Google users go on Antarctica adventure virtually following in explorer footsteps

ARMCHAIR ANTARCTICA enthusiasts can now enjoy 360 degree views of the ice-bound peninsula and landmarks left by its explorers without risking frostbite or penguin nips.

New imagery released by Google using “innerspace technology” allows viewers to “walk around inside the buildings, which have been preserved for a century in the icy drifts”, it says.

Google first released similar images two years ago, but the new postings on its “World Wonders” site include shots of Antarctica’s Half Moon island and the South Pole Scott-Amundsen research station’s telescope.

With a click of a mouse, viewers can also tiptoe into, around and outside Capt Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Cape Evans on Ross island, and Irish man Sir Ernest Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds, also on Ross island.

Shackleton built his hut in 1908, during his “Nimrod expedition” – the first of three Antarctic adventures. His aim was to reach the South Pole, but he had to retreat just 97.5 miles south of his target – prompting the famous log entry by him that “we have shot our bolt – and the tale is 88 degrees 23 minutes South”.

Shackleton had landed on the Cape Royds promontory on Ross island in early February of 1908, and located the hut site an “ice-free floor of a small protected valley”, according to biographer Roland Huntford.

It was here that the first serious medical operation on record in the Antarctic took place, for one of Shackleton’s group, Aeneas Mackintosh, lost an eye and it had to be removed by a colleague.

Shackleton didn’t return to the hut after the Nimrod South Pole attempt, but left instructions, including a note which said that there were sufficient provisions to keep 15 men alive for one year.

Books, woollen and cotton clothing and cans of food are among some 5,000 items in the hut, maintained by a New Zealand charity.

Scott could have used the hut during his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition, as it was relatively free of sea ice, but there was an agreement between the two men that neither would use each other’s facilities.

Scott’s 101-year-old Ross island hut has about 8,000 items, including ketchup bottles and frozen sugar cubes. Irish men on Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole included Kerryman Tom Crean, who also served later with Shackleton. Cork men Robert Forde of Cobh, Mortimer and Tim McCarthy of Kinsale and Patrick Keohane of Courtmacsherry, were also recruited by the adventurers.

Keohane, who was one of the rescue team which found the bodies of Scott and some of the Terra Nova team members, is due to be honoured in his native parish with a statue in his memory.