TIM STOTT

5. SCIENCE ON EXPEDITIONS

A wheel mark in the desert lasts for decades. A footprint in the Arctic takes years to fade. Yet the expeditions which make these marks may further our knowledge of the world in which we live, helping us to conserve it… ...the benefits of expedition science should outweigh the problems of disturbance. Tipping the balance in the right direction depends on awareness and care during the expedition, and publication of the results. (Macklin, 1991, pp. 40–41) In the UK, there are now more organisations providing educational expeditions for young people as school vacation or gap year experiences than ever before. Both anecdotal evidence and now a growing body of systematic research evidence, suggest that expedition experiences can develop knowledge, skills, and understanding that can enhance a person’s well-being and future employability. In this chapter, we discuss expeditions that involve the measurement and collection of field data and information from the expedition area - in other words the sort of work that is now often described as “traditional” fieldwork. Expedition members often undertake other activities such as investigations of social interaction or behavior change (Forrester and Stott, 2009), artwork, making videos, investigations of members’ responses to arduous conditions and creative writing. Whilst these may all be useful and worthy additions to an expedition programme, they fall outside the scope of this chapter. Instead, the scientific fieldwork being examined here is the sort that provides a unique opportunity to learn about biological and geographical processes on the ground, where they are happening. This type of fieldwork has seen a sharp decline over the last decade (Smith, 2009).

HISTORY OF SCIENCE ON EXPEDITIONS This section aims to show, by means of several examples taken over the past five centuries, how many important research discoveries, findings and even theories have been generated from conducting expedition-based scientific research. Ferdinand Magellan (1480 – 1521) was a Portuguese maritime explorer who was the first to lead an expedition across the Pacific Ocean and made the first successful attempt to circumnavigate the Earth. Captain James Cook (1728 – 1779), an English explorer, navigator and cartographer, achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand in the 1770s. Charles Robert Darwin (1809 – 1882) was an English naturalist, whose five-year voyage on

S. K. Beames (ed.), Understanding Educational Expeditions, 45–53. © 2010 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. STOTT the Beagle allowed him to make geological and natural history collections, and to eventually conceive his theory of natural selection in 1838. Fridtjof Nansen (1861 – 1930), a Norwegian explorer, scientist and diplomat led the first crossing of Greenland by ski in 1888, and achieved great success with his Arctic expedition aboard the Fram, which in 1893 was deliberately allowed to drift north. But, after a year in the sea ice it became apparent that Fram would not reach the North Pole, so Nansen and Johansen started north on foot from 84° 4´ N on March 14, 1895 and three weeks later reached 86° 14´ N, the highest latitude then attained. During this first crossing of the Arctic Ocean, the expedition became the first to discover the existence of a deep polar basin and the first to note and describe dead water, a strange phenomenon which can occur when a layer of fresh or brackish water rests on top of denser salt water, without the two layers mixing. Robert Falcon Scott (1868 – 1912), a British Royal Naval officer and explorer led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery Expedition (1901–04) and the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition (1910–13). Scott’s scientific crew included meteorologists, hydrologists, zoologists, glaciologists, biologists and geologists, all under control of Dr E. A. Wilson, the Chief Scientist. In the austral winter of 1911, Wilson led “The Winter Journey”, a 60-mile journey in total darkness and temperatures down to –57 °C, with Bowers and Cherry-Garrard to the Emperor penguin breeding grounds at Cape Crozier to collect eggs for scientific study. Cherry-Garrard (1994 [1922]) later described this expedition in his memoir, The Worst Journey in the World. The following year Captain Scott led a party of five, manhauling their supplies, which famously reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find that they had been preceded by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian party in an unsought “race for the Pole”. On their return journey Scott and his four comrades all perished because of a combination of exhaustion, hunger and extreme cold. The bodies of Scott, Wilson, and Bowers were discovered the following spring in their tent some 12 miles from One Ton Depot. Amongst their belongings were 35 lbs of geological specimens which had been collected on the moraines of the Beardmore Glacier. Over 1900 rock specimens from the expedition are housed at The Natural History Museum today. Of these specimens, many have given geologists evidence for continental drift, for example. Solomon and Stearn’s (2001) The Coldest March, provides new information about the weather encountered by the polar party in February and March 1912, and makes the case that they were killed “not primarily by human error but by this unfortunate and unpredictable turn of meteorological events” (p. xvii). Perhaps because of the heroism and tragedy, but certainly because of the publicity and numerous books subsequently written (e.g. Roland Huntford and Ranulph Fiennes), Scott’s Antarctic expeditions, one may argue, placed expedition-based scientific research onto the agenda of future expeditions and brought it into the public eye. Indeed, the late Surgeon Commander G. Murray Levick was a member of Scott’s Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13, and in 1932 he founded BSES Expeditions (the British Schools Exploring Society), which is widely acknowledged as the first organisation to annually offer young people the opportunity to participate in expeditions to remote wilderness areas around the world. Today, BSES Expeditions is a well-established

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