@Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Originally published January 8, 2001
Explorers give years, lives discovering harsh world
ERNIE MASTROIANNI Journal Sentinel staff
For most of recorded history, Antarctica was a question mark on world maps. Formidable barriers of sea ice and the world's stormiest seas kept all but the hardiest of mariners away.
The famed English explorer James Cook circumnavigated what is now known as the Southern Ocean in trips made between 1772 and 1775, encountering vast reaches of sea ice but no land. But the presence of impenetrable ice led him to surmise that there must be a continent to the south.
Crossing the Southern Ocean and spotting the Antarctic land mass did not happen until the early 1820s, when the lure of profit drew commercial whalers and seal hunters. They were the continent's first visitors, mostly along the Antarctic Peninsula.
But whaling was driven by profit, not exploration, so new discoveries were by happenstance.
In 1838, the U.S. Navy dispatched Charles Wilkes to lead an exploration of the seas around Antarctica. The voyage lasted until 1842. It was he who surmised, after a series of land sightings from 1839 to 1840, that Antarctica was a continent, and he mapped out more than 1,500 miles of coastline.
During the same time period, British explorer James Clark Ross led a mission that discovered the Ross Ice Shelf, Ross Island and McMurdo Sound. He also witnessed the eruption of a volcano, which is now known as Mount Erebus (named after a ship in Ross' fleet) and remains active, looming over McMurdo Station, the U.S. base in Antarctica.
At the dawn of the 20th century, two well-financed missions made runs at reaching the geographic South Pole.
Norwegian Roald Amundsen led four companions with tons of provisions pulled by dogsleds. He reached the pole on Dec. 14, 1911, helped by moderate weather and the hardy sled dogs that were bred for the cold.
British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the pole a month later, demoralized after his party of five hauled sleds themselves over a longer route, only to find a small tent and a short note of greeting from Amundsen.
"The pole, yes," wrote Scott on Jan. 17, 1912, "but under very different circumstances than expected."
But Amundsen did not get the fame that usually comes with the winner of such a feat. Scott, who died on his way back, only 11 miles from a depot of food and fuel, captured the imagination of the world. The account of his journey to the pole and the brutal trip back remains some of the most gripping writing on exploration ever penned.
Scott and his party endured an unusually cold February and March, and froze to death in their tents, pinned down by a raging blizzard and temperatures down to minus 60. A rescue party found their remains the following spring, and the contents of Scott's logbook were retrieved and published.
After Amundsen's victory and Scott's death, British explorer Ernest Shackleton declared that an overland crossing of the continent was the only remaining feat in Antarctica.
Shackleton failed gloriously.
His two-year odyssey ended when sea ice locked in his ship, Endurance. He and his crew spent one winter drifting, then abandoned ship in spring when ice floes crushed the boat. They took lifeboats to deserted Elephant Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula. From there, Shackleton and a small crew made an 800-mile voyage to South Georgia Island in a makeshift, open cockpit sailboat. Once they reached South Georgia, they hiked over an icy, windswept mountain range to reach a whaling station.
Two years after the start of the voyage, Shackleton returned by steamer to Elephant Island to rescue the rest of the crew. Amazingly, no lives were lost. A book on the epic ("South: The Endurance Expedition," by Ernest Shackleton) was a bestseller, lavishly illustrated by the expedition's photographer, Frank Hurley, whose high-quality photos captured the gritty details of the two-year epic.
In the 1920s and 1930s, aviators dominated exploration, and leading the way were Richard Byrd and Lincoln Ellsworth.
Byrd led five Antarctic expeditions, starting in 1928 when he built the Little America station on the Ross Ice Shelf. He flew over the South Pole on Nov. 29, 1929, and made numerous geographic discoveries. Ellsworth, who had been the financial backer of Roald Amundsen, in 1936 became the first person to fly across Antarctica.
In 1946, the U.S. military, without a war to fight but with a new adversary (Russia) based in a cold climate, turned its sights on Antarctica. Nearly 5,000 men and dozens of ships and planes went to the continent to train in the cold weather. It remains the largest military exercise in Antarctica.
A decade later, Navy aviator George Dufek landed a plane at the South Pole in 1956 as an advance to establishing a permanent U.S. base. It marked the first time a human had stood on the spot since 1912, when Scott and Amundsen were there.
The following year, 1957, an international effort -- dubbed the International Geophysical Year -- was launched to explore the continent. Since then, the South Pole and McMurdo Station on Ross Island have been occupied by the U.S., in a program funded and organized by the National Science Foundation.
Tourism began in the 1960s, mostly with cruise ships exploring the spectacular scenery of the Antarctic Peninsula. In 1979, a chartered plane from New Zealand crashed into Mount Erebus, killing 257 tourists on a sightseeing flyover of the continent.
Minnesotan Will Steger led an international dogsled expedition in 1989 that crossed the continent, from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula to the Soviet station Mirnyy on the opposite coast.
In 2001, two high-profile missions crossed Antarctica. They include the International Trans Antarctica Scientific Expedition, an overland journey by Sno-Cat to gather information about the West Antarctica Ice Sheet.
And two teachers, American Ann Bancroft and Norwegian Liv Arnesen carried out a privately financed mission to ski across the continent using wind sails as aids.
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