No finer book about early Antarctic expeditions than Turney's '1912'

This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the greatest achievements in world exploration, the famous expeditions to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott.

Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, led the first expedition to the South Pole in December 1911, but it wasn’t announced to the world until March 7, 1912, when he finally made his was back to Tasmania.

Scott, a British explorer who was racing Amundsen to the pole, got there second on Jan. 17, 1912. On the way back to their camp on the Antarctic coast, Scott and his men succumbed to one of the harshest environments on earth, dying from the extreme cold, exhaustion and starvation.

In addition to the famous expeditions led by Amundsen and Scott, there were three lesser known expeditions to Antarctica in 1912 and no finer book has been written on the subject of these historic expeditions than “1912: The Year the World Discovered Antarctica” by Chris Turney.

Published in October by Counterpoint, this 320-page book discusses the historic expeditions made Amundsen and Scott and also describes the lesser-known expeditions to Antarctica by explorers from Japan, Germany and Australia. Wilhelm Filchner led the German expedition, and Douglas Mawson led the Australians. Nobu Shirase led the Japanese.

In 1912, Antarctica was a vast unexplored region of the world and little was known about its exact size and features. These early expeditions sought to explore this unknown spot on the globe and to collect scientific information about the continent. A lot of the information they gathered involved the weather, magnetism and animal life and was so important and valuable that scientists and researchers are still using it today.

Add to this that these early polar explorers and scientists were collecting this information in one of the harshest environments on the planet. Brutally cold temperatures, hurricane-strength winds, bottomless crevasses, poor equipment, inadequate food and other factors made their work especially dangerous and resulted in adventurous tales of amazing endurance and self-sacrifice. Many of them died.

Turney is uniquely qualified to tell this story. A gifted storyteller and writer, Turney is a geologist who lives in Sydney, Australia, where he works as a Professor of Climate Change at the University of New South Wales. He is a past recipient of the prestigious Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship, the Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal, the Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Geological Society of London’s Bigsby Medal. He has been described as “the new David Livingstone.” Turney has also made expeditions to Antarctica. In fact, as of this writing he’s currently working on that frozen continent.

In the end, I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of exploration, scientific expeditions and tales of true-life adventure. If you’d like to buy a copy of the book for yourself or as a gift for someone else, you’ll find copies of it for sale online through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. For more information about the author, visit his official Web site at www.christurney.com.