VICTORY The Norwegian party pitched a tent as near to the actual pole as they could calculate. More Photos »  One hundred years ago, on Dec. 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 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. He had a romantic view of exploration as a self-affirming adventure, a kind of trial by ice. 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 motorized 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 recognized 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, Dr. 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.  Advances in aviation, icebreakers and other technologies after World War II opened the Antarctic to wider and more sustained scientific research. The United States and about a dozen other countries established permanent living quarters, supply depots and research facilities, the infrastructure for year-round living and increasingly ambitious research projects.  Now, from coastal ice shelves to the 10,000-foot polar plateau, from subglacial mountain ranges to pristine lakes sealed under ice, Antarctica is one vast international laboratory for research in sciences as diverse as astrophysics and climatology, geophysics and oceanography. Looking ahead, the National Academy of Sciences has just published a study, “Future Science Opportunities in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean,” identifying key questions that should drive research there in the next 10 to 20 years.  The report’s principal recommendations focused on researching the continent’s role in global climate change. Polar scientists were not surprised.
The 100th anniversary of the race to the South Pole has prompted a fresh look back and new research.