Extreme Environments Quotes

I read a ton of nonfiction. I tend to read about a lot of very extreme situations, life-or-death situations. I'm very interested in books about Arctic exploration or about doomed Apollo missions. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction that's sort of hyperbolic and visceral. And then I kind of draw on my own personal experiences and my own sort of generic life experience, and I kind of try to feed my day-to-day reality that I have with sort of high stakes reference points that I read about. They're things everyone can relate to.

The extremes of jungles, mountains, and deserts are inherently dangerous places.

I've done work wearing full cold-weather gear hanging off of scientific towers in the Antarctic and the Arctic. Having to actually do small, delicate tasks on scientific equipment while you have no dexterity or tactile feedback is something that's very transferrable.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

I've always been more interested in organisms that can move on their own than in stationary plants. But when I canoe or hike along the edge of lakes or oceans and see trees that seem to be growing out of rock faces, I am blown away. How do they do it?

If you're going to risk dying, there's no sense doing it wet, cold and hungry unless absolutely necessary.

At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them.

Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath the Earth's crust, in pure salt crystals, and inside the rocks of the dry valleys of Antarctica.

I've become quite a serious explorer: I've been to Everest three times; I'm the oldest man to reach the North Pole; and I've just been to the lost world of Venezuela.

If you are going to do a film about the South Pole, the chances are that you will film it in Hawaii! Whatever is most difficult, you will get to do it.

Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones. ... It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.

You don't often see Bear Grylls in a suit.

Antarctica is a paradise compared to Mars.

There's actually an incredible amount of parallels between working in central Congo in a remote, isolated village and doing research aboard the space station.

You can't stay in the desert, you go nuts after 24 hours.

The best experience that we have on Earth is the fact that we have scientific stations, weathering over stations down in the Antarctic for almost the entire 20th century to learn how to exist in exceedingly hazardous conditions; and the Moon is far more hazardous than Antarctica. At least they have water there.

I think Himalayan climbers tend to mature fairly late. I think most of the successful Himalayan climbers have ranged from 28 to just over 40, really.

There is one living organism, called a tardigrade, that has survived the five great mass extinctions on Earth, and it can survive in vacuums in space and boiling hot water and freezing subzero temperatures.

There are places I don't want to go. Making movies on tops of mountains, in the desert, playing scenes while icy torrents of rivers rush by. The jungle. It's very uncomfortable.

My work is all about adventure and teamwork in some of the most inhospitable jungles, mountains and deserts on the planet. If you aren't able to look after yourself and each other, then people die.

We're constantly re-evaluating the potential for life. We're finding it where we didn't think it could exist, such as volcanic vents and other extreme conditions like under arctic ice. We're finding life in these incredibly harsh and dynamic conditions, so we're having to re-evaluate our own ideas of what's possible on this planet alone.

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.

We have to engineer devices that are going to work in space stations. Those same things are going to work in the most remote regions on Earth.

If there were creatures on Uranus - and I don't think there are - seasonal affective disorder would be a lifetime thing.

No one's played on the moon yet. No one's played in zero gravity. Some bands have played at the Pyramids of Giza, but we'd very much like to do that in the near future.