old photographer isn’t necessarily slowing
down, but after years of crisscrossing the world, he’s
learned to savor some experiences over others.
“I’m more selective about what I get excited
about,” Wu says. “It really is the journey than
what you see in a lot of ways.”
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