[3] Three years earlier the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which was seeking to promote the region's significance, had asked the Philharmonia Orchestra to recommend a composer for the commission of an orchestral work intended to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams's score for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic and the Seventh Symphony (Sinfonia antartica) which he fashioned out of that film score.

In his journal, Davies described hearing "the ice crack and split before the bow, then roar along, keel to stern, in a tumultuous clatter of slabs and shards", and this sound is represented at the beginning of the symphony through the percussive use of a biscuit tin filled with broken glass, a tam-tam with plastic soapdish, and three lengths of builders' scaffolding.

Et subito factus est sonus de coelo ... Tamquam spiritus vehementis" (And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place saying: Alleluia.

Material from the introduction is then developed in a faster tempo, leading into the central scherzo which recalls Davies's An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise.

This ends with an episode describing the litter left behind by early Antarctic expeditions, represented here by quotations from Davies's own recent works, followed by the second slow section, with glittering icy sounds overlaying earlier material.

The final fast section transforms the ideas from the exposition, representing the changing shape of partially thawing icebergs in midsummer, and a slower coda brings back elements from the introduction.