Beneath the Ice

In the remote, icy wilderness on the Greenland ice cap, a gaping hole marked the spot where climber Will Gadd and his support crew and film team would descend into the unknown. A moulin is basically a giant hole in a glacier, created when surface water finds its way into a crack in the ice and melts through. And in this dream project, the plan was to climb into one and go deep inside the Greenland ice cap to a place nobody has ever been before.

What they discovered was a sparklingly beautiful, but terrifying 90m-deep cavern, with a roof made of hundreds of tonnes of cracking, creaking and groaning ice.

Having become the first person to ice climb up Niagara Falls, Will Gadd is no stranger to perilous situations. But the Canadian adventurer undertook his biggest and most dangerous challenge in Beneath the Ice, exploration within the Greenland Ice Cap with the aim of collecting global warming data. Will tells us what motivates him to embark on such a journey…

Curiosity, more than any other emotion or motivation, has always pushed me forward. It has taken me to the edge of human understanding and ability, a place that gets me up in the morning.

The excitement of answering “what would happen if we…” first drove me to explore caves in my teens around the same time that curiosity introduced me to ice climbing. I hooked up with an older crew of cavers who brought me along primarily because I could squeeze my skinny frame through holes that they couldn’t. We’d move through the rock thousands of feet below the mountains, and then they’d send in “the probe”. I’d squeeze into places no human had ever been, all because it was wildly interesting and scratched the raw itch of curiosity.