Antarctica facts
🐧 I read some books about Antarctic exploration and got excited.
Here are some fun facts I recently learned about Antarctica, or more specifically about humans on Antarctica.
The Belgian Antarctic Expedition
- The Belgica set sail for Antarctica in 1897 and returned to Belgium in 1899. It was the first ship to overwinter in the Antarctic sea ice.
- The expedition's leader, Adrien Victor Joseph de Gerlache de Gomery, likely stranded the ship on purpose because he knew that a dramatic survival story would sell better (if they survived). He did not tell his crew this.
- Surprisingly only two men died (one from falling overboard and the other from a heart condition) but several of the others went varying levels of mental.
- The ship's first mate was a little-known figure in polar exploration called "Roald Amundsen".
- Emil Racoviță, the expedition's biologist, kept everyone onboard amused by drawing rude cartoons of them.
- Racoviță, when analysing various species of penguins, the "pugnacious" chinstrap penguin as "a strict individualist", but said the gentoo penguin was "decent and honest", "a shrewd communist" and "sumptuously dressed".
- When Racoviță returned to Europe, he became the subject of the first ever underwater photograph, which looks fucking sick btw so check it out!!!
- Frederick Cook, the ship's doctor, would later become infamous for falsely claiming to be the first human at the North Pole and then being jailed for running a massive Ponzi scheme in the Texan oil fields. This did not stop him and Amundsen from becoming besties.
- However Cook actually came in pretty clutch on this expedition because he'd spent some time living with Inuit people and actually paid attention to what they were doing, which meant he had a much better idea of how to survive at extreme latitudes than a Belgian aristocrat.
- Cook also saved everyone from dying of scurvy by insisting they eat raw penguin meat, which turns out to have Vitamin C in it.
- Apparently penguin meat tastes pretty bad!
- Cook also encouraged the crew to go for a daily walk on the ice surrounding the ship for the sake of their health. This was known as the "Madhouse Promenade".
- While the ship was frozen in the winter ice, all the waste the crew produced (empty tins, animal carcasses, human shit, etc etc) was dumped over the side and accumulated in the snowdrifts. Racoviță referred to this as "Caca Avenue".
- When the expedition finally tried to escape the ice, they had to blast their way through this frozen mess with explosives, sending chunks of it raining down onto the deck.
- To avoid the Belgica's hull being damaged by icebergs while the ship made its way out of the ice, the crew hung penguin carcasses over the side as buffers. Very horrible!
- After returning to Belgium, de Gerlache went into business with a shipbuilder named Lars Christensen. However de Gerlache ran into money troubles and Christensen had to sell one of the ships at a steep loss. The buyer, Ernest Shackleton, renamed his new ship the Endurance and set off for the Antarctic himself. This all went totally according to plan.
- The Belgica's frozen winter is now used by NASA as a lesson in how a crew might survive a long-distance journey through space.
Antarctic research stations
- Antarctica's only bowling alley opened in McMurdo Station in 1961, but was demolished in 2009 due to structural damage in the building. Its original pins were designed to look like penguins.
- The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station holds an annual marathon of The Thing from Another World (1951), The Thing (1982) and The Thing (2011).
Things I enjoyed reading or watching about Antarctica
- The Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton
- Encounters at the End of the World (2007, directed by Werner Herzog)
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