Swimmer Lewis Pugh braves near-freezing waters to protect them
He was a world-class endurance athlete, and then Pugh decided he could use attention-grabbing swims to persuade governments to think differently about marine ecosystems.
The water flowing through the East Antarctic Ice Sheet was nearly as cold as water can be without freezing, just above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, yet Lewis Pugh wore only a Speedo, goggles, and a swim cap. He felt extremely fit, but he’d also bulked up slightly to keep himself warm on this unprecedented quest: swimming down a half-mile river that tunneled through the shifting glacial ice. He moved methodically in the water, careful not to stir the ice stalactites overhead. It was so cold that at first he could barely breathe, and after 10 minutes, his hands were swollen, their veins bright blue. On a rocky shoreline, he was greeted by his support team, among them Viacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, the retired Russian hockey star. “I pull him out from the water,” Fetisov recalls of that day several years ago. “I see his skin was so fragile. I said, ‘Oh my God, he’s unbelievable, this man.’”
Pugh, 55, has been a long-distance swimmer for nearly four decades. During that time, he says, “our oceans have changed enormously.” We’re now facing what he calls a perfect storm of marine crises with climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pollution. “I started doing swims to carry a message about the health of our planet,” he says. “This has always been about justice.”
Pugh completed his first endurance swim—from Robben Island, South Africa, to Cape Town—in 1987, when he was 17. But it wasn’t until his mid-30s, when he was swimming the bay of Deception Island, a caldera off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, that he found his mission. That day in 2005, as he swam, he saw bones piled nearly to the water’s surface. They belonged to whales hunted decades before. “It left a big mark on me,” he recalls. “I like to think that those bones are a reminder of man’s potential for folly.”
Since then, he’s swum in a glacial lake on Everest, across the North Pole, and from Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea to Egypt, a journey that brought him alongside stunning coral reefs. Though most nations have pledged to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, he’s worried that change isn’t happening fast enough. Beyond that threshold, Pugh points out, we would lose between 70 and 90 percent of the world’s coral reefs and then at 2 degrees, probably all the world’s coral. “This will be the first time in human history that we lose an entire ecosystem,” he says.
After a swim across the Ross Sea, deep within the Antarctic, in 2015, Pugh took the first of several trips to Moscow. There he met Fetisov, the captain of the Soviet Union’s gold medal–winning hockey teams of the 1980s, who had become a member of the Russian Parliament. “He said, ‘Louis, I was a defenseman, and the world needs more defenders and protectors,’” Pugh recalls. Fetisov arranged conversations with a number of top government officials, including one meeting inside the Kremlin with then chief of staff Sergei Ivanov, now a special envoy for environmental protection, ecology and transport. The following year, Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed to a multicountry effort to establish a 600,000-square-mile marine protected area in the Ross Sea, one of the largest in the world. “You remember Ping-Pong diplomacy, in the 1970s?” Pugh asks. “This was Speedo diplomacy.”
Once he completed his swim through the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in 2020, Pugh returned to Moscow, where he and Fetisov hoped to gain Russian support for three more marine protected areas in the Antarctic. Those negotiations stalled, though, and it’s unclear whether Russia is abiding by its earlier commitment. In January 2020 the New Zealand Air Force spotted a Russian fishing vessel in the Ross Sea’s marine protected area, an act the United States later called “illegal” and “egregious.”
Recently, Pugh found himself 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, on the western coast of Greenland. He’d come to the town of Ilulissat to swim in a tidal fjord fed by one of the world’s fasting moving glaciers. Calving at a rate of 11 cubic miles a year, the glacier contributes to sea-level rise around the world. “It’s ground zero of the climate crisis,” Pugh says.
The water was so cold that he went only for the briefest of dips. “I put my head in the water,” he recalls, “and you can hear little bubbles. And these bubbles are the ice that was trapped thousands of years ago.” When he surfaced, he heard the roar of calving icebergs. A reminder that he’d have to return for another swim.
