Unravelling the secret of the South Pole

One hundred years ago, on December 14, 1911, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and four companions trudged through fog, bitter cold and lacerating wind to stand at the absolute bottom of the world, the South Pole. Nowhere was there a trace of their British rival, Robert Falcon Scott. No Union Jack mocked them, no ice cairn bespoke precedence. The Norwegians had won the race.

Amundsen and Scott: They were commanding forces driving early exploration of Antarctica, the ice-covered continent almost half again the size of the United States and unlike any other place on Earth. Both were driven by ambition to win fame by grabbing one of the few remaining unclaimed geographic prizes. Each was different, though, in temperament and approach to exploration, which may have been decisive in the success of one and the undoing of the other.

Earnest and methodical, Amundsen had previously wintered over with an expedition in Antarctica and succeeded in the first navigation of the Northwest Passage, north of Canada, as he learned well how to prepare for work on the planet’s coldest, most unforgiving continent.

He knew from experience how indispensable well-trained dogs were for pulling sledges. His next destination was to have been the North Pole. But when he heard that two other groups claimed that triumph, Amundsen wrote that “there was nothing left for me but to try and solve the last great problem – the South Pole.”

Scott was a navy officer and a gentleman who had led an expedition that fell well short of the South Pole because of poor planning and execution. Using dogs to pull all the sledges he thought unsporting: better, he wrote, “to go forth to face the hardships, dangers and difficulties with their unaided efforts.”

This the Scott party had to do. Its motorised sledges and the ponies soon broke down, leaving them to pull the sledges all the way up a glacier to the high polar plateau. When Amundsen’s men already were only a week away from their base camp at the Bay of Whales, to complete their 2,000-mile round trip, the exhausted British team arrived at the pole on Jan. 17, 1912, five weeks too late. How deflating to see the Norwegian flag, alert to the wind. In his diary, Scott wrote: “Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

Disappointment then turned to tragedy. Stalled by a nine-day blizzard, weak from hunger and sledge-pulling fatigue on the return trek, Scott and his four team members perished by the end of March. Most of the bodies were not found until November, at their last camp, among diaries and field notes and rock specimens they had gone perhaps too far out of the way to collect. Scott may have lost the race to the pole, but in death, he prevailed in the narrative for much of the last century as the brave and stoic hero of legend.

The time of Amundsen and Scott was the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. The adventurous were in part attracted to the ice because, as the British mountaineer George Mallory was to say of Everest, it was there: a recognised new challenge. Even so, the same competitive spirit drove individuals and nations to seek to be first to make scientific discoveries, as Edward J. Larson, a Pepperdine University historian and author of the recent book “An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science,” describes in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Nature.

As early as 1900, Larson notes, the British, notably teams under Ernest Shackleton and to a lesser extent Scott, as well as German scientists, measured the movement of glaciers and mapped the coast and the interior. From seabed sediments and outcrops they determined that Antarctica was a true continent – with a landmass underlying thick ice – in contrast to the Arctic, where the ice more thinly covers a wide sea. From fossils they learned that the continent was once warmer and home to abundant life, all clues to its earlier link to other southern continents.

“We’ve become very aware of the importance of polar regions in recent years as the harbinger of changes to come on a global scale,” said Raymond S. Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who primarily studies the Arctic and was not directly involved in the academy report.

Robin E. Bell, a senior research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who participated in the academy study, called attention to the report’s conclusion that a greater knowledge of rising temperatures and melting ice in some parts of the continent “will allow scientists to better predict” climate everywhere else.

The National Science Foundation asked the academy to prepare these recommendations as guides in deciding which projects to support with grants. The government agency is spending $67.4 million this year on Antarctic projects. Since the advent of satellite imagery in the 1970s, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have gathered much of the data calling attention to the continent’s involvement in climate change.

Subject of new research

Changes in the ice sheet, which covers roughly 97.6 percent of the continent, is the subject of new research along the lines of academy recommendations. An international team of researchers, financed by the NSF and NASA, will travel by helicopter this month to the remote Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf. The glacier, Borg said, “has begun to flow more rapidly, discharging more ice into the ocean, which could have a significant impact on global sea-level rise over the coming century.”

Scientists will use remote-sensing instruments to investigate the cavity beneath the ice shelf where it extends beyond the land and over the ocean. They hope to determine how relatively warm ocean water enters this cavity and undercuts the bottom of the glacier, melting and releasing more than 19 cubic miles of ice into the sea each year.

The academy report noted the seals, whales and penguins native to Antarctica have evolved physiologies adapted to the extreme environment, and this “could hold the key to understanding and preventing a host of illnesses and conditions that plague humans, such as heart attacks, strokes and decompression sickness.”

For years, Russians have been drilling through the ice to Lake Vostok, the largest of more than 140 subglacial lakes on the continent. They may finally break through next year to collect a sample of water presumably supersaturated with oxygen. If there is life in the water, it evolved in cold darkness and under high pressure over millions of years. Any sign of life in Vostok may strengthen the prospect of finding life on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which appear to have under-ice seas of liquid water.

The academy also emphasised the value of Antarctica as “an unparalleled platform for observing the solar system and the universe beyond.” In the thin, dry atmosphere at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, the clarity of light is an astronomer’s dream. Several types of telescopes there observe some of the earliest events in the cosmos and are searching for clues to the nature of dark matter and dark energy that presumably constitute 95 percent of everything in the universe. Other telescopes keep track of solar eruptions as an early warning system of stormy space weather endangering communications and navigation satellites.