1º British: Shackleton and the exploration of the Antarctica (I_Theory)

Let’s start! What do you know about Antarctica? Antarctica is the continent surrounding the South Pole, almost entirely covered by an ice sheet. Here you have a detailed phisical map of it:

 

Antarctica is the coldest, highest, windiest, driest continent on Earth, as you can discover in this link about its environment and it is home of animals such as penguins, seals, whales… as you can watch in this Nationalgeographic video.

Antarctica was always an atractive dream for explorers, adventurers and scientists. Among History, there have been many travels, starting as soon as  the 18th century! On January 1774 James Cook (UK) crossed the Antarctica Polar Sea Circle but could not even see the continente due to the bad weather conditions (he was just 75 miles away from it!).

On November, 1820 Andrés MacFarlane (Chile) was the first person that disembarked in Antarctica (Expedition “Dragón de Valparaíso”).

Nevertheless, the most famous and hazardous Antarctica stories were the explorations of Scott (UK), Amundsen (Norway) and Shackleton (UK), al lof them at the beginning of the 20th century. These are their portraits:

Captain Scott and Roald Amundsen both aimed to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1911. That was nicknamed “The race to the South Pole” (Link to video and map).

Who won? Amundsen! On 14 December, 1911 he reached the center of the continent; When Scott arrived few weeks later, on 17 January 1912, the Norwegian flag was already there…

The journey back (on foot!) was not only sad for Scott and his men, but also terrible due to heavy snow storms and lack of food: they died before reaching back their ship in the coast. A posterior expedition managed to reach their last refugee, buried their bodies and recovered their diaries, that were published when back in London and become best-sellers.

But let’s focus on Shackleton’s last atempt: the Endurance voyage; although the expedition failed and the ship sunked, the adventure of the Endurance was probably one of the most remarckable historical hits in Geographical expeditions. And, spoiler, despite the difficulties all members of the team survived and went back to UK thanks to the determination and effort of the captain, Sir Ernest Shackleton!

Thanks to the NOVAproject website you would find a lot of information and visual resources for your work, such as the timeline and the team. Additionally, you can revise the National Geographic summary.

A real adventure, isn’t it? But what about now a days situation? Currently, Antarctica is a continente for international cooperation in science, where Spain is also collaborating.