Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
55
Scott's western party, also numbering twelve, left the base on October 12. With the
wisdom of the previous season, sledge groups had been scaled back. For this journey, the
men were divided into two teams of six, each pulling a pair of eleven-foot sledges in train.
Making excellent time, the party passed the depot at Cathedral Rocks on October 16. The
following day they were on the moraine down from Knobhead, having taken six days to
reach the same spot that Armitage's party had struggled to in twenty-seven days the sea-
son before. Over the next two days, however, the runners on three of the four sledges split
or lost their coverings of German silver. Faced with such a disastrous breakdown, Scott
placed most of the supplies and the one good sled in a depot and beat a rapid retreat back
to Discovery.
The three sledges that the party brought back were beyond repair, but salvaged parts
from two of them were rebuilt into a seven-foot sledge, and another eleven-foot sledge
not being used was pressed into service. On October 26 the western party set out again,
much more lightly provisioned. This time they were nine men, three bound for the pla-
teau (Scott, Lashly, and Evans), three in support (Skelton, Feather, and Handsley), and
a geological party of three, including Ferrar, Kennar, and Weller. The six bound for the
summit pulled the larger sledge, the geological party the smaller one.
Everyone was in top shape from all the pulling on the aborted journey, and the loads
were considerably lighter, so by the end of the second day, the party was already camped
next to Descent Glacier. The runners on the sledges began to fail again, requiring make-
shift repairs as they proceeded. When the men reached the depot of their previous tra-
verse on November 1, Scott realized with horror that the instrument box had been blown
open by the wind, and the “Hints to Travellers” manual for calculating longitude and
latitude from celestial bearings had been lost. This topic was critical for the plateau party
once it reached the featureless plain of the summit, beyond any landmarks that could be
used for navigation. Scott, however, decided to risk pushing on, in hopes that on the re-
turn the men would be able to retrace footprints, and that taking readings of the sun's
noon attitude would give them a latitude along which to make their return.
The headreaches of this outlet glacier open into a broad basin rising through a series
of steplike icefalls. Katabatic winds regularly pour down from the plateau over these up-
per slopes and through narrow side valleys, clearing much of the snow from the icy sur-
faces of the glacier. (Katabatic winds result when air descending from the stratosphere
over the interior of Antarctica is cooled by the ice cap, becomes more dense, and pours
down the incline of the ice. These gravity-driven winds funnel into the heads of outlet
glaciers throughout the Transantarctic Mountains, creating a draft that is constant unless
disturbed by encroaching storms.) Because of the lack of snow at the edge of the plateau,
it became a problem for Scott's party to find surfaces on which they could secure their
tents.
This condition was especially influential on November 4, when under increasingly
forceful winds, the men pushed up over the undulation of one of the last icefalls hoping
to find flat ground at the top. The surface did flatten, but no snow could be found over
the ice. After about an hour of desperate searching, with everyone suVering frostbite on
the face, a patch of white presented itself on the blue. It then took another frantic hour
under gale-force winds to securely erect the three tents. At the time the men were happy
