Shackleton Antarctica Expedition: www.voicesdelaluna.com

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Introduction to Antarctica Adapted from: http://faculty.umf.maine.edu For more information, visit http://faculty.umf.maine.edu/gretchen.legler/public. Antarctica is the highest, driest, windiest, emptiest, coldest place on earth. An ice sheet covers all but 2.4 percent of Antarctica's 14 million square kilometers. At its thickest point the ice sheet is 4,776 meters deep and averages 2, 160 meters thick. This is 90 percent of all the world's ice and it is 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. There are lots of penguins, whales, seals, krill (the main food for whales), and even fish in Antarctica's waters, but there are no land mammals and, as far as scientists know, no native peoples. Eskimos and polar bears are found in the ARCTIC, not the Antarctic. Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, CVO, OBE, FRGS (15 February 1874 -- 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish polar explorer, one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. His first experience of the polar regions was as third officer on Captain Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery Expedition, 1901--04, from which he was sent home early on health grounds. Determined to make amends for this perceived personal failure, he returned to Antarctica in 1907 as leader of the Nimrod Expedition. In January 1909 he and three companions made a southern march which established a record Farthest South latitude and by far the closest convergence in exploration history up to that time. For this achievement, Shackleton was knighted by King Edward VII on his return home. After the race to the South Pole ended in 1912 with Roald Amundsen's conquest, Shackleton turned his attention to what he said was the one remaining great object of Antarctic journeying--the crossing of the continent from sea to sea, via the pole. To this end he made preparations for what became the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914--17. Disaster struck this expedition when its ship, Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and was slowly crushed before the shore parties could be landed. There followed a sequence of exploits, and an ultimate escape with no lives lost, that would eventually assure Shackleton's heroic status, although this was not immediately evident. In 1921 he went back to the Antarctic with the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition, intending to carry out a programme of scientific and survey activities. Before the expedition could begin this work Shackleton died of a heart attack while his ship, Quest, was moored in South Georgia. At his wife's request he was buried there.