BUENOS AIRES: A handful of scientists from different countries have been working for the past few decades to find, rebuild and maintain the historic monuments of Antarctica, turning up fishing settlements, expedition bases and research stations that are more than a hundred years old.
Their aim is to restore parts of human history in the Antarctic territory, reclaiming the vestiges from the ice that covers nearly everything on the continent.
In force since 1961, the Antarctic Treaty recommended at its first meeting to protect the historic sites from damage by the weather and by human activities. Shortly thereafter, a list of 73 locations was drawn up, all considered part of Antarctica’s heritage.
Every Southern Hemisphere summer, Ricardo Capdevila, head of the Argentine Antarctic Institute’s Museum and History Department, travels to Antarctica with a team of experts to locate and restore those sites and to maintain the already-designated historic monuments.
This year, which is the first centenary of the expedition led by Swedish geologist Otto Nordenskjold, Capdevila and his team restored the wooden cabin built by the scientists a hundred years ago on Snow Hill Island.
The structure had filled with ice, which contributed to keeping it erect after years of freezing temperatures and strong winds, said the scientist.
“First we cleared away the ice, and then we made a steel belt to hold it in its original shape. It was a very strong structure because while we were camped there, winds reached 270 km per hour, and the cabin withstood it perfectly,” Capdevila said.
Nordenskjold set sail form the Swedish port of Goteborg in October 1901 aboard the ship ‘Antarctic’. In February 1902, with five crewmen — including Argentine second lieutenant Jorge Sobral — he disembarked on Snow Hill Island, near the eastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. There, they set up base to spend the winter and remain until December, when the ‘Antarctic’ was to come for them.
But the ship never arrived. After becoming trapped in ice, it sank in February 1903 to the east of Paulet Island.
The expedition team was rescued in November by the Argentine corvette ‘Uruguay’, which a few days later recovered the shipwrecked crew of the ‘Antarctic’, who sought refuge in a stone house on Paulet Island, another monument being reconstructed.
Capdevila is currently working on salvaging the Moneta house, Argentina’s first permanent scientific station in Antarctica, established in 1903 in the South Orkney Islands. Originally, it was the expedition camp of Scottish explorer William Bruce, but was later handed over to Argentine Josi Moneta to set up a weather station.
Moneta later wrote “Four Years in the South Orkneys”. The restoration experts hope to inaugurate the site for visits by the public next year, the hundredth anniversary of an Argentine presence in an area where temperatures can hover at 30 degrees below zero Celsius.
Argentina is not the only country following the historic restoration mission. Australia, Britain, Chile, New Zealand, Spain and the United States have programmes aimed at keeping alive the human history of the 14-million-square-km continent covered by ice and snow.
Jorge Berguqo, assistant director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute, said that the remains have been found of a sea lion hunt dating to 1820.
Over-hunting caused the near extinction of the fur seal, which was highly prized at the time by the British and North Americans. The hunters left behind objects, stone walls and shipwrecks in Antarctica.
Later, whaling expeditions emerged, as evidenced by the remnants of a station on Deception, one of the South Shetland Islands, where seven countries are working to create a shared administrative and preservation zone.
On Livingston Island, also in the Shetland archipelago, a human femur and skull were found, and determined to belong to an indigenous woman of Argentine Patagonia.
“Historians believe the Indians were taken on the whaling ships to do the dirty work of killing,” says Berguqo.
Then came the heroic era of 20th century exploration. Their tales are true adventure stories. At least a dozen expeditions were landmark efforts, due to the knowledge of the territory they contributed or to the challenges that the explorers had to face.
On the coast of Antarctica’s Ross Sea, Australian experts are working on restoring the house of Robert Falcon Scott, the Briton who tried in 1901 and 1911 to reach the South Pole. He achieved his goal in January 1912, in his second attempt, but he never made it back. He died, frozen and without food, alongside some of his team members.
In the same area, there is a site that is related to Norway’s Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole, a month ahead of Scott.
Berguqo recounts the ups and downs of another adventurer, Ernst Shackleton in his book “The 22 Lives of Shackleton”.
During the 2000-2001 Southern Hemisphere summer, more than 13,000 visitors set out from the southern Argentine port of Ushuaia, ready and willing to sail more than a thousand kilometres to the Antarctic Peninsula.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.