A century in Antarctica: from sealskin coats to bases with Whastapp

From the very long voyages with sealskin coats of the Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose death marks one hundred years this Wednesday, to the current bases where scientists use state-of-the-art satellites and even Whatsapp.

Expeditions to the Antarctica They have been fascinating the world for more than a century, although in recent months they have suffered significant difficulties due to the pandemic.

“Men are needed for dangerous travel. Low wages, extreme cold, months of complete darkness, constant danger, doubtful return unharmed. Honors and recognition in case of success ”.

This was the advertisement that Shackleton published in the London press in 1914. He was seeking to recruit men to cross Antarctica for the first time on foot, an ill-fated feat that ended with the “Endurance” running aground in the icy Weddell Sea and with its crew wandering during a year and a half for the ice.

It was heroic

Mauricio Jara, a historian from the University of Chile, explained to Efe that Shackleton is part of a generation of brave explorers who made the first scientific discoveries on the frozen continent in the so-called “Heroic Era”.

“There are some authors who say that Shackleton did not achieve any success, beyond arriving in 1909 at 88 degrees and 23 minutes south latitude before (the Norwegian) Roald Amundsen,” said Jara, one of the greatest Antarctic experts in Chile. .

In his opinion, the explorer’s greatest triumph was his “charisma” and “his quality of tireless leader, who never abandons his people.”

After the wreck of the “Endurance”, Shackleton led his men across the ice to Elephant Island, where the vast majority survived for months feeding on seals and penguins.

He and five other men embarked on an even more difficult undertaking: reaching a whaling station on the island of South Georgia, more than 1,000 kilometers away. They succeeded in May 1916 and were later able to save the rest of the crew.

Despite the hostile conditions of expeditions in the early 20th century, with men dressed in sealskin coats and mud inside their boots to cope with temperatures down to minus 80 degrees Celsius, “the mortality rates were quite low, in relation to what one could imagine ”, assured Jara.

“The death that did cause stupor was that of the British Robert Falcon Scott, who died just 50 miles from the coast for lack of food,” he added.

From the interwar period to COVID

Polar crossings began to change in the interwar period, when wooden sailing ships were replaced by armored ships and canned food became popular.

Since then, both logistics and technology have advanced by leaps and bounds, to the point that today there are even divers who dive into its icy waters to detect the effects of climate change on marine flora.

However, it continues to cost “enormous amounts” of money to study the white continent, the great sensor of global warming, said the head of Expeditions of the Chilean Antarctic Institute (Inach), Cristian Toro.

The campaigns, which are worth about US $ 3 million each, start in November and usually last until March, but it all depends on the weather, according to the expert.

“A colleague who is at the Yelcho base (one of the three in Inach) told me these days that they cannot go out because the snow covers half of the second floor and he sent me photos by Whastapp of penguins walking at the height of his window ”Said Toro.

The coronavirus, which first appeared in Antarctica in December 2020 with an outbreak that affected more than thirty scientists and military personnel at the Chilean base Bernardo O’Higgins, is also disrupting everything on the white continent.

Lea Carroll, from the French Development Research Institute, lamented the lack of interaction between the thousand international bases that has caused the pandemic, “which is affected by a lot of research.”

For the historian Jara, the importance of Antarctica lies not only in what it teaches about the world, but also in that “it is the only territory in the world dedicated exclusively to peace and science”, something that remains intact despite the pandemic .