by Chris Turney
In the aftermath of Scott’s death there was serious soul-searching. Markham searched for a scapegoat. On 8 March he wrote to Fridtjof Nansen, describing Amundsen’s actions as ‘not honorable’. He explained: ‘I allude to the proceeding of Amundsen in making a rush to the South Pole, to forestall Captain Scott, and scamper back for the reward. I do not think that it can be justified….The only possible excuse would be that the route was entirely different: but even then the secrecy would be dishonorable.’
Nansen did not agree. Responding politely, the great polar explorer said he considered that anywhere was up for grabs, and no one had a prior right to geographical science. ‘I took naturally a keen interest in his [Scott’s] expedition, and I was very sorry that he would not listen to my advice or take plenty of good well broken dogs and turned to them and not to ponies, which I never considered much fit for polar work of that kind. He took some dogs though but had he done what I would have had him do, we should still have had him around us.’
Markham remained unconvinced about Amundsen but felt Nansen was right about the ponies, and commented, ‘I opposed the south pole but Scott was smitten by it. I have always felt that the rushes to the poles to please the newspapers and rake in money has been the curse of polar discovery.’
Others celebrated the work of the Terra Nova expedition. Rudmose Brown, a member of Bruce’s Scotia party, wrote, ‘Great as the disaster has been, England is immeasurably the richer for it in tradition and inspiration. Luck was against him it is true, but without in the smallest degree minimising the heroic efforts of these men, it may be possible to indicate some contributory cause…In time all these scientific results will be appreciated. At present it is difficult to think of anything except the fate of the southern party, and the lesson in simple manliness that is has given to the nation.’
In Germany, Wilhelm Filchner was full of praise for the British leader: ‘Scott achieved his aim…The scientific notes and observations that have been saved promise to yield a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Antarctic, in the exploration of which Great Britain has taken a prominent part. This fresh sacrifice will be painfully felt beyond the Channel and throughout the world.’
The RGS led calls for donations to meet Scott’s final wishes. Money was urgently needed to support the families left behind, and to commemorate the death of Scott and his men through memorials and the publication of scientific results. Before, funding had proved difficult; now, money—government and private—poured in, doubling the amount raised by the expedition. Clock towers were raised, streets renamed and monuments erected. Statues crafted by Scott’s widow, Kathleen, were placed in London’s Waterloo Place and Christchurch, New Zealand—sadly, the latter figure was badly damaged during the February 2011 earthquake. In Madame Tussauds, a wax model of Scott was put alongside one of Shackleton, remaining on display there until the 1960s.
Some eighty official scientific reports were produced from the Terra Nova expedition. Eight volumes on zoology were published, along with others on the aurora, botany, cartography, geology, glaciology, gravity and magnetism. All spoke of scientific insights gathered from a mysterious landscape, and many would lay the foundations for future polar scientific work. On the biological front alone, of the more than two thousand different species of plants and animals collected, more than four hundred were completely new to science. Unlike the aftermath of the Discovery expedition, there would be little criticism. The effort directed to developing a full scientific program had paid enormous dividends.
On a memorial cross erected to the dead men near their base in Antarctica, the departing expedition members inscribed a short quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ Robert Scott achieved his aim.
Arguably some of the most significant scientific reports to come out of the expedition were the three volumes on meteorology. After leaving on the Terra Nova at the end of the Antarctic summer of 1912, George Simpson had diligently spent the next seven years working up the weather observations taken on the ice. His analysis was groundbreaking. All data had value—including that taken by the different sledging teams and during Amundsen’s expedition. The result was a stunningly comprehensive study of Antarctic weather as seen from the Great Ice Barrier and plateau, allowing the Briton to explore the role weather conditions played in Scott’s death.
Simpson showed, for instance, that there was indeed a high-pressure system sitting over the Antarctic continent, fed by air flowing south from warmer climes in the upper atmosphere. Today we know that by the time this air reaches the southern continent it has been intensely chilled, falling to temperatures below -80°C, and sinks. This cold air—katabatic, or downhill, wind—periodically pours off the central plateau towards the coast, like air spilling out of an open refrigerator door.
What precipitated the fatally long storm Scott and his men experienced was not certain, but Simpson was amazed at how well connected Antarctica was with the rest of the world, writing, ‘This connexion between the pressure departures over the Antarctic and surrounding regions is most interesting and still more important. It appears that the Antarctic is one of the great “centres of action” of the world and further investigation is imperatively demanded.’
In 1912 the global climate was tumultuous. Exceptionally harsh droughts were experienced in Australia and Indonesia; heavy rain and flooding crippled parts of North America; in the North Atlantic high numbers of icebergs were spotted, sinking the Titanic two weeks after Scott and his men died. The world was feeling the effects of a massive upheaval in the tropical Pacific. Known as El Niño, this weather event occurs once in every five to eight years, when the warm western waters migrate out into the centre of the ocean. Weakening trade winds set off a cascade of change around the world—including Antarctica. El Niño had not been recognised when Simpson was analysing his data, but we now know that at the end of the summer and through the winter the Ross Sea region is particularly vulnerable to its effects, through a peculiarity of geography.
It is important to realise that within the westerly winds that dominate the mid-to-high latitudes of the south, the air can also spin, creating areas of spiralling low pressure that migrate around the ocean. It is these lows in what is known as the circumpolar trough—often spanning several hundred kilometres—that can swing in towards the Antarctic coastline. In an El Niño year, the lows tend to sit for longer over the eastern Ross Sea during autumn and winter.
Because air flows around southern hemisphere lows in a clockwise direction, these strategically placed pressure systems encourage katabatic winds to whip off the plateau and down to the Ross Ice Shelf, where they are funnelled west, and then north by the mountains of Victoria Land. This created unusually cold conditions in the western half of the Great Ice Barrier when Scott and his men were attempting to get back to Cape Evans.
In March 1912 the British team found the summer was ending far sooner than expected. During their attempt to get back to base the struggling party was hit by a succession of blizzards that pushed temperatures more than 10°C lower than normal. This is just what we would expect during an El Niño. Simpson wrote, ‘There can be no doubt that the weather played a predominating part in the disaster, and…was the immediate cause of the final catastrophe,’ and concluded: ‘the Barrier could be traversed many times without again encountering such low temperatures so early in the year.’ Recent scholarly investigation, most notably by Susan Solomon in her fascinating book The Coldest March, has shown that 1912 was exceptionally cold, even in the context of modern weather data.
The work done on Mawson’s expedition supported the British interpretation. Weaving in the Australasian expedition’s results, the New Zealand meteorologist Edward Kidson was able to build on Simpson’s work and produce daily weather maps that spanned the Antarctic to the tropics. The new continent was not nearly as meteorologically isolated as had been thought. Kidson showed that the changes in atmospheric pressure recorded by th
e different expedition barometers of 1912 were tracking the seemingly endless procession of lows from west to east.
During 1913 Frank Wild claimed in The Times that ‘from March 21 for a period of nine days we were kept in camp by the same blizzard which proved fatal to Scott and his gallant companions’. At one level he was right. Kidson’s work indicated that the successive low pressure systems were all linked. As Wild and his men were pinned down by a blizzard, the same low-pressure system was sweeping inexorably east towards the Ross Sea, keeping the British team trapped. Antarctica’s weather danced to the changes offshore. Scott really was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
On a cold evening in January 1914 a long procession of people converged on the plush red-brick premises of the Royal Geographical Society, in central London’s Kensington Gore. The society had just moved into its new home and was leaving behind the controversy that had inadvertently kick-started the explosion of work in the south. Female fellows were now openly welcomed, and the RGS was tackling the twentieth century with confidence. It was a fresh start for all.
This particular January night was unusually busy. Held on the eve of World War I, the meeting was not about the geopolitics of the region. Instead, lodging their heavy outdoor clothing at the cloakroom, the audience members had come to hear a speech by one of the scientific heavyweights of the era, ‘Prof’ Edgeworth David.
David was here to show how the research of 1912 had spectacularly advanced the world’s knowledge of Antarctica. It seemed fitting that he provide this overview. Although he had not been south for five years, David had maintained contact with many of the expeditions, helping them to interpret their results and weaving these into his own findings from Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition.
Over the next hour David gave a dizzying survey of what had been discovered in the new continent and the research questions that remained. Where things were hazy he intuitively suggested hypotheses, many of which would be confirmed decades later. There was no one better informed.
In his posthumously published book, The Lands of Silence, Markham declared that the ‘great object of Antarctic exploration is to discover the outline of the Antarctic continent, and to study the physiography so far as the great ice-cap will admit of such researches’. The year 1912 was a watershed in this regard. The exploratory work had gleaned an understanding of what lay south.
Not only were new coastlines found, David remarked: others that had confounded explorers for years were finally dismissed. The Australasian expedition, with Davis captaining the Aurora, had proved that the Company Islands were a mirage, while in the Weddell Sea, Filchner had escaped the bullets of the Deutschland crew to show that Morrell Land was most likely a figment of an eccentric American sealer’s imagination.
Mawson likened Antarctic exploration to discovering missing parts of a huge and complicated jigsaw. Thanks to the exploits of five teams in an amazing short burst, several large pieces of the puzzle were unearthed and the picture started to make sense.
Often sustained by sheer willpower, the teams had worked against the odds to show the great white continent was not just a vast wilderness. Some 8500 kilometres of the coast had been mapped on oceanographic cruises. As a result of these efforts the Antarctic coastline looked to be 22,500 kilometres long—an estimate not far off the eighteen thousand kilometres that today we know it to be. And where sledging parties had gone inland, vast tracts of previously unknown ground had been discovered. Mawson’s expedition alone explored 3200 kilometres, while Amundsen covered 2800 and Scott a further 460.
One huge uncertainty before 1912 had been how the continent’s mountain chains linked up—if they linked up at all. From Amundsen’s descriptions and photographs, the Beacon Sandstone first described in Victoria Land seemed to extend to the Axel Heiberg Glacier, which the Norwegian had climbed to reach the plateau. Unfortunately, at the other end of the continent, Filchner had fallen short of a suite of rock samples from Prinz Luitpold Land. David was disappointed, because this would have conclusively shown whether the new coastline joined the mountains Amundsen had seen carrying over the horizon.
There was a strong reason for supposing they did. The wholly different geology of the Andes tended to support Amundsen’s observations that this mountain range continued towards Prinz Luitpold Land, a staggering distance of 3500 kilometres, making it one of the longest mountain ranges in the world.
If the mountains of Victoria Land did indeed cut across the continent, the question remained whether the barriers of the Ross and Weddell seas linked up, cutting Antarctica in two. The Japanese expedition looked south from King Edward VII Land and saw high ground that implied the presence of land; Amundsen suggested there might also be mountains to the northeast of his point of ascent, which he called Carmen Land.
If these were real—though because of the known refraction of the air in this part of the world, they might have been hundreds of kilometres away—there could not be a wide strait, David argued. Filchner’s Luitpold Land, at the southernmost part of the Weddell Sea, lent support to the idea. At best there was a narrow strait. Decades later, David’s supposition was proved correct.
After the expeditions of 1912 there was a backlash against the bewildering array of names being given to different parts of Antarctica. People were getting tired of the landscape being named after monarchs and rich benefactors. Today naming is strictly controlled and many of the locations in Antarctica have been retitled. Although individual mountains have largely kept the titles bequeathed to them, the chain that cuts a swathe across the continent now goes by the name of the Transantarctic Mountains, while the Antarctic Andes are best known as the Antarctic Peninsula.
With this rationalisation, there was also a recognition that the word ‘barrier’ did not do justice to the extraordinary features found in the Ross and Weddell seas. During 1912 the Australasian team discovered a similar floating formation on the east Antarctic coastline. This find was given a more accurate term, and named after the Anglo-Irishman who had supported the Australasian effort: the Shackleton Ice Shelf. It would be some years before the Great Ice Barrier became known as the Ross Ice Shelf. But the work undertaken by the British and Norwegian teams did show that this enormous feature was essentially flat and rose only very slightly towards the Transantarctic Mountains.
Shirase’s team had found the only significant amounts of rock debris in the barrier ice near the coast of King Edward VII Land and close to numerous outlet glaciers, giving a strong clue about its formation. David astutely realised that the ice shelf must be shaped by a combination of factors: ice flowing in from surrounding glaciers and snow falling from above, melting at the base and calving into the Ross Sea.
The timescale involved was vast. The British calculated the barrier’s movement was somewhere in the order of 460 metres each year, not far off today’s estimate of a metre a day. And, thanks to the mapping efforts of 1912, the Ross Ice Shelf was shown to be equivalent in size to France, allowing David to calculate that it took some twelve hundred years for ‘ice at the apex…to travel to the sea cliff’.
But it was by crossing the crevasse-torn ice shelf that the most significant discoveries about this ancient landscape were made. Shackleton found a succession of different rock types exposed in the mountainsides at the top of the Beardmore Glacier, at a spot known as Buckley Island. Thanks to detailed work by Scott and his team, it was realised that Mawson had found the same sequence of rocks some 2250 kilometres away. Although finding an identical geological pattern in two different locations, albeit over a huge distance, was not in itself thrilling, one part of the sequence excited considerable comment: coal.
In 1912 it was well known that the existence of coal spoke of forested swamps in the past. Based on the plant remains the Antarctic coal contained it was evident there were parallels to those found in other parts of the world during a geological period of luxuriant plant growth known as the Permian, more than 250 million years ago. This geological link helped David, an expe
rt on Australian coal, to decipher the geological history of Antarctica.
The mere presence of coal posed a tricky question: how did vestiges of ancient forests come to be found at the Beardmore Glacier? As David remarked, ‘We are thus confronted with the extraordinary problem of trees, probably coniferous, flourishing with 5° of the South Pole itself in a zone which is now, in winter-time, more or less in complete darkness for five months in the year.’
Prophetically, David asked: ‘Could this coal-flora have flourished, even under warmer conditions, with the Beardmore glacier situated in its present relation to the South Pole, so that the flora would have been in darkness for five months of the year? If not, has the Pole shifted, or has Buckley Island shifted in regard to its present distance from the Pole?’
The answer to why coal was in Antarctica lay within the sixteen kilograms of samples Scott and his team had collected and dragged to their deaths. With the publication of Scott’s Last Expedition, a collection of the British leader’s journals, the public learned that on discovering the dead men the search party ‘recovered all their gear and dug out the sledge with their belongings on it. Amongst these were 35 lb. of very important geological specimens which had been collected on the moraines of the Beardmore Glacier; at Doctor Wilson’s request they had stuck to these up to the very end, even when disaster stared them in the face and they knew that the specimens were so much weight added to what they had to pull.’