Antarctica and Fossils

In which the blogger finds his world insisting, through a campaign involving press reports, a new museum exhibit, and postage stamps, that he pay attention to Antarctic fossils.

Perhaps I’m just experiencing that phenomenon where something comes to my attention and suddenly my world appears overpopulated with that something.  It seems that there is increasing attention among scientists and in the popular media to fossils from Antarctica.  Frankly, it’s not hard to see why collecting and studying such fossils might be an attractive venture for those pursing the fossils and somewhat newsworthy for the rest of us.  The very challenges of working in that unforgiving environment might draw the adventurous (maybe such explorers see themselves in the mold of John Bell Hatcher, one of my paleontological heroes and subject of a post on this blog).  Coping with the harsh climate certainly gives an exciting patina to news coverage of such efforts.  Clearly more important (I assume) to the scientists is what these fossils have to tell us about the extremely different environmental conditions (often warm and wet) that prevailed there while that geographic area was part of the supercontinent Gondwana and what that might teach us about climate change.  This scientific content might perhaps be of some interest to the layperson, but popular coverage could be coming simply from the spark of amazement that is felt when one realizes the contrast between what the environment was there then and what is now.  And that bit of understanding, in and of itself, is worth something.

A good example of this playing out is the extensive coverage in the popular press of the recent Antarctic expedition which recovered the fossilized remains of trees that date from about 260 million years ago, shortly before the massive extinction event marking the end of the Permian Period.  These fossils have the potential to reveal something about how these trees handled the alternating extremes of prolonged light and prolonged darkness that prevailed then and prevail now at the poles.

But what impresses me most about this story is how it spiraled out from local coverage of the involvement of two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee geologists in that effort (Matthew Wamser, UWM Geologists Uncover Antarctica’s Fossil Forests, UWM Report, November 13, 2017), to be the subject of some 75 news reports worldwide from such outlets as Science Daily, The National Geographic, CNN, the Independent newspaper (Britain), and the Indian Express newspaper (India).

And it’s surprising to me that all of this comes from a story about finds upon which the research is only just beginning and whose true scientific import isn’t really that obvious or proven.  Further, one assumes that peer-reviewed publications are some long time away.  Yes, the interest, at its core, may well stem from the surprise for many that Antarctica was, at one time, covered in green forests and inhabited by a wide range of animals.

So it is that that the timing of the Field Museum’s soon-to-open exhibit Antarctic Dinosaurs couldn’t be better, an event I only learned about in the past few days (perhaps it's a bit of that cosmic conspiracy to confront me with Antarctic fossils).  The museum introduces this exhibit in not unexpectedly breathless terms:

Though Antarctica today can be a forbidding land of snow and ice, 200 million years ago it was a wooded, lush habitat where dinosaurs thrived. Opening in 2018, this new traveling exhibition embarks on the thrilling hunt for never-before-seen fossils and sheds new light on our planet’s ever-changing climate and geology.

Following the footsteps of early explorers and scientists today, witness the persistent challenges and extreme conditions of harrowing expeditions to the “Lost Continent.”

The exhibit, which opens at the Field in Chicago on June 15, 2018 and runs through January 6, 2019, takes the visitor on a tour.  (The description which follows relies on documents posted on the Field’s website.)  At the outset, the exhibit will offer the visitor a look at the conditions in the Antarctic now and the equipment needed to survive, comparing that gear to what was used by early explorers like Robert Falcon Scott.  Some of the first fossils found in the Antarctic will be on display (I’ve posted on Scott and his collecting of fossils in the face of death).  The visitor will then explore the geological forces that created the continent and visit a reconstructed Antarctic forest.  Next, the way fossils are hunted and collected in the current climate will be on display.  At that point, the visitor will encounter what is, I assume, the highlight of the exhibit, the world of Antarctic dinosaurs which will come to life through fossils and reconstructions.  The last two stops within the exhibit for the visitor will reveal how and why the continent’s climate changed to what it is now, and suggest lessons we might learn from those changes.

(After it closes at the Field on January 6, 2019, the exhibit takes to the road; its first stop will be at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for a stay from June 1, 2019 through January 5, 2020.)

As I suggested in a recent post, I’ve revived a past interest in philately with some emphasis on the appearance of fossils on stamp issues.  That effort has continued apace (with invaluable help from Paleophilatelie.eu where things philatelic and paleontological meet), and here in this endeavor the connection between Antarctica and the fossil evidence of past richness of flora and fauna on this continent has been inescapable, too.  Indeed, I think that among the most attractive stamps featuring scientifically accurate images of fossils that have ever been issued are those from the British Antarctic Territory (BAT), an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom.  The BAT consists of a wedged shaped slice of the continent with its apex at the pole and extending out toward South America.  (A small curiosity, the area encompassed by the BAT does not include Scott’s route to the pole in 1911-1912.)  Here is a map of the BAT (it is available from Wikimedia Commons and licensed under the Open Government License v1.0).

BAT stamps are primarily printed for the stamp collecting trade, an important source of revenue for the territory.  The BAT stamps featuring fossils from the Antarctic that were printed in 1990, 1991, and 2008 are shown below.  In addition, I offer two close-ups, one of a 1991 issue showing an Antarctic forest (featuring Southern Beeches - a cross-section of a fossil Nothofagus trunk is shown on the stamp) during the Cretaceous Period, and the other of a 1990 stamp showing a fossil leaf from a Glossopteris tree, which dominated the Antarctic forest before the End-Permian Extinction wiped it out.

These stamps are quite stunning.

I’m not sure at this point what in the way of Antarctic fossils the future has in store for me (I’m sure the powers that be won’t quit their campaign at this point).  Perhaps I should preempt them and take a trip to the Field Museum this summer.

Did Our Contract With Dogs Include This?

For most of my life, I have been accompanied by dogs – a source of companionship, challenge, joy, humor, distraction, and, yes, sadness.  We know how nearly every account of some special dog that graced a writer’s life typically ends; I guess I’m unduly squeamish about such narratives.

With that as context, it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking about the relationship of humans and dogs given that I have just finished reading Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth:  Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole, a masterful, gripping account of the efforts by the Englishman Robert Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen to reach the Pole in 1911 - 1912.  Amundsen succeeded, reaching the South Pole on December 15, 1911, and returning to tell the tale; tragically, Robert Scott and his team attained the Pole a month after Amundsen but perished during their return.  Though failing to make it back, Scott managed to tell the tale through his moving journal.  I’ve posted on Scott previously and the fossils he collected on the way back.

Scott approached the journey to the Pole by employing disparate means of transportation – he used motorized sledges, ponies, dogs, and men.  The first were an abysmal failure due to mechanical breakdowns, and ponies became a burden to the expedition because they were largely ill-suited for life or movement in the polar environment.  Dogs . . . ah, despite evidence to the contrary, Scott was biased against dogs as beasts of burden in polar regions and, as a result, used them poorly.  A reading of his journal leaves little doubt that, for Scott, the appropriate way to reach and return from the South Pole was by “man hauling” where the men pulled the sledges themselves, sometime using skis, sometimes not.

In contrast, Amundsen relied on dogs to provide the brute strength needed to pull the sledges, accompanied by men on skis.  Huntford posits that Amundsen and his team worked to make the dogs succeed because of a deep antipathy to man hauling.

Before exploring Amundsen’s use of dogs, I must acknowledge that Huntford and others, beginning in the 1960s, wrote histories of Scott that created a portrait of dramatically failed leadership.  These histories challenged the orthodox view that held up the man as a great leader and hero done in by the fickleness of nature and fortune.  Huntford, in particular, generated significant blowback by Scott loyalists, perhaps because his account is so well written and persuasive.  Be that as it may, I am using Huntford principally for his account of Amundsen’s plans for, and use of dogs, not his take on Scott.

The reasons that motivated Amundsen to rely on dogs for polar travel were myriad – their service as beasts of burden was the primary one.  He was convinced dogs were best suited to travel in polar regions and so expressed surprise at Scott’s general rejection of this animal.  “There must be some misunderstanding or other at the bottom of the Englishmen’s estimate of the Eskimo dog’s utility in the Polar regions.  Can it be that the dog has not understood his master?  Or is it the master who has not understood his dog?”  (Roald Amundsen, The South Pole:  An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,’ 1910- 1912, translated by A.G. Chater, Volume 1, 1913, p. 58)  The Norwegian brought only Greenland Huskies to Antarctica; not just because those dogs were able to handle the harsh conditions, but they also had a host of personality traits that helped make life in these brutal and often monotonous landscapes bearable.  In his portrait of the Eskimo dog, Huntford strings together a powerful array of descriptors – “loyal, intelligent, brave, persevering.”  At the same time, this dog could be “thieving, bullying, malingering.”  He adds that it is “is a compulsive fighter and a social animal.”  “His relation to his master is not that of servile beast, but of contractual dependent, performing certain duties in return for food and protection.”  (Last Place on Earth, p. 94 – 95)

The consequences for most of the dogs that began the trek to the South Pole with Amundsen were dire.  There was an inexorable and deadly logic at work.  This is what I’ve come to understand from Huntford’s account and other sources.  Before the 1911 Antarctic winter had set in, Amundsen had created a massive depot of nearly 2 tons of supplies at 80º south latitude (some 100 miles south of his base camp, Framheim, on the Ross Sea) and substantial depots housing about a ton of supplies further south at the 81º and 82º south latitudes.  When the actual assault on the Pole was launched in October, 1911, the supplies in these depots were to be hauled deeper south into the Antarctic wilderness to nourish men and dogs not only on the journey to the Pole, but, through the creation of additional depots, for the journey back north again.  At the outset, a large force of dogs would be needed to haul all of the supplies from these first depots.  But as the team moved south consuming food and fuel as it went, and offloading supplies at new depots, the number of dogs required would decline.  Continuing with unnecessary dogs increased both the amount of food needed to be carried on the sledges and the demand on the supplies cached in the depots necessary for the journey back north.  At some juncture on the trek south, many of the dogs would have to be put down.  Indeed, the bodies of those victims would feed their canine brothers and sisters, as well as the men.  Amundsen was frank about this calculus regarding his choice of the dog as his beast of burden – “[T]here is the obvious advantage that dog can be fed on dog.  One can reduce one’s pack little by little, slaughtering the feebler ones and feeding the chosen with them.”  (The South Pole, Volume 1, p. 58.)  It’s brutal mathematics but, once the expedition was set in motion, the death of most of the dogs was inevitable.

On October 26, 1911, Amundsen and 4 of his men left their depot at 80º south latitude with 4 sledges each being pulled by a team of 12 dogs.  The South Pole lay 600 miles to the south.  Of the 48 dogs that set forth that day, I believe only 12 made it back to Framheim on January 26, 1912.  Most of the dogs died at the hands of the men who had charge of their teams.  (Amundsen did not have a team, rather he sometimes acted as “forerunner,” leading the expedition and offering the dogs an object to follow in the white sameness).

From 80º south latitude, Amundsen followed his plan to run all of the dogs until the expedition traversed the Great Ice Barrier (Ross Ice Shelf) and found its way through the Transantarctic Mountains to the Polar Plateau, roughly two-thirds of the way to the Pole, with the worst of the hauling behind them.  When they stopped on November 21st on the Polar Plateau, the number of dogs was down to 42 dogs, a half dozen having either wandered off or been killed for certain “transgressions” (such as coming into a heat, an event drastically disruptive to the functioning of a dog team).  Here on the Polar Plateau, at what came to be called the Butcher’s Shop Depot, each man in charge of a team of dogs had to kill a number of his dogs to bring the overall total number of dogs down to 18, a group that would be reorganized into 3 teams.  As Amundsen wrote in his account, “It was hard – but it had to be so.  We had agreed to shrink from nothing in order to reach our goal.”  (The South Pole:  An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,’ 1910- 1912, translated by A.G. Chater, Volume 2, 1913, p. 67.)  The Butcher’s Shop was a scene of massacre but also one of feast for dogs as well as men.  In addition to the nutrition provided, the fresh meat served to ward off scurvy for man and dog.  Later, more attrition occurred until just a dozen dogs made it back from the Pole.

Pictured below is Oscar Wisting at the South Pole with a team of the fortunate dogs.  (This picture is from Amundsen’s The South Pole, Volume 2.)

I am conflicted by the sacrifice of so many of Amundsen’s dogs to the achievement of his goal.  To suggest why, I offer a photograph of one of my beloved dogs, the one that came closest to exemplifying all of the traits Huntford ascribes to the Eskimo dog.  My dog purportedly had large dollops of Chow and Husky in her.

My first reaction on reading about the fate of Amundsen’s dogs was to assert, in my usual anthropomorphizing fashion (particularly when it comes to dogs),

Wait!  That’s not part of the contract struck by the first dogs and humans.

But the more I’ve read of the scientific literature on the evolution of wolves (Canis lupus) to dogs (Canis familiaris), and the initial domestication of protodogs, the less certain I am about the validity of my complaint.

Within scientific circles the consensus position appears to accept the wolf as the source of the dog.  Biologist Rodney L. Honeycutt makes this point in his succinct and informative article on the dog’s evolution (Unraveling the Mysteries of Dog Evolution, BMC Biology, Volume 8, Number 20, 2010.)  The strongest evidence for the wolf as the source is based on genetic analysis.  Bones from early dogs and wolves cannot be used to construct this evolutionary narrative because distinguishing among those bones is so often problematic.

Archaeological and genetic analyses have, as yet, failed to answer a number of important, related questions, including:  Did the dog originate once from a single stock of wolf, or more than once from multiple stocks?  Where did it originate?  When?

As Honeycutt observes, much of the available research to date supports the notion that dogs arose on multiple occasions from several wolf stocks, and that archaeological evidence suggests European or Middle Eastern points of origin.  Work on the genetic evidence is clearly proceeding apace, generating some fascinating, though contradictory results.  Some genetic analysis has posited the Middle East as a key point of origin for the dog (see Bridgett M. vonHoldt, et al., Genome-wide SNP and Haplotype Analyses Reveal a Rich History Underlying Dog Domestication, Nature, April 8, 2010).  Most recently, teams of researchers, in several studies analyzing the mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome of an array of dogs and wolves, have concluded that dogs originated just once, and the place of origin was in Asia, south of the Yangtze River (ASY), from a stock of several hundred wolves.  Their reading of their findings is based principally on the premise that canine genetic diversity should be greatest at the place or places of origin, and, indeed, these researchers found far greater canine genetic diversity in ASY than elsewhere.  (Jun-Feng Pang, et al., mtDNA Data Indicate a Single Origin for Dogs South of the Yangtze River, Less than 16,300 Years Ago, from Numerous Wolves, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 26, Number 12, 2009; Z-L Ding, et al., Origins of Domestic Dog in Southern East Asia Is Supported by Analysis of Y-chromosome DNA, Heredity, Volume 108, 2012.)

I don’t have the background to assess such genetic studies, but I do recognize and enjoy debate and disagreement when I find it.  Honeycutt criticizes the ASY research because of an imbalance in the sampling – the number of canine DNA sequences analyzed far exceeded the number of wolf sequences.  “Such asymmetry in sampling of the wolf population is likely to bias any conclusions about origin.  Given the fact that wolves, dogs and other members of the genus Canis are inter-fertile, there is a high likelihood that dogs and wolves interbred subsequent to hybridization, thus complicating the derivation of the number of founders for dog lineages.”  (Honeycutt, p. 3)

In general, estimates of the timing of the dog’s origin varies depending upon whether the analysis is based on archaeological or molecular evidence.  Honeycutt cites a range of between 13,000 to 17,000 years ago for the former, and between 76,000 and 135,000 for the latter.  Though Pang’s report – see above – suggests an origin more recent than 16,300 years ago, it presumably conforms to Honeycutt’s contention that “most recent molecular studies embrace data provided by archaeological evidence.”  (Honeycutt, p. 3)

Nevertheless, disputes about places of origin and its timing should not obscure the fact that humans and dogs have had a longstanding relationship.

The dog was probably the first domesticated animal and the only one accompanying humans to every continent in ancient times and has therefore a central position in human history.  (Pang, p. 2849)

Juliette Clutton-Brock suggests that the forging of a hunting partnership between protodogs and humans may have marked the first element in the original canine-human “contract” (that’s my term, not hers).  (Origins of the Dog:  Domestication and Early History, in The Domestic Dog:  Its Evolution, Behavior, and Interactions With People, edited by James Serpell, 1995.)  Given where this post began, I find her discussion of the uses of dogs in Australia and North America to be particularly interesting.

For thousands of years, on the two continents of Australia and North America, the native peoples had dogs but no other domestic mammals until the arrival of Europeans.  Although the dog was never used for traction in Australia, as it was by the native Americans, it was greatly valued by the Aborigines as a hunting partner, companion, bedwarmer and occasional item of food.  (Clutton-Brock, p. 15, emphasis added)

To drive the point home even harder, I turn once more to Pang’s research article that posits an ASY point of origin.  In that piece, the authors go well beyond the reach of the genetic evidence they gathered and fashion a storyline for the initial domestication of wolves.  Rather than a contract struck between hunters – human and protodog – the authors suggest that the life-changing interaction came in a human society with sedentary aspects because “[i]t seems probable that some degree of sedentary life would have facilitated the wolf taming and domestication process.”  Not only was such a sedentary society forming in southeast Asia, more to the point, the authors note that southeast Asia has had a long historical tradition of eating dog.

It may therefore be speculated that the wolf was domesticated for its use as a source of food rather than for hunting, guarding, or companionship as mostly suggested, perhaps under influence of a European non-dog easting perspective.  (Pang, p. 2863)

Whoa, I didn’t see that coming.  But, upon some reflection, I suspect these researchers are incorrect with regard to the primary motivation for domestication.  The other sources of protodog’s value to humans would, in my European-biased view, far outweigh any of its value as food.  Writer Mark Derr in How the Dog Became the Dog:  From Wolves to Our Best Friends (2011) argues vehemently against the idea that wolves were domesticated for their food value.  Anyway, to my mind, it’s much easier to latch on to Clutton-Brock’s portrait of Australian Aborigines opting for all of the above in terms of their relationship to dogs.  Of course, that multi-faceted relationship developed long after the first dogs were domesticated.

In the final analysis, biased or not, I think killing and eating one’s canine companion lies outside the bounds of our mutual contract of interdependence.

The canine story I enjoyed most from Huntford’s account of the Amundsen race to the Pole (besides the fact that every time Amundsen and his men pitched their tent, they had to bank snow around it to keep the dogs from pissing on it) is actually a post-Antarctic one.  Wisting’s lead dog, The Colonel (presumably among those pictured above) survived the polar expedition and went on to live with Wisting in Norway.  Wisting wrote of his dog, “[H]e enjoyed his retirement with gusto.”  And there was the quiet side to The Colonel's old age when he would visit the Salvation Army.  “He sat outside their premises every evening in all kinds of weather and listened reverently to the speeches, songs and music.”  (As quoted in Huntford, p.461)  Of course, The Colonel’s story ends as nearly all dog stories do and, even after all of this, I wont go there.

Geologising in the Face of Death ~ In Defense of Robert F. Scott

Geologise or geologize is the verb form of geology.  (Oxford Dictionary of English, Second Edition, Revised, 2009.)  I assume the meaning is “to do geology.”  In the very few times I’ve encountered this verb, it has been used to describe not only the act of examining geological features in the field, but also, and principally, the hunting for fossils.

Fossil hunters face myriad dangers in the field.  A cliff side gives way, the tide comes in sooner and higher than expected, lightning hits, a venomous creature strikes, a heart begins to fail miles from medical care, . . . .  The dangers are manifest and fossil hunters recognize them, even if they often fail to take any precautions.  We can be rather cavalier about the risks.  In an earlier post, I quoted geologist and paleontologist William Buckland’s response when someone urged him to be careful scaling a wall in a quarry, “Never mind, . . . the stones know me.”

There is another, more moving, intersection of fossil hunting and danger that means a great deal to me.  I am drawn to stories of human beings who, although in dire circumstances where their own deaths are a real possibility, find respite from those dangers by hunting for fossils.  Fossil hunting can be restorative, an experience that offers relief, if only briefly, from other worries and fears.  There is, I believe, a fossil hunting “high” unassociated with actually finding something.  It can be recognized only after the fact when, suddenly, the hunter “comes to,” realizing that hours have passed, hours that are hard to reconstruct but ones which psychologically took the person away.  I guess this may be true of any all-consuming activity.

To my small clutch of such stories, all of which heretofore have been about men at war, I add the poignant one of British naval Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s final Antarctic expedition, 1910 – 1912.

One hundred years ago this very day (January 21, 1912), Scott and the four men of his Polar team were engaged in a desperate effort to return from the South Pole.  For the last, long (150 mile) leg to the Pole and now for the 800 mile trek back to safety, Scott, Captain Lawrence E.G. Oates, Lieutenant Henry R. Bowers, Petty Officer Edgar Evans, and zoologist Edward Adrian Wilson engaged in what they called “man hauling.”  That is, they pulled the sledges themselves, with the haulers often on skis.

These men had been part of a larger party that had set out for the Pole from the Cape Evans Hut, base camp, on November 1, 1911.  Ponies and dogs did much of the hauling at first; motorized sledges started with them but were soon abandoned, a dismal failure.  In time, the ponies were shot and fed to the dogs and the men.  On January 4, 1912, the final support team headed back and Scott and his four chosen men began the long “haul” to the Pole.  The usual description of this part of the expedition is totally inaccurate, it was anything but a “dash” to the Pole.

On January 17th, in a joyless mood, the Scott party reached the Pole and then turned for home, now burdened with the knowledge that Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his men had beaten them there by some five weeks.  In the picture below, the Scott party poses at the South Pole.  From left are Oates, Bowers (seated and holding the string that tripped the camera shutter), Scott, Wilson (seated), and Evans.

Wednesday morning, January 17. – Camp 69.  T. [temperature - in degrees Fahrenheit] -22º at start.  Night -21º.  The Pole.  Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected.  We have had a horrible day – add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature -22º, and companions labouring on with cold feet and hands.

We started at 7.30, none of us having slept much after the shock of our discovery. . . . We have been descending again, I think, but there looks to be a rise ahead; otherwise there is very little that is different from the awful monotony of past days.  Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of  priority. . . . Now for the run home and a desperate struggle.  I wonder if we can do it.
                       ~ Scott’s Last Expedition in Two Volumes, Volume 1, Journals, 1913.

As cited by Peter King, editor of Scott’s Last Journey (1999), Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (1979) observes that Scott’s journal entry was massaged before publication and the last lines in the portion quoted above actually read:  “Now for the run home and a desperate struggle to get the news through first.  I wonder if we can do it.”  Whether or not this indicates that Scott failed to recognize how dire his situation really was (as Huntford claims), I can understand how the man would have been focused at that moment on salvaging some measure of glory for the endeavor.

Soon, though, all in Scott’s party clearly knew that they were in serious trouble.  The demands of the trek to and from the Pole were breaking down the men.  The days and nights were much colder than expected and blizzard followed blizzard.  Frostbite ravaged hands, feet, faces.  Food was in short supply as was the fuel needed to heat the food and, more importantly, to melt snow for water.  Reaching the supply caches left on the inward journey became essential to survival.  The deterioration was not just physical but, for some of the men, increasingly psychological.

Scott took a long time to admit in his journal just how bad things were.

Wednesday, January 24. – Lunch  Temp. -8º .  Things beginning to look a little serious.  A strong wind at the start has developed into a full blizzard at lunch, and we have had to get into our sleeping-bags. . . . We are only 7 miles from our depôt, but I made sure we should be there to-night.  This is the second full gale since we left the Pole.  I don’t like the look of it.  Is the weather breaking up?  If so, God help us, with the tremendous summit journey and scant food.  Wilson and Bowers are my standby.  I don’t like the easy way in which Oates and Evans get frostbitten.

. . .
Tuesday, January 30. – R. 13.  9860.  Lunch Temp. -25º, Supper Temp. – 24.5º.  Thank the Lord, another fine march – 19 miles.  We have passed the last cairn before the depôt, the track is clear ahead, the weather fair, the wind helpful, the gradient down – with any luck we should pick up our depôt in the middle of the morning march.  This is the bright side; the reverse of the medal is serious.  Wilson has strained a tendon in his leg; it has given pain all day and is swollen tonight.  Of course, he is full of pluck over it, but I don’t like the idea of such an accident here.  To add to the trouble Evans has dislodged two finger-nails to-night; his hands are really bad, and to my surprise he shows signs of losing heart over it. . . . 

Then, five days later, Scott and Evans were injured falling into crevasses.  For Evans this truly marked the beginning of the end, possibly from having suffered some brain injury in his falls.  Scott’s journal entry for February 4th notes that Evans “is becoming rather dull and incapable.”  Evans’ condition continued to deteriorate.

So it is that readers of the journals are surprised to learn that, on Thursday, February 8th, after a “beastly morning” in the face of a strong, cold wind, Scott steered the party toward the moraine near Mt. Buckley which offered some shelter from the wind.  Here, he recognized, was an opportunity to do some geologising.

Thursday, February 8. – . . . The moraine was obviously so interesting that when we had advanced some miles and got out of the wind, I decided to camp and spend the rest of the day geologising.  It has been extremely interesting.  We found ourselves under perpendicular cliffs of Beacon sandstone, weathering rapidly and carrying veritable coal seams.  From the last Wilson, with his sharp eyes, has picked several plant impressions, the last a piece of coal with beautifully traced leaves in layers, also some excellently preserved impressions of thick stems, showing cellular structure.  In one place we saw the cast of small waves on the sand.  To-night Bill has got a specimen of limestone with archeo-cyathus [a Cambrian sponge] – the trouble is one cannot imagine where the stone comes from; it is evidently rare, as few specimens occur in the moraine.  There is a good deal of pure white quartz.  Altogether we have had a most interesting afternoon, and the relief of being out the wind and in warmer temperature is inexpressible.  I hope and trust we shall all buck up again now that the conditions are more favourable.

Geologising!  A day cut short to scramble over the moraine and collect fossils!

Beyond surprise, writers have expressed a variety of opinions about the wisdom of this “diversion.”  Huntford, according to King, cites this as “grotesque mismanagement” particularly given that the 30 pounds of fossils were added to sledges to be man-hauled by the ragged party.  (Other sources claim they added a even heavier amount to their load.)

In her account of Scott’s final expedition, historian Diana Preston seems to acknowledge some of the positive aspects of geologising at this juncture.  She writes,

No doubt the break from manhauling and the relief of being in a sheltered spot out of the harsh summit winds had their effect on hungry and weary men.  More important to their morale, however, was the fact that they were doing what they had come for – scientific research.  They could regain some pride after the ignominy of their arrival at the Pole, reminding themselves of the differences between their carefully planned programme of scientific work and Amundsen’s opportunistic Viking raid.  (A First Rate Tragedy:  Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole, 1999, p. 191)

She appears to end up hedging on the issue:

Whether Scott’s geologizing was a magnificent example of dedication or a foolish diversion depends upon your point of view.  (p. 191)

In this, she pits science versus survival.  The fossil of an extinct fern, Glossopteris indica, found during the geologising excursion, helped show that Antarctica once had a semi-tropical climate and was part of the super continent Gondwana.  The Natural History Museum, London, which has just opened an exhibition on Scott’s last expedition, includes in its web-based material an interesting video on the scientific importance of the Glossopteris fossil.  Still, despite their scientific value, the addition of the fossils to what the men already had to pull surely had negative some consequences.

It is helpful to be reminded that Scott’s mission was a scientific one.  His complete crew included a “scientific staff” with three geologists, a biologist, a physicist, a couple of zoologists, and a meteorologist.  (True, only one of the scientific staff was part of the team that made it to the Pole.)  The Natural History Museum, London, has some 40,000 scientific specimens collected by the full Scott expedition.  More than 400 of these specimens had previously been unknown.  Writer Eric Niiler in What Scott Learned (The Washington Post, January 3, 2012) describes some of the scientific importance of the Scott expedition.  The title of the online version of this article captures its essence, He Lost the Race to South Pole But Made Discoveries for Science.  Indeed, throughout the expedition Scott and his men did science.  They studied the Antarctic fauna (and the parasites that lived within the animals!), gathered detailed meteorological data, tracked the movement of glaciers.  Scott promoted science.  Several nights a week at the Cape Evans base camp during the dark months of 1911,  men delivered lectures on their areas of expertise.  In his journal entry for May 8 – 9, at the base camp, after describing some of the mechanical and scientific issues the men were grappling with, Scott observed,

Science – the rock foundation of all effort!!

To the question at hand.  Did the delay to geologise and the added weight ultimately make the difference in the outcome?  I don’t know.  There were many decisions that Scott made that have been second guessed, this is just one of them.  Regardless of the purported mistakes, had the weather been only marginally better, the expedition may well have avoided its tragic outcome.  As for the search for fossils, I assume that Scott saw the virtue in turning his team to something other than the struggle homeward.  With no evidence other than my gut, I would offer up as a possibility that he believed it might offer the men something perhaps more vital than a break from the cold and wind, or, for that matter, something more important than a reminder of the scientific aims of the expedition.  Hunting through the debris of the moraine for fossils might well have granted the struggling party an afternoon’s psychological respite from their cruel circumstances.  Scott could have seen the real value in that, particularly given his worries about the men’s mental stamina at this stage.  To me, the geologising was an inspired and worthy gamble.

Nevertheless, the tragedy played out.  Only days later Evans suffered a total mental and physical collapse, dying in the tent on February 18th.  Soon after, Oates’ physical condition deteriorated markedly, his frost bitten feet slowing the team’s retreat from the Pole.  Food ran short, and the caches of supplies that Scott relied on contained much less fuel than needed (the fuel containers had allowed much of it to evaporate).

By the middle of March, Oates was done in and as the team waited out a blizzard, he turned to his companions and said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”  Scott then noted in his journal, “He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.”

By Monday, March 19th, Scott, Evans, and Bowers had made it to within 11 miles of a critical cache of food and fuel only to be hit by a massive blizzard which forced them into their tent.  On March 29th, the storm still raged and the men, despite their intention for days to make the effort to reach the depot 11 miles away or die trying, could not leave the tent.  There they died.

Scott’s final entry, made on the 29th, ends with

. . . We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.
It seems a pity, but I do not think I write more.
R. Scott
For God’s sake look after our people.

Notes

1) A few small editorial changes have been made to this essay following its posting.

2) Scott’s journal as published in Scott’s Last Expedition is a fascinating, often moving account of heroic action, through and through a tragedy.  A great read.  Though, as noted above, we are reading a somewhat edited version of his journal.

There are many full, etext versions of Scott’s published journal of the last expedition available on the web.  They are of varying quality, sometimes marred by images of the hands of the folks doing the scanning or by blurred pages obviously moved during the scanning.  Of those available on Google Books, the one at this link is okay.  I read the PDF version on a Kindle (4th generation) with the screen rotated.  I clipped the pictures in the posting from the PDF version available at this link.  A nice, searchable PDF is available from the Internet Archive at this link.

3) In the addendum to Scott’s last entry, the "our people" he refers to are the families of the men who perished on the expedition.