#douglas mawson

[viaparhelion]

Does anyone have book recs to learn more about the australasian antarctic expedition?? I recently read a paper that went a little into mawson mertz & ninnis’ whole ordeal and I simply Must Know More

[laissezferre]

historians accusing shackleton of not caring for science – he had four geologists on nimrod! FOUR in a shore party of SIXTEEN! i mean sure one was hired as a physicist (??), one was a fresh grad (!!), one was a nepobaby brought in for the ££, and one was a 50yr old babygirl also brought in for the ££. but there were four of them!!

[hms-melodrama]

Finished reading Alone on the Ice by David Roberts. The section about various expedition members surviving the AAE only to enlist and then die in WWI was heartbreaking.

Learning about the harrowing time these men had in the antarctic and how they were subsequently cut down on the front lines, injured in the trenches, or died from the effects of mustard gas was deeply moving and a stark reminder of the horror and scope of a war occurring in a new age for that generation.

[bluebacchus]

Maybe you sickos will appreciate my mid corporate TikTok skills on here

[sanktsalieri]

not sure where to ask this so here i go: does anyone have "information" about the books 'mertz & i', as well as 'alone on the ice' by david roberts and how i could read them? pls dm me if you do, thank you!!

[fragrantblossoms]

Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914) / Item 1638: Macquarie Island. Its geography and geology. Looking north from Caroline Cove. Plate XV, 1 / Douglas Mawson

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

[oughtnots]

do you like polar exploration? do you like eerie interactive fiction? then you should play to keep the meat, a short (15-30 min) twine game based on the end of mawson’s 1911 antarctic expedition! you play as xavier mertz, mawson’s companion, and you have just watched the third member of your expedition fall into a glacier. now you must attempt to make it back to winter quarters alive.

content warnings: human and dog death, starvation, illness, discussion of cannibalism

[myfavoritedemons]

Polar History Films Streaming Free

Are you a fan of Cold Boys? Do you have a valid library card? You should check to see if your library grants you access to Kanopy! If so, you can stream all of these films for free!

1919 - South: Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition

1930 - With Byrd at the South Pole

1934 - The Wedding of Palo (By Knud Rasmussen)

1949 - Scott of the Antarctic

1998 - The Loneliest Mountain

2008 - Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica

2014 - Chasing Shackleton (miniseries)

[pietroalberto]

Douglas Mawson

[makapansgat]

Polar Pebbles

[theexpertsmag-blog]

#HappyBirthday Sir Douglas Mawson (1882-1958) born on 5th May. He was an #Australian scientist and explorer of the #Antarctic. His intellectual boldness and skill were matched by a practical initiative and courage which confirms his place among the world's greatest explorers. He was an alumnus of the #UniversityofSydney and also a former lecturer of #UniversityofAdelaide. He was awarded Founder's Gold Medal by the #RoyalGeographicalSociety and the #AmericanGeographicalSociety awarded him the David Livingstone Centenary Medal. He also received Bigsby Medal from the #GeologicalSocietyofLondon and Clarke Medal from #TheRoyalSociety of #NSW. #Mawson was also made a Fellow of #TheRoyalSociety in 1923.

[lindahall]

Douglas Mawson – Scientist of the Day

Douglas Mawson, Australian explorer of Antarctica, was born May 5, 1882.

read more...

[lyssahumana]

First Lines: Douglas Mawson - Home of the Blizzard

The chief object of this Australasian Antarctica Expedition was to investigate, as far as possible, the stretch of prospective but practically unknown Antarctica coast extending almost two thousand miles in an east and west direction, between the farthest west of the Terra Nova and the farthest east of the Gauss -  a new sphere west of the region visited by Scott and Shackleton.

[myfavoritedemons]

A snapshot of Mawson's Antarctica expedition – in pictures

[goldenpolar]

For Australia day: the completion of the huts by Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition and life in the interior.

[thinking-thought]

Alone on the ice!

This book is a testament to the human spirit! The spirit to go on an adventure, to be curious, to explore, and to survive. It is the story of Douglas Mawson’s expedition to Antarctica, which is probably one of the greatest survival stories there is. It is hard to read this book and not wonder how exploration must have been in the early 1900′s. Some of the men on those expeditions saw snow for the first time in their lives on Antarctica. Think about it for a second, to go away for at least a year to an unknown land with absolutely no contact with the rest of the world. I don’t think I would have had it in me if I had the opportunity.

Of the many expeditions to yet unexplored Antarctica during that period, this one by Douglas Mawson and team stands out for many reasons. His biographer and author of this book, David Roberts had this to say about Mawson’s expedition.

 “...Mawson was completely uninterested in reaching the South Pole. What mattered to the man instead was the urge to explore land that had never before been seen by human eyes, and to bring back from the southern continent the best science that men in the field might be capable.”

That sums up the story of the expedition. To explore new land and to collect as much scientific data as possible.  They got to name every land feature they encountered. The entire expedition, right from the setting of the winter quarters in Cape Denison(the windiest place on Earth, they didn’t know it at that time), to returning to Australia two years later was filled with dramatic adventure that could not have been bettered by the best of script writers.

An image from Cape Denison.

The winter quarters that they build on arrival. I believe this hut exists to this day and is a museum now.

Their meal plan when wintering over before starting the expedition in the beginning of summer.

The general plan of the expedition was this. Head to Antarctica in the beginning of winter. Winter over in a hut and take scientific measurements every day. At the end of winter, explore the land in three man teams in different directions, and then return to the hut by the end of summer and back to Australia before winter sets in.

I would love to share the story in its entirety here, but it would do no justice to the adventure. Mawson, and his team comprising Ninnis and Mertz had the longest journey of all the teams, so they had huskies help them pull their sledges, which sometimes they also killed for meat when their time was up. All of the men carried diaries, and they all give a wonderful account of the journey. The men fell into crevasses multiple times and survived until one fateful one in which they lost Ninnis along with most of their food supplies. Mawson lost Mertz as well to fever. Mawson’s will to somehow get all of their diaries to someplace closer to the hut so search teams can find and learn about their adventure dragged him across the glacier until he fell into a crevasse too. He somehow mustered energy to pull himself out, when the mouth of the crevasse gave way and he fell again. At the verge of giving up and letting go of the rope he was hanging on to, he remembered a verse from his favorite poet, Robert Service.

“Just have one more try - it’s dead easy to die. It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.”

Those two lines pushed him to want to survive. What happened after that is just the most amazing thing I have read. If you are thinking it gave him some energy and he had a fairy tale happy ending, you couldn’t be more wrong. He let his will to survive overcome all the horrible luck that the last part of the expedition threw at him, and I have immense respect for it. You have got to read what happened, or at the very least, take a look at the video I link at the end of this post.

I for one think that this story of survival is everything that it means to be human. We are at an age where Mars is our next Antarctica. Our generation could live to see the first humans up there, and what a moment that will be. There are going to be so many hardships for those first few explorers just like the early explorers to a place unknown faced, but we will survive, and generations to come will read about it.

We are a curious species, we want to know the unknown, and when the going has gotten tough we have in our ears heard the same thing that Mawson heard when he almost let go of that rope in the crevasse more than a hundred years ago.

“Just have one more try - it’s dead easy to die. It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.”

--

P.S: This is a brief video of the story of Sir Douglas Mawson, told by the author of Alone on the Ice, David Roberts.