Rare Look Inside Antarctic Explorers’ Huts | National Geographic

we’re at Cape Evans on Ross Island in
the Antarctic this is a Hut from which
Captain Falcon Scott took off to the
South Pole on his expedition from which
he didn’t return I work with a
conservation architect and conservation
builder and artifact conservator and a
project manager and together we’ve been
conserving this building that was
abandoned in about 1914 at the end of
the heroic age of Antarctic exploration
if you take a long view of this Hut
you’ll see that it’s built on the lowest
part of a beach and so for about a month
or two every year there’s free water
which runs down the slope and so that
was gathering behind and underneath the
hut and a ton of ice was formed
underneath the floor in the walls that
vapor was condensing and freezing and
expanding and starting to blow the walls
apart and in the hut itself the aspects
were becoming sodden by this moisture
come here what we’ve done is stabilizer
Hut’s and that’s been the goal of the
conservation plans to stabilize them so
we can say with confidence
barring any kind of catastrophic event
and that these Hut’s will be here in
good structural shape for the next 35
years something like that
at least I think the thing that’s really
special about these huts is that this is
the only continent on earth where the
first structures of human occupation are
still in evidence
and I bet alone make some extraordinary
special it seems to me I think also they
have they continue to have lessons for
people about the aspirations of that
people will have you know about the
lengths that they will go to not just
the discovery of the South Pole but the
science program that ran in conjunction
with that discovery in that respect
their Hut’s can can be an example to
people of that sort of commitment to
going where things are not known