ANTARCTICA; A TALE OF TWO SUPERCONTINENTS?

Abstract

On March 29, 1912, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions, Dr. Edward A. Wilson and Lieutenant H. R. Bowers died in their tent during a blizzard on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica from cold, exhaustion, and lack of nourishment. They were a mere 18 km from a supply depot they had cached months earlier, before their journey to the South Pole. They died disappointed men, having learned on their arrival at the pole that Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian party had beaten them to the long-sought goal by one month. During their return journey, despite full awareness of the seriousness of their situation, Scott and his men had taken time to geologize in the Transantarctic Mountains (Scott 1913). They man-hauled 16 kg of rock samples collected there towards civilization until they succumbed. The specimens were retrieved by the party that found their frozen remains the next summer. The accurate geologic positioning of Antarctica as the keystone of a southern supercontinent by Alex Du Toit in his reconstruction of 1937, following the early concepts of Taylor (1910) and Wegener (1912), would not have been on firm ground without the collections made on Scott's expeditions, and on the expedition of Ernest H. Shackleton that pioneered the route through the Transantarctic Mountains to the Polar Plateau in 1908 (Shackleton 1909). Specimens of the Glossopteris flora firmly linked Antarctica to the other southern continents, though full acceptance of the hypothesis of a Gondwana supercontinent by the scientific community