I am not going to do this story any justice.

Friday started the return of the Science Friday lectures, so Daryl and I headed back with the idea we'd get to see a lecture on Penguins - yay! The title was From Pensacola to Penguins, for heaven's sake.
Dr. Wade H. Jeffrey of the University of West Florida will present "From Pensacola to Penguins: 30 Years of Antarctic Research", a summary of experiences and research accumulated during twelve trips to Antarctica. During these trips, he has lived in tents, worked at research stations, and sailed on research vessels/ice breakers. Most of the more recent work has focused on the effects of ozone depletion and increased ultraviolet radiation and how marine microbes are affected. These organisms are the foundation of food webs - and changes in their activity and community composition have the potential to impact the health of ecosystems and growth of larger organisms."

Still, it was pretty interesting. He spent so much time talking about the initial expeditions to the South Pole that he ran out of time for discussing the results of his UV testing project - LOL! But the expedition stories were really cool. First of all - every time he said Scott I would have flashbacks to that Monty Python skit.

Trying to condense the story so that I can give the cool quote - British explorer Scott made an attempt with Shackleton but they failed, partly cuz Shackleton got scurvy. Shackleton tried his own attempt to redeem himself, got very close but realized while he had enough supplies to *get* to the pole, he didn't have enough to get back, so smartly decided to turn back - however he made good notes and mapped out the path there. Scott and Norwegian explorer Amundsen set out on individual attempts to reach the pole. Amundsen was smart, explored the North Pole a lot, lived with the inuits, got the proper equipment, ate his dogs when they no longer needed the dogsled, etc. and made it there first - woot! Scott was bullheadedly British (we don't need the proper equipment, I'm doing it my way, I'm not listening to other's way) and also collected lots of samples for scientific analysis. When his team got to the pole they found Norway's flag - and headed home. And died. Before they made it home. Because he had the wrong equipment, the wrong food, the wrong methods, and a bunch of rock samples weighing them down. Scott became a hero, though Amundsen was the successful one. Meanwhile, Shackleton got no credit so he decided he'd WALK across the continent. He had two boats - one for him and one on the other side to lay out supplies in advance so all he had to do was walk. His boat got trapped in the ice for a year and sank and other bad stuff. Shackleton escaped somehow and rescued the rest of the crew only to discover that their other boat had also crashed and needed rescuing - which Shackleton did. Okay - all that so that I could give this quote - "Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton." [Attributed to Raymond Priestly but appears in essence elsewhere including in Cherry-Garrard's Worst Journey in the World (see previous)]. Isn't that an awesome quote??

I could write more about the stuff the lecturer did, but this is already a crazy long post.

Did I mention I'm writing this while standing on boxes in a trench?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Amundsen