In 1992, prompted by his robotic “brain”, Dante I moved with eight replicated legs on the floor of Erebus crater. Erebus, personification of darkness, one of the primordial deities in Greek mythology, nicknamed since the 19th century the second highest volcano in Antarctica, after Mount Sedley, and the southernmost on planet Earth. After being transported to an altitude of 3790 meters, the summit of Mount Erebus, the exploration robot began to descend towards the magma lake. Built at Carnegie Mellow University in the US, Dante has taken a robotics mission and another volcanology mission to the still-active Erebus crater. Dante sought to demonstrate the advantages of robotic exploration in extreme environments, the capabilities of locomotion in these contexts and self-sustainability. At the same time, she collected gas samples inside the crater and measured the radioactivity of the materials there.
Eighty-four years ago, in a world that envisioned robots as futuristic wonders, human eyes gazed into the crater of Erebus. The opening moment took place on March 9, 1908, in the South Antarctic summer, when the average temperature was about -20 degrees Celsius. Two days earlier, a group of men had set out to conquer the summit of the volcano. The white back of the southern giant was discovered, during an eruption in 1841, by the British polar explorer and naval officer, James Clark Ross, who saw it on board the ship HMS Erebus. Volcano will be patronized in honor of the ship’s name. In contrast, the map of Ross Island, located on the continental border of Antarctica, gained its most powerful outline, Erebus, along with Mount Terror.
What became known as the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, a period defined by the end of the 19th century into the 1920s, saw a wave of geographical, scientific, marine and land exploration into the planet’s southernmost reaches. Among them, the one that promised, between 1907 and 1909, to take the British flag to the south pole of the planet. It didn’t, but it set a new record for the southern edge of Earth. On January 9, 1909, the flag flew at coordinates 88º 23″ south, 180 kilometers from the South Pole. The moment captured in a photograph reveals three men (doctor Eric Marshall, naval officer Jameson Adams, and sailor Frank Wilde, All of them British) thin and rough, in the image of glory, pain and suffering. On the other side of the lens was the promoter of the expedition, the one who in 1906 in England had begun to drum up support for the company aiming to conquer the South Pole. The Anglo-Irish was not Ernest New to the lonely landscapes of the South, Henry Shackleton, born in 1874. However, it was the first time he had launched himself towards the pole.The Nimrod Expedition (or British Antarctic Expedition), referring to the ship that set out for Antarctica , born of a desire for conquest combined with the disaster that befell Shackleton in the early years of the 20th century.Robert Falcon Scott, young Shackleton finds himself condition to abandon the expedition to Antarctica (1901-1904) aboard the RRS Discovery. By the age of twenty-nine, the officer suffered from physical exhaustion, a condition Scott later mentioned in Voyage of Discovery (1905).
In 1906, Ernest Shackleton was working in public relations for Anglo-Scottish shipping magnate William Beardmore. At the same time the man, offended by Scott’s words, was looking for sponsors for the expedition he had planned to the frozen wastes of the south, a pledge which Shackleton valued at 30,000 pounds, with a view to reaching the geographical south. pole and the south magnetic pole. The explorer fostered hope of future profits, through the sale of a book and postage stamps resulting from the expedition, as well as proceeds from lectures. Without support from the English Royal Geographical Society, the expedition relied on private loans and individual contributions, such as Beardmore, Edward Guinness (patriarch of the Anglo-Irish brewery family), British army officer Philip Brocklehurst, and later on the governments of Australia and New Zealand.
Previously, Shackleton had to find a ship that would transport men and equipment to the borders of Antarctica, as well as hire a crew. The answer came about shipping from Norway. “old man” Nimrod, a 41-meter whaling ship, built in Scotland in 1867, was damaged over time, but at a price suitable for Shackleton’s pockets and had to serve a voyage of tens of thousands of kilometers. restored in england, Nimrod Welcome a diverse crew. Among those already mentioned, the presence between 1911 and 1914 of the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson, the future promoter of the Australasia Antarctic Expedition, should be highlighted.
In the summer of 1907, it was Nimrod She left the English coast towards Australia, then to New Zealand to enter the Antarctic Ocean. In February 1908, Nimrod’s party encountered the southern winter in a cabin erected for that purpose, on Ross Island in McMurdo Sound. Finally, on October 29, 1908, Shackleton, Marshall, Adams and Wilde, supported by horse-drawn sleds and dogs, began the march south. An agonizing march of about 2,767 km drags men and animals to the Antarctic border. On January 4, 1909, having lost all his ponies, with dwindling supplies, and far from the South Pole, Shackleton accepted his luck: he would not reach the southernmost tip of the planet. On January 9, after more than 70 days of hiking, in the middle of the polar plateau, the team planted the Union Jack flag. The quadriplegic suffered from intestinal infections and malnutrition. On February 28, 1909, Shackleton and Wilde watched Nimrod Anchored off Cape Royds on Ross Island. On the 3rd of March, it will be the turn of the remaining expeditionary party to be rescued south, at the resupply post. The ship indicated its journey to the north. In the course of the expedition, Shackleton’s team achieved another milestone, reaching the south magnetic pole on January 17, 1909.
On 14 June 1909, Shackleton was greeted by a crowd at Charing Cross station, in the presence of Leonard Darwin, President of the Royal Geographical Society, and Captain Scott (the Internet allows us to listen to Shackleton’s speech with nearly four minutes in Ernest_Shackleton-MySouthPolarExpedition.ogg). Two years later, on December 15, 1911, the Norwegian navigator Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole. Shackleton created a new boundary, Trans-Antarctica, a project that failed during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917. On January 5, 1922, Ernest Henry Shackleton died of a heart attack. He died on the ship Searchoff the Atlantic islands of South Georgia during the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition. The goal: to circumnavigate Antarctica.
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