For Wilbur Weber, just getting to Antarctica was a challenge. He had to fly 8,000 miles, endure 40 hours on treacherous seas while carrying along every type of cold weather clothing imaginable.

On October 19, Mr. Weber will be giving a talk about his experiences called ?Antarctic: The land that no one owns? at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) at 7 p.m.

?Antarctica had been a place I thought about in my childhood,? said Mr. Weber, 62. ?After opening a National Geographic magazine, I wondered what those white things were at the bottom of the world. I thought gee ?what?s that all about?, and then I lost interest.?

Mr. Weber worked in the beverage industry for over 40 years, and currently works at John Barritt & Sons.

As an adult, his interest in Antarctica was rekindled in 2003 when he heard a lecture given by British activist Robert Swan who at the age of 33 became the first person to walk to both poles.

Mr. Swan has organised several tours to the Antarctic, to bring the continent into public perception. ?He had just come back from ?Inspire Antarctic Expedition One?,? said Mr. Weber. ?That was kind of interesting.?

After the presentation, Mr. Weber shook Mr. Swan?s hand and said, ?I bet you and I are the only two people here who know there?s an Earth Charter?.

Mr. Weber had become deeply interested in the Earth Charter and the resulting Earth summit conferences through a friend.

The Earth Charter aims to insure the principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society. It encourages a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of humanity and the natural world.

Mr. Swan was surprised by Mr. Weber?s comment about the Earth charter, and asked Mr. Weber to stop and chat.

?That started a relationship with him,? said Mr. Weber. ?We still e-mail each other on occasion. We had some communications on various environmental things.

?The next Antarctic Expedition came along in 2004. I wanted to go on that, but it was too late. A few months later I started campaigning to be on the next one.?

To be invited on one of Mr. Swan?s expeditions, Mr. Weber had to write an essay and fill out numerous forms about himself. Thousands of people asked to go on the expedition and only 40 or 50 were chosen.

?The odds didn?t seem good,? said Mr. Weber. ?I was an old guy, and this was really something for young people.?

However, that September, Mr. Swan called Mr. Weber all the way from Australia and invited him along on the trip of a lifetime.

?His goal in life is to educate people about Antarctica,? said Mr. Weber. ?He wants people to be aware that the Antarctic Treaty ends in the year 2041.

?He entices many of us on various types of expeditions. He wants to preserve Antarctica as the land that nobody owns.?

Antarctica has an area about one and a half times the size of the United States. On the Eastern Antarctic icecap temperatures range from -22 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer to -76 in the winter.

The coldest winter temperature recorded there was an unimaginable -128.28 degrees Fahrenheit.

The nearest flora can be found off the continent on the nearby South Shetland islands in the form of mosses and lichen.

Currently, the only human activity in the Antarctic revolves around a number of research stations.

?It is such a great place to research about the past,? said Mr. Weber. ?Ice cores can be bored to determine what kind of climate changes have gone on over thousands and thousands of years.

Mr. Weber went to the Antarctic in mid-February which was mid summer there. Temperatures ranged from zero degrees to 32 degrees.

?They sent us a huge list of clothing to bring, saying you never know what you are going to run into,? said Mr. Weber. ?They said ?don?t be disappointed if some of this isn?t used. If we do need it you?ll have it?.?

Naturally, such clothing doesn?t exist in Bermuda, so Mr. Weber had to buy it all online.

?I bought a pair of very dark prescription glasses, and glacier glasses,? he said. ?I found out that sometimes on a sunny day the dark prescription glasses were not good. There is so little atmosphere that the intensity of the white snow would burn your eyes in a few hours.?

The light intensity is partly because of the hole in the ozone over the Antarctic which measures 27 million square kilometres.

As it turned out, temperatures in the Antarctic that February were unseasonably warm and Mr. Weber didn?t need a lot of the special clothing.

?One day it got almost to 40 degrees,? he said. ?And it was windy. It use to be extremely unusual for it to get over freezing. That is something relatively new over the last 100 years. It is something to do with climate change.?

The Antarctic continent is about one and a half times the size of the United States, but 98 percent of it is covered with ice. If the ice sheets there melted, sea levels in all the world?s oceans would rise by 200 to 210 feet.

In some places the ice is 15,000 feet thick, but Antarctica is only 10,000 feet high at its highest point, according to Mr. Weber.

?The weight of the ice cap is so heavy that it is actually depressing the crust of the earth,? said Mr. Weber. ?It is amazing. Like you and I, the world is seventy percent water.

?Only three percent of that water is fresh water. Two thirds of the fresh water in the world is locked up in the Antarctic ice cap and it is melting.?

Because of the harsh conditions there, very few humans have ever visited, leaving the continent fairly pristine.

?It?s beautiful ? if you like white,? said Mr. Weber with a laugh. ?The white and the blue ocean is kind of nice.?

This Swan Expedition had several missions. It was titled ?Leadership on the Edge?, and was meant to be a team-building exercise for some of the people on the ship.

The research group also helped to build an education station at the Russian research facility Bellingshausen on the King George Islands.

?A group took an old Russian shack and over a period of three days renovated it,? said Mr. Weber. ?We panelled the inside with recycled panelling, painted and carpeted it, built bunk beds, and put in some basic facilities. This building will be used as the dormitory for the education station.?

To get permission to build the education station there, the group agreed to help the Russians remove a pile of waste in the area.

?It was a mound of white powder,? said Mr. Weber. ?I don?t know what the chemical was. We were told it was harmless; but they wanted it out of there.?

When the education station is fully built it will produce all its own power using solar panels. Although there are no plants or trees, there is some animal life in Antarctica. Mr. Weber saw three species of penguins, Gentoo, Adelie and Chinstrap Penguins, although he did not see the larger King and Emperor penguins. There were also a number of seals around.

?There were fur seals everywhere no matter where we went,? Mr. Weber said. ?Fur seals have adapted to humans. One hundred and some years ago fur seals were rather docile animals.

?Humans would walk up to them and clock them on the head to get their fur. Now, when someone walking upright approaches, the seals rear their head back and growl at them.?

In fact, the group quickly found out that when threatened the previously docile seals will now gang up on the predator.

?If a fur seal is attacking you, you are supposed to pick up a couple of rocks and beat them together,? he said. ?If that doesn?t work then you are supposed to get down on your hands and knees and beat the rocks on the ground, if you can imagine. They can move pretty fast.

?The other kind of seals that were neat were the Leopard Seals. They are nasty to penguins for sure. The penguins are their noon day lunch.

?There were also Weddell Seals, and Crab-eared seals which are large and still very docile and have very short fins.?

While cruising the Southern Atlantic Ocean on the research vessel on the way to Antarctica, Mr. Weber also saw a number of humpback whales.

?Crossing the Drake Passage was a hell of a trip,? said Mr. Weber. ?That was absolutely horrifying.?

At times during the 48 hour boat trip, the vessel rolled 80 degrees. ?If you want to go to Antarctica you have to really, really want to go,? said Mr. Weber.