A selection of music from a glaciologist exploring Antarctica

A few weeks ago Juba from Cigcola from Smelly Feet Records got in touch about a series called The Expansion, asking a simple question: what were you listening to out there?

I sent back an embarrassingly long answer. Three months on a kite, eight to ten and sometimes twelve hours a day, with a landscape that barely changes — you have a lot of time to fill. So I'd treated Antarctica as a blank page and used it to catch up on every book I'd ever meant to read.

Mostly audiobooks, if I'm honest. Music gets repetitive fast when it's the same songs day after day, but a good story could carry me for a week. I started with the heroic age — Endurance, In the Kingdom of Ice, Icebound — until I got quietly fed up with those explorers complaining about the cold while I was there just as frozen.

So I widened out: the Apollo missions, Vikings, Mandela, Michelle Obama, Marcus Aurelius, the suffragettes, Inuit mythology before heading to Greenland, and a stack of books on climate solutions. And Shantaram, which I first read on my very first expedition in the Himalaya fifteen years ago, and which was a completely different book this time.

And podcasts kept me tethered to what was happening back in the world — every single episode of Outrage + Optimism, my favourite by far, plus a lot of The Daily, because COP30 was underway while we were out there and I couldn't bear not knowing how it was going.

The music had a different job: to make me feel warm, and to make me want to dance. Muse, Daft Punk, Pink Floyd, Hans Zimmer, Les Misérables, Taylor Swift, Raye, Madonna (Confessions Tour live), ABBA Voyage setlist on heavy rotation. It had to be loud enough to hear under a helmet.

All of it through cheap wired earphones plugged into my iPhone, jammed under my helmet for so long they made my ears hurt and bleed every single day.

What Juba and the team did with that list is something I could never have imagined. Forty-five minutes, audiobooks woven in and around the music. I listened to it and I was back on the ice. Not remembering it — in it.

I am genuinely indebted to them. Thank you to Juba, and to Mikey for the editorial. This is one of the most unexpected and generous things anyone has made out of my work!

Listen here: