In 1988 the pop group Mecano launched the Spanish market the album "Descanso dominical" which included the song "Heroes of Antarctica", his personal tribute to one of the great explorers of History, Robert f. Scott (1868-1912).
Scott led the Expedition, Terra Nova, known officially as the British Antarctic Expedition, the third of the explorations of the British Empire to the Antarctic in the TWENTIETH century .
The lyrics of the song tells of the tragic end of Scott, Wilson, Evans, Bowers and Oates, the intrepid british explorers who lost their polar race –along with their lives– in favour of the Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen .
A continent covered by forest
At the International Congress of Geography, 1895, he described Antarctica as "the great piece of geographical exploration by be assumed to be", and whose study might add, significantly, to the knowledge of almost all branches of science.
By that time, both geographers and scientists were unable to say whether that white spot that appeared in the lower area of the maps it was really a continent , or simply a collection of ice islands.
The time would prove that it is not always the Antarctica had been a hell of a desolated and white, there was a time in the history of our planet that was part of a mega-continent called Gondwana .
If we could travel in time we would see with astonishment that the white continent was a paradise of life and natural wealth, where the dinosaurs campaban to their hearts content.
The missing pieceThe winter of 1912 was particularly hard, there were extremely low temperatures, lower than forty degrees Celsius . This was, without a doubt, one of the factors that prevented Scott arrive at the supply depot. The five explorers died only seventeen miles of them.
Next to the bodies was found a diary, weather, notes, accounts, rolls of films, and sixteen pounds of fossils. It is possible that those dying explorers would have had a better chance of surviving if they had fallen off of the fossil , but it surely felt that they were too valuable to get rid of them. They were not wrong.
In 1924 those responsible for the Museum Scott desempolvaron the archaeological remains that have led to the expedition antarctic, and found the support more than evident to the hypothesis of continental drift.
Among the jewelry geological had fossils of Glossopteris, a shrub now extinct that was the end of the Paleozoic to the continent, Gondwana, meant that in a remote past there had been forests. In addition, the finding agreed with other samples found in Australia, Africa and India.
Without intending it Scott had just pave the way to knowledge of plate tectonics , was the missing piece to complete the geological jigsaw puzzle of our planet.
To finish, and returning to the song of Mecano, it committed two inaccuracies geopolitical. On the one hand, it is said, "God save the queen", where, at the time of the expedition to the british throne was seated George V; on the other there is an explicit reference to the "point of latitude zero", which would mean that Scott reached the Equator,... in place of the South Pole.
Pedro Gargantilla is a internist in the Hospital of El Escorial (Madrid), and author of several popular books
Date Of Update: 16 September 2019, 10:00
