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  SOUTH POLE

  The Earth series traces the historical significance and cultural history of natural phenomena. Written by experts who are passionate about their subject, titles in the series bring together science, art, literature, mythology, religion and popular culture, exploring and explaining the planet we inhabit in new and exciting ways.

  Series editor: Daniel Allen

  In the same series

  Air Peter Adey

  Cave Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher

  Desert Roslynn D. Haynes

  Earthquake Andrew Robinson

  Fire Stephen J. Pyne

  Flood John Withington

  Gold Rebecca Zorach and Michael W. Phillips Jr

  Islands Stephen A. Royle

  Lightning Derek M. Elson

  Meteorite Maria Golia

  Moon Edgar Williams

  South Pole Elizabeth Leane

  Tsunami Richard Hamblyn

  Volcano James Hamilton

  Water Veronica Strang

  Waterfall Brian J. Hudson

  South Pole

  Elizabeth Leane

  REAKTION BOOKS

  For Zac and Tessa

  Published by

  Reaktion Books Ltd

  Unit 32, Waterside

  44–48, Wharf Road

  London N1 7UX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2016

  Copyright © Elizabeth Leane 2016

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and

  Index match the printed edition of this book.

  Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 9781780236292

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1 Where is the South Pole?

  2 Maps and Mythologies

  3 Polar Imaginations

  4 Pole-hunting

  5 Settling in at ‘Ninety South’

  6 Highest, Coldest, Driest …?

  7 Looking Up and Looking Down

  8 South Polar Politics

  9 Pictures of Nothingness

  10 Adventurers and Extreme Tourists

  CHRONOLOGY

  REFERENCES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ASSOCIATIONS AND WEBSITES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  This map shows the wedge-shaped territorial claims to the Antarctic converging on the South Pole (only the Norwegian claim has an unspecified southern limit).

  Preface

  It is hard to think of a stranger place than the South Pole – if you can call it a place at all. Humans have theorized its existence for millennia, but our history of actual encounter with the South Pole is remarkably short – a little over a century. Many people equate it with a whole continent – Antarctica – but the Pole itself is technically just a point. There is no doubt about its cartographic position: 90 degrees south. But try to locate the Pole on a standard map and you may find yourself tracing out a line along its bottom; it does not slot easily into our conventional ways of looking at the world.

  In the popular imagination, the South Pole is the most remote point on the globe. However, as one of two points where Earth’s rotational axis meets its surface, it is also about as central a place as you can find: the whole planet revolves around it. The topography of the Pole is both remarkable and tedious: it ‘sits’ atop several miles of ice, on a largely featureless plateau. There is not, on the face of it, a lot to recommend the place: it is dark for half the year; its freezing climate is entirely hostile to all organic life above the level of the microbe; its economic value is minimal; and it is a long way from anywhere. In the early decades of the twentieth century, however, this point on Earth was more sought after than any other. Six nations’ territorial claims now meet there, although it remains, like all of Antarctica, unowned.

  My aim here is to tell the story of humanity’s relationship with the Pole – one that begins in speculation and imagination, moves through exploration and tragedy, becomes rooted in settlement and science, but remains open to geopolitical machinations. This story pivots around two key historical events, nearly 50 years apart. One is the first arrival of explorers at the Pole: the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition led by Roald Amundsen reached the longed-for point in late 1911. They were followed about a month later by a five-man British party led by Robert Falcon Scott, all of whom died on the return leg, generating a tragic story that has eclipsed Amundsen’s success in the public imagination. The other event is the construction of the first scientific station at 90 degrees south by the United States in 1956–7, named ‘Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station’ in honour of the two expedition leaders. The very existence of a permanent station points to one of many important differences between the North and South poles. Unlike its northern counterpart, the South Pole is solid. Although it is ice rather than land, it can be built and lived upon, meaning that its history of human interaction has been quite different from that of the Arctic pole.

  A Norwegian newspaper promises readers Amundsen’s own narrative of the South Pole expedition, sent by telegram. The Norwegians’ arrival at the Pole had been announced from Hobart on 7 March. The photograph of Amundsen is actually a publicity shot taken near his home, not far from Oslo, prior to the expedition.

  Sign marking the Geographic South Pole.

  I also want to complicate the story of the South Pole as it is popularly told. I have been talking here about the South Pole, but there are, as I will explain, many ‘South Poles’, not all of them stationary. While my focus is primarily the Geographic South Pole, from time to time I turn to various ‘other’ poles. And despite Antarctica being dubbed the ‘continent for science’, I want to emphasize that the Pole is not just a natural place, a goal for explorers and an important site for scientists. It is also a very political and contested place, as well as a cultural place, one that is continually re-imagined and represented. The South Pole is a real point on the Earth that can be visited – tourists pay a large price to do so – but it is also a highly charged symbol.

  At first glance, the Pole might seem an impossible subject for the writer, let alone the artist or photographer. How much is there to say about a remote point on an ice plateau that cannot even be located without complicated observations and calculations? As it turns out, a great deal – much more than can be squeezed into a book of this size. Images and ideas have accreted around the Pole during thousands of years of geographical speculation, and the previous century, with its sledging journeys and overflights, international political negotiations, scientific investigations, infrastructure construction, environmental crises and tourist visits, has added many new meanings and mythologies. This book attempts to weave together these diverse facets of the South Pole.

  1 Where is the South Pole?

  Where is the South Pole? It seems a nonsensical question. Ninety degrees south: what could be more singular, more precise, than the location of the South Pole?

  It was just this question, however, that in late 1911 exercised the first men to reach the Pole’s vicinity: the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his four companions. Faced with a featureless icy waste much like the rest of the plateau they had traversed for weeks, they needed to locate their target as accurately as possible. Despite their initial celebrations, flag-planting and national proclamations, ‘every one of us knew that we were not standing on the absolute spot.’
1 The controversy surrounding apparent arrivals at the North Pole a few years previously by Frederick Cook and Robert Peary was a salient lesson. Neither Arctic explorer had proved beyond doubt that he had actually reached his goal, and a heated dispute had ensued.

  Amundsen’s team, then, did not rest on their laurels. The leader sent three men out on skis, two perpendicular to their original path and one in the same direction, travelling out about 20 km (12.5 miles) and using spare sledge-runners as markers. The task exposed the three skiers to some danger: any one of them could have lost his way (and hence his life) on the blank expanse of the plateau. Meanwhile, the remaining two men took hourly observations of the sun’s elevations to determine their position. As a result, they moved 9 km (5.5 miles) further on, planted another flag, set up their spare tent in which they left letters – one for the Norwegian king, one for the British expedition leader Robert F. Scott, then still on his way south – and took now-famous photographs. In a bold attempt at domestication, they named the place ‘Polheim’, just as they had called their coastal base ‘Framheim’. More observations ensued: ‘we were not on the absolute Pole, but as close to it as we could hope to get with our instruments’. Skiers were sent out yet again, ‘to come a few inches nearer to the actual Pole’.2

  When Scott’s team arrived a month later, their situation was very different: where they had hoped for blankness, they were confronted by the marks of human activity. Making their own measurements, they took an upright sledge-runner they found as the Norwegians’ best approximation of the actual Pole. It was about 800 m (half a mile) from the point where the British had held their own more despondent arrival ceremony. The Norwegians, Scott reflected, had ‘made thoroughly sure of their mark’.3 In the end, both teams located the Pole with remarkable accuracy, but it took some doing. The South Pole was not easy to find.

  More than 100 years later, the Pole has stayed put (more or less) but, subject to continual ice movement and accumulating snow, the signs of the first human encounter with this ‘last of all places’ have moved on – and down. All the artefacts left by Amundsen’s team at Polheim – the tent, the letters, the flag, the abandoned equipment and clothes – are now under about 17 m (55 feet) of ice. Ironically, scientific calculations suggest that Amundsen’s tent, at a little more than 2 kilometres) from the Pole, may now be slightly closer to the Norwegians’ target than it was in 1911.4

  Sculptor Håkon Fagerås created these bronze statues of Amundsen’s team outside the Fram Museum in Oslo to mark the centenary of the first arrival at the Pole.

  The letter (bottom right) Amundsen left at the South Pole for the King of Norway, and the envelope in which it was eventually sent from Britain after it was retrieved from Scott’s party.

  Thorvald Nilsen’s map (6 February 1912) of the region near the South Pole traversed by Amundsen’s team was reproduced in the expedition narrative The South Pole.

  The Antarctic ice is always shifting, meaning that no marker stays at ‘90 south’ for long. These days two different markers are used. The first is the photogenic Ceremonial Pole: a shiny spherical mirror on a red-and-white barbershop-style column, surrounded by a semicircle of flags representing the twelve nations that originally signed the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. This serves for obligatory ‘hero shots’ and official occasions, but is a few hundred metres away from the Geographic Pole. The second, less permanent marker is a metal post (a pole, if you like) indicating the actual site of 90 degrees south, accompanied by a sign and an American flag, and surmounted by an ornamental metal disc. It moves with the ice about 10 m (30 feet) every year, so is annually replaced by a new marker (carefully designed by South Pole Station personnel), in the corrected position, during a ceremony held on New Year’s Day.5 The sites of the old Pole positions are marked by stakes, the line of them indicating the movement of the ice.

  Hanssen’s photograph of Wisting, Bjaaland, Hassel and Amundsen (and dogs) at the South Pole, 14 December 1911.

  Amundsen and Hanssen use a sextant to determine their position. This copy of the photograph, signed by Bjaaland, was presented to South Pole residents in 1961.

  British magazine The Sphere provides readers with a ‘down-under view’ of Scott’s route in late December 1911.

  A famous ‘selfie’: Bowers took this photograph of Scott’s party at the South Pole using a string attached to the camera. L-R: Oates, Bowers, Scott, Wilson, Evans.

  Just as the ice is constantly shifting, so is the continent itself, although on a much longer timescale. The South Pole has not always been in Antarctica – or rather, Antarctica has not always been at the South Pole. Five hundred million years ago, the continent probably lay on or near the equator, butting against Australia, India, Africa and South America as part of the super-continent of Gondwana. At points in this long history the South Pole was covered by ocean rather than land. Antarctica wandered around the high southern latitudes, but only in the last 35 million years, after it had drifted towards the Pole and broken from Australia and South America, did it begin to take on its present icy form.6

  Antarctica’s isolation means that the South Pole is physically quite different from the North. The ancient Greeks’ coinage of the adjective Ant-arktikos – meaning, essentially, opposite the north (Arktos, ‘the bear’, is a northern constellation) – was accurate in more than just an astronomic or geographic sense. The South Pole sits on more than 2,700 m (9,000 feet) of ice, under which is the bedrock of a continent, itself surrounded by a large uninterrupted body of water – the Southern Ocean. The North Pole by contrast sits on sea ice only a few metres thick, in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, which is surrounded by land. There are, of course, also physical similarities. Both places are very cold, due to the low angle at which the sun’s rays hit them and the reflection of sunlight by the white ice. The South Pole, however, positioned high up in the interior of a continent, is far colder. The Earth’s tilting axis is also responsible for the diurnal extremes at each Pole: a ‘day’ famously lasts half the year, with sunrise at the South Pole occurring in September, at the spring equinox, and sunset at the autumnal equinox in March, six months later. Weeks of twilight separate the long periods of light and dark.

  The issue of the Earth’s rotation brings a new complication to the question ‘Where is the South Pole?’ A marker placed on the South Pole might move due to the shifting of the ice underneath, and the continent on which the Pole ‘sits’ might in the far future drift away from under it again, but the Pole itself – defined as the place where the planet’s axis of spin meets its surface – might be expected intuitively to remain stationary relative to the planet itself. But this is not the case. The reason is the shape of Earth. Although we like to think of our planet as a perfect sphere, it is a rather messier body, a little squashed at the top and bottom (giving it an ‘oblate spheroid’ shape) and slightly asymmetrical. It is this asymmetry, as well as periodic changes in the distribution of its mass (such as the seasonal displacement of air and water and changes in the fluid mantle), that makes the Earth’s axis of rotation move relative to the planet’s surface, in a roughly spiral motion. This ‘polar motion’ would not have been significant enough to upset Amundsen or Scott – it never causes either pole to vary more than a matter of metres from an average position. In addition to this roughly periodic shift, however, the poles are undergoing a slow irregular drift. This drift is due to non-periodic movements of the Earth’s own matter – shifting water masses as well as changes within the planet’s interior. The North Pole has been meandering southwards over the last 100 years, travelling on average along the 70 degrees west meridian (the direction of Canada).7 The South Pole is taking its own path – presumably the opposite of the North’s.8 Again, the change is minute on a global scale – about 0.1 m (4 inches) per year at the North Pole since the turn of the twentieth century.9

  2012 Geographic South Pole marker.

  All this assumes that, when the question ‘Where is the South Pole?’ is asked, we are all talking abo
ut the same South Pole. In the above, I have used ‘South Pole’ as shorthand for the Geographic South Pole of the Earth (also called the Geographical South Pole or Terrestrial South Pole), and will continue to do so throughout this book, unless otherwise specified. But there are many alternative South Poles, including the Magnetic South Pole, Geomagnetic South Pole, Celestial South Pole and South Pole of Inaccessibility – a veritable polar zoo. Confusingly, these terms are not always used consistently, but vary with context and purpose. Many sources define the Geographic Pole as the point where Earth’s rotational axis meets its surface. Others use a different phrase, such as ‘pole of rotation’ or ‘spin pole’, to describe this continually shifting point, defining the geographic poles in terms of the Earth’s system of cartographic coordinates, as the fixed points where the lines of longitude meet: 90 degrees north and south. As the distance between the pole of rotation and the ‘cartographic’ pole – 90 degrees south – is so small on a global scale, the distinction makes very little difference to nontechnical discussions of the South Pole.

  The ‘original’ South Pole could be found in the heavens rather than on Earth. The term ‘Pole’ comes from the ancient Greek word polos (πóλoς) – pivot or axis – which in turn derives from an earlier Indo-European root word meaning ‘to be in motion’. While the Presocratic Greeks believed the Earth to be flat, they nonetheless had a concept of a Celestial North Pole: observing that the stars appeared to rotate around the sky from east to west each night, they postulated the existence of a spinning celestial hemisphere and used polos to refer to the axis around which it appeared to turn, as well as the end point of this axis. When the Earth was considered to be flat, neither the idea of a southern celestial pole nor the concept of an earthly axis (and hence terrestrial poles) was necessary. When the celestial vault began to be conceived as a sphere rather than a hemisphere (for example, by Anaxagoras in the fifth century BC), however, the concept of a southern as well as a northern celestial pole became theoretically possible. With the argument for a spherical Earth, consolidated by Aristotle in the fourth century BC, came the necessity for terrestrial poles – points where the celestial axis met the surface of the planet (which was not itself thought to turn). Aristotle’s On the Heavens mentions the invisible southern celestial pole as well as the visible northern one, and his Meteorologica refers to the ‘other’ pole in a terrestrial context – probably the earliest written reference to the Geographic South Pole.10 Later Greek and Roman thinkers such as Eratosthenes, Cicero, Pliny the Elder, Strabo and Ptolemy refer, either implicitly or directly, to the southern as well as the northern terrestrial pole. Many thinkers of the Middle Ages also assumed a spherical model of the Earth and hence the existence of a southern terrestrial pole.11 Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe (1391) includes one of the earliest written references to the concept in English.