Australian conncetions

Sir Douglas Mawson led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1911 to 1913. He also led another research team from 1929 to 1931
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Sir Douglas Mawson first arrived to the Antarctic the icy shores in 1907. He was with British explorer Sir Ernest Shackletons’s expedition to find the South Pole in 1909.
Sir Mawson returned to Australia in 1911 to raise money to start Australia’s first expedition. The 1911 expedition was first and most serious scientific expedition undertaken during the heroic eras (which were the first 25 years in the 20th century described by Antarctic historians as the heroic era of Antarctica exploration.

The group conducted magnetic, biological, geological and astronomical studies and a huge amount of the scientific material over the two year expedition. The work was published in 1947 with 22 volumes of scientific reports. Sir Douglas Mawson built a timber base camp at Cape Denison in 1912, it is still being used today.

In 1956, Syd Kirby was 21, just out of the university and joined a 15 month expedition to Antarctica. At that time 85% of Antarctica was not explored. The field trips would take sixteen hours a day, four to five hours to set up and take down the camp. One trip in the day light of Antarctic summer Kirby and his companions went for a thirty hour day.

They are four permanent Antarctic bases for modern explorers, in planes instead of dog sleds. An Australian team has just returned from a major international field operation using light planes and using seismic sensors to map a mountain chain buried under 4km of ice in the heart of Antarctica. Information about the behavior of the ice sheets millions of years ago will help predict how they will respond to climate change and the likely rise of sea levels world wide.

The scientists hope, by studying the million year old ice, to give us the best clues to climate change. Part of the project was to set up a weather station on the summit of Dome Argur, 4093 meters above sea level, the coldest place on Earth. We are lucky to have Australian explorers who want to go to Antarctica to work out how they can change our environment for the better.