quote:

Posted

very good looking picturs

Great pictures Cusp, and probably my most minimalist wallpaper ever.

I’ve been bothered by a question lately and I wonder if anybody down South knows the answer - who was the first man to reach the South Pole?

Well, obviously it was Amundsen but, as I’ve seen from Cusp’s pictures, there’s now an official South Pole marker at the geographical pole, which I’m assuming is the point at which the lines of longitude converge. I believe that it get’s shifted a few metres once a year to allow for the movement of the glacier upon which A-S base sits, but it is the official South Pole (capital letters). So who was it that first stood upon the spot of the shiny stick?

I’ve been doing a bit of research…

Amundsen and his team reached the pole on December the 14th 1911 and set up a tent base, which they named Polheim. They'd broken their theodolite on the journey and their primary concern, understandably, was getting home alive so they had little time and inadequate equipment to identify where the pole actually was. What they decided to do was to 'box' the pole: they marked a 10 mile square around where they believed the pole was and skied grid lines across it. After this they spent a few days taking readings, moving forward to their newly calculated pole position and skiing more grids.

It turns out that Polheim was, at the time, about 5.5 miles from the actual pole and that one of Amundsen's team members, Helmer Hanssen, was the one who skied closest, getting to a couple of hundred yards of the geographic pole. Amunden himself probably never got closer than a kilometer.

Scott and his team got as far as the Polheim tent and, as they now realised that they had been beaten and were in poor shape, turned round and started for home.

Nobody returned to the pole for about 45 years until Admiral Byrd led an airbourne expedition in 1955. His flight landed in the general vicinity of the pole to scout for the setting up of a permanent base the following year - the International Geophysical Year. The IGY base was intended to do science but was mostly to beat the Russians.

So who got to stand on the official, geographical pole first? Well, you could make a case for it being an American, Lt. Dick Bowers (I don’t think that he was any relation to Scott's Bowers), who on November the 20th 1956 led the airdropped team that was tasked with identifying 90 degrees South with modern instruments. He may have been the man who erected the first marker, which seems to have been a bamboo cane. Paul Siple, the expedition's chief scientist, apparently took the first silver globe (originally a photographic lens for taking atmospheric pictures).

Does anyone down there have an opinion about any of this (or a copy of Siple’s book about the IGY expedition)? I don’t think that we ought to re-write the history books or anything but it is, er, quite interesting.

Nice article on the IGY base.

Hey there, sorry for being absent for so long. The satellites have been going down before the end of the work day, work days have been busy, and everyday is a work day for me.

'Dekka, that's indeed an interesting bit of polar history you found. I think uncertainty about actually finding the exact Pole (be it north or south) is pretty commonplace. If I recall correctly, there is also some contention about whether Byrd actually found the North Pole when he (allegedly) flew over it for the first time. It's naturally a mainly astronomic observation that determines whether you've reached +/-90 degrees latitude, and anybody who has done any sort of non-GPS-supported navigation knows how much uncertainty can be introduced by the smallest of measurement or computational errors.

Probably one of the best resources for Antarctic history, since he was there for it as of the 70s, is Bill Spindler-the guy that runs southpolestation.com. He's actually here at Pole right now, and I'm sure would be glad to discuss this (with a whole lot more knowledge than I have) with you.

Anyhow, there's a lot more light in the sky, behind some heavy overcast right now, and I'll try to get some photos posted once that clears.

quote:

Probably one of the best resources for Antarctic history, since he was there for it as of the 70s, is Bill Spindler-the guy that runs southpolestation.com. He's actually here at Pole right now, and I'm sure would be glad to discuss this (with a whole lot more knowledge than I have) with you.

Thanks, I shall certainly do that - looks like a very interesting board. I'll read it up tomorrow though - if I start now I just know I'll be up all night.

I'd forgotten that (presumably geostationary) comsats dip below the horizon down there. The dishes must be pretty much horizontal.

Alright, links to pictures with sunrise (still just twilight, though) on my blog:
Pic 1
Pic 2

A fire in the sky...

polerisemedium.jpg (39 Kb, 117 downloads)

Really nice.
It's also pretty fascinating that you can come back a few hours later and take the same picture.

quote:

Originally posted by CuspTech:
A fire in the sky...

If you squint your eyes, this image looks like ducks floating on the water.

It does. The world should be run by ducks.