UT Researcher Gets Rare Access In Antarctica

Tea, cocoa, and dog biscuits, eerily frozen for 100 years. Geologist Peter Flaig found them recently in the most precarious of places: Ross Island, Antarctica.

A postdoctoral fellow in the Jackson School of Geosciences, Flaig walked through this former supply stop for British explorers who came to a tragic end.

Hoping to be the first to set foot on the South Pole, British naval commander Robert Falcon Scott was locked in a race with a team of Norwegian explorers when the hut was used as a depot in 1911.

His team pressed from there to the South Pole, but the Norwegians beat them by five weeks. Then, on the 800-mile trek back, the British team froze, just 11 miles from the hut.

Mummified pig carcasses and frozen food boxes still sit in wait for the return that never came.

Photo courtesy Peter Flaig.