Jackson Ryan is science editor of CNET, and four-time nominee for a Eureka Prize for Science Journalism. In December 2021, he departed on a six-week voyage aboard the Australian Antarctic Division’s new icebreaker the RSV Nuyina, courtesy of a media fellowship from the AAD. His writings from that experience are up for a Eureka nod this year. 

What was your pitch for the fellowship?
I applied the year before, but my pitch was not very good because I was trying to manufacture something that wasn’t there. But when the Nuyina was going to be launched, that fit perfectly in with what CNET does in the tech space. 
The idea for the stories were born on the journey. I’d already looked around for things that I wanted to write about, but you generate these ideas when you’re working with the scientists. There’s so much opportunity to write cool stories. I’ve still got another five that are sitting there, just ideas on the page. Some of them require a bit more investigating.

Did you know what you wanted to write about before you embarked?
I went with the intention to tell stories about how climate affects Antarctica. That’s an obvious, easy way to start framing the story; you know that this is a problem, so there’s going to be things that need to either adapt in some way or the science needs to change or science needs to be done more. I started asking the media team for contacts I could talk to about invasive species and other things that climate change would affect. I also literally typed into Google ‘Antarctica climate change’, see what had come up and then go, ‘Okay, this is cool’. 
I definitely started reading up on the krill stuff before I met Rob King, because I knew he’d be on board. It was obvious to me very early that he would be a really interesting person to interview. He’s six foot whatever and he literally hit his head on the roof of the old ship, so the Nuyina was built specifically for his height. There was an ice core drilling project that was about to start, and so I knew that had to be one. But there’s a whole list of ideas that don’t make it. 

What’s your favourite article that you’ve had published so far? 
I think the krill story is the most science journalism-ish story because it functions as a profile, and also as a much deeper look at how the oceans are changing there. I really liked investigating that one. Also, it had this beautiful hook, when Rob King told me about his dad – the motorcycle story – I know that was how I would start the story.
The toughest thing is writing about a ship and trying to personalise that. I took a lot of inspiration from Ann Leckie’s science fiction work Ancillary Justice, and was thinking about that series a lot on the ship. I also was reading another science fiction novel, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. 
I did try and do a bit more literary work. It was something I wanted to experiment with, but you come up against the barriers of digital journalism and publishing on a tech website. But I actually am quite proud of it. When I go back and read that, I think I’ve done something different to what I’d usually do. There’s a unique power in that kind of writing, that rumination.

How did you juggle being a journalist and being a member of the crew?
I thought about that pretty much every day, because you become friendly/friends with people on the ship, but you have to try and separate that friendship out and be like, ‘am I here as a journalist, or am I here as a person playing board games on an icebreaker?’. There are compromises you have to make. What I learned from a journalism perspective is how to separate those two things. 

Was there any tension associated with being there on the AAD’s dime? 
It is uncomfortable. I wrote, in the space station story, that the drop keel broke. It’s an icebreaker, but with the drop keel down you can’t go through ice. On the ship, there’s pandemonium, and there’s a guy sitting on the floor with schematics looking at them and being like, ‘how do we fix this?’.
If I didn’t write that in the story, I’m lying to the audience. A journalist still has to be unbiased and provide that unbiased view of the journey itself. But it’s a huge dilemma when you’re on the ship about whether I should have written something about the ship not actually performing to standard at the time. 
I also wrote sort of a photo essay that went from my journey from Sydney down to the quarantine. I was stuck in this horrendous quarantine hotel in Hobart, and I named the quarantine facility. That got a ‘please explain’.  
That’s kind of the pressures that you’re up against. The AAD media team, some of them are journalists so they understand what the role is. That obviously butts heads with the corporate side of things. But we didn’t budge. We’re not going to remove that, because that’s the truth. 

How was the experience of going on an icebreaker to Antarctica?
Reading the book Madhouse At The End Of The Earth, about the ship that got stuck in the ice, that gets your mind going. That’s not going to happen to us on the Nuyina, but what are the interesting aspects of that story; people isolated from everyone start going crazy. I definitely felt that on the ship. Because you’re alone so much, even though you’re with around sixty other people. 
The experience of standing on the continent is a huge moment. But it’s very hard to separate the idea of going to Antarctica with the idea of why are any of us here, and why do we even need the station down here?
From a journalist’s perspective, it’s hard to be super-emotional in the moment, because you’re like, ‘what’s all this stuff going on? From a personal perspective, you cut yourself off from the rest of the world for a little bit and it gives you so much time to think. You really appreciate the vastness of the Earth.; you just see rolling ocean, and bits and pieces of wildlife along the way and you fully understand how big the planet is. 
It’s crushing, in some ways, because you’re like, ‘what are the hell am I doing out here? What am I even trying to reveal to people?’ David Attenborough goes here; shows beautiful seven-part documentaries about what Antarctica is about, and the wildlife and all the cool things that have been done here. And then at the end is a five-minute thing about how climate change is going take all this away. 
Climate is completely embedded in the story and the journey. You can’t separate it anymore. That really did play on my mind so much. Sitting on the edge of the continent, there’s no sound but wind, but you can hear the steady drip of ice into water. This isn’t climate change – this is just what happens when the sun’s out, which is 24 hours a day – but in some ways, it probably is as well.
I think I did an okay job in the end, so I’m proud of that. But the emotion of it – I still think about that all the time.

What was your favourite animal?
You see a lot of Adélie penguins out there and you get to experience the full range of Adélie personality traits. There’ll be ones that are super-charismatic and ready to investigate, and ones that just will lay there and don’t care that you’re anywhere near them. 

Would you recommend the experience? 
From science journalist’s perspective, everyone should think about pitching and trying to get to Antarctica and tell those stories. From a personal perspective, Antarctic is awesome. It is one of those once-in-a-lifetime – once in many lifetimes – experiences. 

Jackson Ryan spoke to Bianca Nogrady.