History of Southern Ocean and Antarctic Exploration

The term Antarctic was originally applied by Marinus of Tyre in the early second century CE to describe a southern region of the planet that was opposite the Arctic Circle. Ptolemy incorporated this view in the second century CE when he published his atlas Geographia. Ptolemy posited the existence of Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown southern land; he expanded on the conjecture of Aristotle that to balance the land in the Northern Hemisphere, there must be a landmass in the south. Although faulty in logic, this idea was the driving motive behind much of the early exploration of the Southern Ocean in search of a hidden land, and it eventually proved true with the discovery of Antarctica.

Modern exploration of the Southern Ocean began in the 1500s with several expeditions around the southern tip of South America. Routes around Cape Horn and through the Strait of Magellan (54°S) were mapped and tracked during Magellan’s 1522 circumnavigation of the globe and through the Drake Passage (59°S), accidentally discovered by Sir Francis Drake in 1578 after a storm blew him far south of the intended Strait of Magellan. This inadvertent discovery provided the first evidence that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were connected and supported the existence of a continual circumpolar Southern Ocean.

The first recorded sighting of Antarctica is credited to the Spaniard Gabriel de Castilla, who reported seeing distant southern snow-capped mountains in 1603. The first person known to have approached land below the Antarctic Convergence was the English merchant Anthony de la Roche in 1675; he also was blown off course in a gale and docked in a bay by the Antarctic island of South Georgia (54°S). The island was marked by cartographers for a century as Roche Island until James Cook landed there in 1775 and renamed it South Georgia in honor of King George III.

During several voyages in the 1770s, James Cook proved that the Southern Ocean was not impeded by any connecting landmass. He thus identified a continuously flowing circumpolar current known today as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and he provided the first boundary latitudes for the current location of the Southern Ocean. However, Cook, continually impeded by the permanent sea ice, never sighted the Antarctic continent itself. Exploration of the Southern Ocean and the search for the Antarctic continent continued into the early 1800s. Then, in 1820, three men (Fabian Bellingshausen, Edward Bransfield, and Nathaniel Palmer) and their teams separately sighted different sides of Antarctica and finally proved the continent’s existence. It nonetheless took thirty more years, until 1853, for the first documented person, the American whaler Mercator Cooper, to set foot on the Antarctic mainland near the Ross Sea.

Scientific exploration of the Southern Ocean began in 1839 with the James Ross expedition, which utilized two warships—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The Ross Sea is named after Ross, and two Antarctic volcanoes—Erebus and Terror—are named for his vessels. The expedition brought along scientists, including the young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, who was responsible for collecting zoological and geological samples. Hooker was a friend of Charles Darwin, who had just completed his voyage on the HMS Beagle in 1836. The Ross expedition took biological samples and described hundreds of new species. It also made advances in the understanding of magnetism (finding the position of the South Magnetic Pole), zoology, and botany. Its four-volume Flora Antarctica, describing more than 3,000 species of the Southern Ocean islands, remains an important scientific reference to this day.

It was again more than thirty years before another major oceanographic cruise visited the Southern Ocean. From 1872 to 1876, the famous HMS Challenger expedition circumnavigated the globe and founded modern-day oceanography. The Challenger traveled 127,000 kilometers and visited every continental region, including the Antarctic Circle, but did not sight Antarctica directly. The Challenger also became the first vessel to cross the Antarctic Circle using steam power, a technology that made subsequent voyages much more reliable and safe in the gale-prone Southern Ocean.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” began, lasting until approximately 1921. This era commenced with an expedition by the Belgian Geographical Society in 1897, although it was not formally called the Heroic Age until the 1950s. Seventeen Antarctic expeditions—primarily European but also one from Japan and one from Australia/New Zealand—took place during this period. Their goals were taking scientific measurements and samples, establishing research and observation stations, mapping the ocean and the continent, and being the first to reach the geographic South Pole (90°S).

Three figures are best known from this era: Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton from the UK, and Roald Amundsen from Norway. Over a series of challenging and dangerous expeditions, these three men competed to be the first to reach the South Pole. First, Scott led the Discovery Expedition from 1901 to 1904, with Shackleton as part of his team. The team ascended the Western Mountains in Victoria Land and discovered the high polar plateau. The expedition set a new record for traveling the farthest south, at 82°17'S. Shackleton led his own expedition, Nimrod, from 1907 to 1909 using limited motorized transport, a modified early automobile. He split the team into two groups, with the southern team trying to reach the geographic South Pole and the northern team trying to reach and take records at the South Magnetic Pole, which wanders but at the time was on land at 72°15'S.

The northern team succeeded, but the southern team fell just short of its goal, reaching the farthest point south at 88°23'S, a record that would stand until Roald Amundsen’s secret expedition (1910-12) on the Fram. Amundsen and his party of five became the first team to reach 90°S on December 14, 1911. The Terra Nova expedition (1910-13) followed shortly after, led by Robert Scott. It set out to reach the South Pole without knowledge of Amundsen’s expedition. He arrived at the South Pole thirty-three days after Amundsen, after suffering through extreme cold and bad storms, only to be shocked by finding evidence of the Norwegian party. Captain Scott recounts in his journal:

Great God! This is an awful place. . . . We have just arrived at this tent, 2 miles from our camp, therefore about l 1/2 miles from the Pole. In the tent we find a record of five Norwegians having been here. . . . We carried the Union Jack about 3/4 of a mile north with us and left it on a piece of stick as near as we could fix it. . . . Well, we have turned our back now on the goal of our ambition and must face our 800 miles of solid dragging—and good-bye to most of the day-dreams!

The tragedy was to continue, however. All five members of the team, including Captain Scott, struggled against a ferocious and continuous blizzard and died of cold and starvation only 11 miles from their supply depot. A final journal entry by Captain Scott was dated March 29, 1912. Their bodies and Scott’s journal were recovered by a search party the following November. The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration ended with Ernest Shackleton’s final voyage on the Quest from 1921 to 1922 to map the Antarctic coastline. Shackleton died of a heart attack on board, and the expedition was cut short.

Interest in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean waned in the following decades due to two world wars and a global depression. Additionally, scientific interests in the region were largely displaced by military expeditions, including five led by Richard Byrd Jr., a rear admiral in the US Navy. On each expedition, his operation set up a base on the ice named Little America (I-V). His largest and most famous expedition, from 1946 to 1947, was codenamed Operation Highjump. This operation set up Little America IV and involved 4,700 men, 13 ships, and 33 aircraft and is still to this day the largest Antarctic expedition ever.

The reasons given for the expedition were vague, but the heavy military presence suggested it was related to a potential territorial claim, as well as training exercises for potential cold-weather conflict. In 1959, the Antarctic Treaty was signed, refocusing international efforts toward scientific pursuits and exploration. Since the late 1960s, cruise ships began to take tourists to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean to experience the environment for themselves. Many of the vessels used for tourism were at one point icebreakers or other work vessels. Today, the main use of the Southern Ocean is fishing, and most visitors to Antarctica are scientific researchers and eco-tourists.

A Secret Nazi Base in the Southern Ocean? A persistent myth that haunts the internet is the existence of a secret Nazi base in Antarctica called New Swabia. Ever since Germany became a unified country in 1871, German scientists have participated in the exploration of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. When the Nazi Party took power in Germany in 1933, it commissioned an exploration of the northern coast of Antarctica by a ship called New Swabia. Between 1938 and 1939, the members of the expedition sought to find a suitable location for a German whaling station to supply the country with fat. Although secondary aims, such as the potential setup of a weather station, had some military applicability, Germany never officially annexed the area.

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the rumor emerged that the Nazis took refuge in a large underground system of caves supplied by warm underground rivers to establish a base for future operations of Nazi weaponry in New Swabia. The US Operation Highjump supposedly set out to defeat the last Nazi stronghold in 1946. Although this operation did indeed take place, it was meant to familiarize US personnel with extreme low temperatures in the event of a potential showdown with the Soviet Union. Rainer F. Buschmann.