She is an open water swimmer, specializing in swimming in icy waters, a discipline in which she is even world champion. At 37, the Chilean Barbara Hernandez already has her name in the Guinness Book for swimming around Cape Horn. She also crossed the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar, among others. And she has just snagged a new record on her list: that of the longest swim in the icy waters of Antarctica, without a wetsuit or flippers, just with a swimsuit and a cap. Barbara Hernandez covered 2.5 kilometers in 45 minutes and 30 seconds in two-degree water.
In the images, as she crawls, the icebergs and frozen mountains of Greenwich Island, at the tip of the South Pole, can be seen behind her. Dry, on the boat, all the members of her team are wrapped up in several layers of clothing, and we measure the extreme, almost inhuman physical prowess that Barbara Hernandez has accomplished.
On leaving, her body temperature had dropped 10°C, dropping to 27°C: she was hypothermic, but well aware when she learned her time. “Physically it has been extremely difficult, but I know it will be worth it if the message of the urgent need to protect these wonderful waters gets to world leaders.“
Because if Barbara Hernandez made this crossing, if she trained for three years, it was above all, beyond the record, to warn about the fragility of the South Pole, the ecosystem of frozen Antarctica is particularly fragile. . When she started, in 2019, her country, Chile, had just suffered a historic heat wave. Three years later, in 2023, a multitude of deadly fires are ravaging its forests, 312 active outbreaks and 440,000 hectares gone up in smoke in ten days, the equivalent of the Hautes-Pyrénées department.
At the same time, we learn that the extent of the Antarctic sea ice has never been so small, a third less than usual for the month of January. “I want that watching me swimexplains Barbara Hernandez to the site Pew Trust. We see the dangerous changes underway here, the melting of the glaciers, the thinning sea ice… What is happening in Antarctica affects the entire planet and in the face of this, swimming is my way of showing that nothing is impossible”she insists.