MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Host of Man vs. Wild series injured in Antarctic expedition

Adventurer and host of the popular Man vs Wild series Bear Grylls has injured his shoulder during an Antarctic expedition. According to CNN the 34-year-old former SAS soldier was being flown back to the UK to receive medical attention.

Grylls was not filming for the Discovery Channel (which produces Man vs. Wild) at the time of the accident, but was on an expedition sponsored by bio-fuel company Ethanol Ventures which aimed to promote alternative energies and their potential while raising money for the children's charity Global Angels. "We will be using lots of different forms of alternative power, including wind powered kite-skiing, part bio-ethanol powered jet skis and inflatable boats, electric powered para-gliders, solar and wind powered base camps ... and good old foot work!" Grylls wrote in his blog last month. UK's Daily Mail reported that the injury occurred as Grylls was preparing to spend Friday night in a bivouac suspended on an ice shelf in the north of the freezing continent. A spokesman for the former SAS soldier told the Daily Mail: "He has broken his shoulder and is in a lot of pain. He is calm and collected - but in pain. It is par for the course for the sort of thing that Bear does - this was a dangerous trip." A diary kept by Grylls on the expedition's official website was last updated on Friday morning. In it, he says that strong winds are hampering the team from getting into the high mountains. "It was pretty hairy in the high winds trying to lower these hanging bivouacs into position and they were being buffeted violently against the ice face," he wrote. Grylls was evacuated to the expedition's Antarctic base-camp by his back-up team on Saturday morning, but high winds had delayed his evacuation to South Africa and then on to the UK by air, according to the Daily Mail. Discovery Channel issued a statement saying: "Once he sees a doctor, we will have a better sense of the level of seriousness of his shoulder injury and the recovery time needed to get him back to his full physical activity." Grylls, who is dropped into some of the world's harshest and most isolated environments on Man vs. Wild: Survival Techniques for the Most Dangerous, and resorts to extreme measures - such as eating insects - to survive, is no stranger to danger. During his time with the SAS he survived a parachute jump where the parachute failed to open.