Beaufort Island And Mount Erebus. Discovered 28 Jan 1841, John Edward Davies, 1841 - Captain James Clark

Scott’s ship the “Terra Nova” moving through the pack ice. Notice the funnel. The ship had a steam engine, of course.

You can't even go on an expedition to find a passage through dangerous ice fields and die alongside 100+ men for your hubris anymore. Because climate change 🙄

Arctic Gothic as inspired by Fortitude

It’s always snowing. It will never not be snowing. It snows and snows and snows, yet the drifts never gets any taller. 

The sun won’t rise for three months. It won’t ever rise again. Your life now exists in darkness.

You’re not allowed to die there because you’ll never decay. But people are already decaying. 

Respect the polar bears. They were here first. What do we do about the polar bear within us all?

The Northern Lights brighten the night sky in the dark winter, but they will never brighten your soul.

Everything is frozen, just like I am frozen by my thoughts.

The Permafrost never forgets. It won’t let you forget either. Soon it will make you remember. 

The cold bites at those exposed to it for too long. Bite back. Always bite back.

Everything is covered in white. Why is no one wearing sunglasses?

rest in peace thomas armitage. died tragically and miserably under mysterious lead-based circumstances in the arctic tundra circa 1848 on a failed expedition only to have your decaying frozen bones get mislabeled, shoddily reburied, have your boyfriends wallet and diary taken away from you to be archived, meanwhile you get gnawed on by various creatures for another hundred years, just to be rediscovered again later and laid out on a piece of plywood from the Home Depot, and then get shoved in a bag which was placed in an acid free box and then shipped to ottawa in the early 1970s just to have some unpaid intern along the line lose your bones. and no one even gives a fuck.

In temperatures that drop below -20 degrees Fahrenheit, along a route occasionally blocked by wind-driven ice dunes, a hundred miles from any other people, a team led by two of our scientists are surveying an unexplored stretch of Antarctic ice. 

They’ve packed extreme cold-weather gear and scientific instruments onto sleds pulled by two tank-like snow machines called PistenBullys, and after a stop at the South Pole Station (seen in this image), they began a two- to three-week traverse.

The 470-mile expedition in one of the most barren landscapes on Earth will ultimately provide the best assessment of the accuracy of data collected from space by the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), set to launch in 2018.

This traverse provides an extremely challenging way to assess the accuracy of the data. ICESat-2’s datasets are going to tell us incredible things about how Earth’s ice is changing, and what that means for things like sea level rise.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

HMS Erebus in the Antarctic, detail of a painting by John Willson Carmichael, 1847 - edit by Canada History

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