The Race to the South Pole

In 1910, two expeditions set out for Antarctica with the same goal: to be the first to reach the South Pole. One was led by Robert Falcon Scott, a British navy officer who had explored Antarctica before. The other was led by Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian who had already sailed the icy Northwest Passage. Amundsen had planned to go to the North Pole. When other explorers claimed to have reached it first, he secretly turned his ship south. He sent Scott a telegram about the change only after he had set sail.

The two leaders prepared in very different ways. Amundsen built his whole plan around dogs and skis. Years before, he had learned from the Netsilik Inuit how to drive dog teams and stay warm in loose fur clothing. He chose men who were skilled skiers and dog drivers. Scott brought motor sledges, ponies and dogs, and his men planned to pull their own sledges for the last part of the route. The motor sledges broke down early, and the ponies floundered in the deep, soft snow, sinking and stumbling with every step. Scott's expedition also had a second goal, science, so his teams collected rocks and weather records along the way.

Amundsen and four companions set out in late October 1911 with sledges pulled by dogs. They reached the South Pole on December 14 and left a small tent there flying the Norwegian flag. By late January, all five were back at their base, tired but healthy.

Scott's group of five reached the Pole on January 17, 1912, after weeks of pulling heavy sledges across the frozen plateau. There they found Amundsen's tent; the Norwegians had arrived about five weeks earlier. On the long trip back, cold, hunger and exhaustion wore the men down. None of the five survived. The last three were stopped by a blizzard only about 11 miles from a large store of food and fuel. In November, a search party found their tent. Their sledge still held about 35 pounds of rock samples, which the men had kept hauling for hundreds of miles.

For more than a century, people have argued about why the two journeys ended so differently. Some point to Amundsen's dogs, his skilled skiers and his single-minded focus on the Pole. Others point to bad luck. A scientist who studied old weather records found that March 1912 was much colder than usual on that part of the ice. Today, the American research station at the South Pole is named for both men: the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.