I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the Antarctic—with its vast fossil hunt and itswholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps.

—H.P. Lovecraft

Thus begins the epic horror story At the Mountains of Madness, a twisted tale of an Antarctic fossil-hunting expedition that went horribly wrong, culminating in the death or madness of most of the expeditioners. At the time this was being written, in 1930, Sir Douglas Mawson was on his last Antarctic expedition, the British-Australian-New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE 1929-31), cruising and mapping much of the unseen coastline of this vast, largely unknown continent. In those days it would not have seemed so mysterious for a continent the size of Antarctica to hold many scientific secrets, perhaps even the vestigial traces of lost civilizations or the fossil remains of higher life forms not found anywhere else on the planet, as Lovecraft's doomed explorers eventually discovered. The reality was simple in 1931: an incredibly small portion of the Antarctic landmass had been explored at all, and virtually nothing was known of its geology or its paleontology.

Most people, quite rightly, think of Antarctica as a land of hostility, an almost alien and unfriendly landscape. Mawson dubbed it the “ home of the blizzard” in his epic book of the same name. Vaughan Williams' musical score for the 1948 classic film Scott of the Antarctic (which became his Sinfonia Antarctica in 1953) used haunting, lilting

tones to paint a musical portrait of a cruel, inhuman Antarctica; his refrains are somewhat similar to how one imagines the mythological sirens' songs that were said to lure sailors to their deaths.

Yet Antarctica is actually a land of such unpredictability and natural fury that humans are almost as out of place there as on the moon. On the moon a person requires total protection from the vacuum and cold of space, plus warmth and air to live, and must take all the necessary food and liquid for survival. Similarly, in the coldest parts of Antarctica, say in a midwinter blizzard on the polar plateau, a thousand kilometers^★ away from the subzero seas, blasting cold winds can freeze human flesh solid in less than a few seconds. The fragile human body must be completely protected by many layers of special clothing, covering all exposed parts of the body. All food must be taken along, and much energy is required to melt ice and snow for drinking water. Like the astronauts on the moon, all human waste is generally taken away as part of a program for protecting a pristine natural environment. Without either a spacesuit on the moon, or heavy clothing and shelter in a midwinter Antarctic blizzard, the human body would rapidly succumb to the extreme conditions.

The discovery of Antarctica by humans dates back just over the last 200 years or so, although Antarctica's geological history goes back at least 3900 million years, based on the radiometric dates of the formation of the mineral zircon in granulitic rocks from Enderby Land. At that time, in the early part of the Archaean Eon, the Earth 's crust was still very hot and the first rocks had just cooled enough to form a thin crust. The oldest rocks known from Antarctica are dated at around 3100 million years. At around 2450 million years ago, these older rocks, now forming the original crust of Antarctica, were strongly folded and broken apart by violent intrusions of molten magma. We have no accurate picture of what the Earth looked like at this time, so have no concept of crustal plates with definable boundaries, such as we would call “continents.”

Antarctica became a recognizable continental region at least 500 million years ago. At around this time the western and eastern parts of Antarctica are thought to have collided, forming the main landmass we know as Gondwana, the giant southern supercontinent. The name “Gondwanaland” (meaning “land of the Gonds”, a native tribe from India) was coined by E. Suess, an Austrian geologist who intuitively recognized geological similarities between the southern continents and peninsular India. Suess suggested that these landmasses were joined by land bridges that had since sunk beneath the seas, Atlantis-style. Today we know this is not true as our knowledge of the Earth's processes tells us that the continents, which are merely slabs of the Earth's crust up to 150 kilometers thick, have been slowly moving, possibly pushed by convection currents within the Earth's mantle (the solid rock layer below the crust). Australia, for example, is currently moving at about six centimeters per year northwards, steaming along ready to collide and become part of Asia in about 50 million years' time. No immigration policies needed then.

Gradually, over the last 500 million years, since the very dawn of Antarctica's formation, large chunks of continental crust have rifted away from its margins to become the continents we recognize today. North America, although there is still controversy about its being a part of Gondwana, was probably the first to rift away (about 490 million years ago), followed soon after by parts of Europe, the Middle East and Arabia, then South America, Africa, and India.

Then, about 130 million years ago, there was only Antarctica, Australia, and New Zealand left, forming the now much reduced Gondwana. Australia began its rifting away from Antarctica about 110 million years ago but the two landmasses did not break their crustal umbilicus until about 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The formation of these two continents as separate entities approximates very closely the time when the dinosaurs were in their death throes. However, because of long trailing pieces of Australia's crust, like the Lord Howe Rise, the complete rift away from Antarctica was not properly established until the late Eocene or early Oligocene epochs, perhaps as recent as 30 million years ago. Antarctica and Australia are therefore the youngest of all continents. At around 30

to 40 million years ago the circumpolar current developed, initiating the great cooling of the southern continent. The ice caps that now cover more than 95 percent of Antarctica's landmass started forming about 20 million years ago in the midst of the continent. The last forests on the mainland there slowly vanished until none were left around six million years ago.

In 1931 the concept of “plate tectonics” was indeed a controversial and much misunderstood theory that few scientists took seriously. The German geographer Alfred Wegener had published his book on the subject in the 1920s but he never gained acceptance in the scientific circles of his day. In Lovecraft's novel At the Mountains of Madness, the summary presented is indeed a futuristic, yet uncannily correct, view of the situation as we understand it today. On finding the maps and charts of the “Ancient Ones,” the civilization that is discovered existing in the remote part of the continent, the expedition's scientist (also the narrator) notes how Antarctica was depicted as being the center of a once gigantic supercontinent:

As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all continents are fragments of an original Antarctic land mass which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface—an hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up—receives striking support from this uncanny source.

Antarctica is also the most recent of the continents to be discovered, explored, and inhabited by us humans. Over 2000 years ago the Greek philosopher Aristotle hinted at the early existence of an unseen southern continent because he saw a need to balance out the mass of the large northern hemisphere continents. As the northern landmasses were under the star Arktos, so Aristotle postulated that a great southern land must exist, which he dubbed Antarktos. Ptolemy (150 AD), the Egyptian geographer, went further by agreeing that this southern land, which he referred to as terra australis incognita, must exist, and furthermore that it would be fertile and populated. He claimed that it was cut off from the rest of the world by a region of fire and some others went on to say that fearful monsters inhabited it. Such ideas naturally

discouraged further exploration to the Antarctic region for many centuries to come.

The mythological background to Antarctica as a potentially prosperous and populated land was first properly dispelled by Captain James Cook, who was the first to sail into the Antarctic Circle, below 66° south latitude, on 17 January 1773. His exact words on this momentous occasion are rather droll and uninspiring: “I continued to stand to the south, and on the seventeenth, between eleven and twelve o 'clock, we crossed the Antarctic Circle in the longitude of 66 degrees 36 minutes 30 seconds south.”

Cook eventually crossed the Antarctic Circle three times in circumnavigating the polar seas. Although he could not confirm that there was no continent within these icy seas, he expressed the notion that land must have been nearby.

No human being had even laid eyes on Antarctica until 1819, when the first person to do so was probably a Russian admiral, Fabian von Bellinghausen, on the Russian Antarctic expedition. Others claim it could have been the American Nathaniel Palmer, who was there at the same time and actually met up with Bellinghausen. Yet it was the lure of biologically rich seas, the temptation of unlimited numbers of whales, seals, and penguins that tempted bold mariners to risk death by venturing into its icy realm. Despite the sighting of Antarctica in 1819, it was to be another eight decades or so later before anyone was able to successfully set foot on the continent.

Norwegian businessman Henryk Bull, a resident of Melbourne, had the idea that Australia should be the first country to set up a whaling industry in the Antarctic seas. He persuaded a retired old whaler, Svend Foyn, to finance an expedition down south in search of whales. They set sail in September 1894 from Melbourne with a small crew in the refurbished whaling ship Antarctic. Amongst their party was surveyor and amateur naturalist Carsten Borchgrevink, who later went on to become one of the first men to spend a winter in Antarctica in 1899. On the expedition of the Antarctic they became the first people to set foot on the Antarctic mainland. They landed at Cape Adare on 24 January 1895. Bull writes in his book, Cruise of the Antarctic (1896):

January 24th, 1895. Cape Adare was made at midnight. The weather is now favorable for a landing, and at 1am, a party including captain, second mate, Mr. Borchgrevink, and the writer, set off, landing on a pebbly beach of easy access, after an hour's rowing through loose ice, negotiated without difficulty.

From that point on, the story of Antarctica is much better known through its era of heroic exploration. The names of Scott, Shackleton, Mawson, and Amundsen, the big four, as they are commonly referred to, are as well known as their legendary exploits.

Robert Falcon Scott, naval officer, led the first official British attempt to get to the South Pole on the 1901-04 Discovery expedition. Ernest Shackleton, an Irishman, pulled a sledge alongside Scott and naturalist Edward Wilson on this trip, which resulted in them arriving at 82° south, although Shackleton suffered from scurvy and later had to be invalided out. With a burning desire to prove himself, Shackleton went on to lead his own assault on the pole on the 1907-09 British Antarctic expedition, and his team reached furthest south at 88°23′ south on 9 January 1909.This same expedition claimed the honor of being the first to reach the South Magnetic Pole. It included a young English geologist who had been living in South Australia, Douglas Mawson, and a well-known geologist who worked at the University of Sydney, Professor Edgeworth David. These two intrepid explorer-scientists were also part of a team that climbed the active volcano Mt. Erebus for the first time.

Scott's most famous and ill-fated trip, the 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition, is well documented by many good books, films, and even a British television mini-series. The heroic efforts of Scott's team's long march to the pole and their tragic deaths on the way back made the world headlines of the day, practically overshadowing the success of Norwegian Raold Amundsen's team in being the first men to reach the South Pole. Amundsen and his men had made clever use of many dogs to race to the pole and get there with almost clinical precision on 14 December 1911. By using some of the dogs as food for the other dogs, the work of the sledge hauling was greatly minimized for his men. Scott, on the other hand, had brought ponies and cars to lug supplies out to his depots. The cars, looking more like snow tractors, eventually

packed up from overheating and other unforeseen mechanical problems and the ponies, although holding out well despite the severe conditions, could not get up past the Beardmore Glacier. While it cannot be fairly said that Scott didn't plan his march well, or try very hard, they were dogged with many problems along the way and had gotten off to a dangerously late start. Eventually, it was to be the unpredictability of the cruel Antarctic weather, particularly the fierce storms, that would prevent them from reaching One Ton Depot, only 19 kilometers away. The three remaining men, Scott, Wilson, and Bowers, perished in their tent and were not found until the following season.

Douglas Mawson led the Australasian Antarctic expedition from 1911 to 1914, with the principal aim of mapping and carrying out scientific work in Antarctica. Through his efforts on this expedition and the 1929-31 British-Australian-New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE), he is today credited with having made Australia's claim to almost 42 percent of the Antarctic continent, some six million square kilometers of land! The story of Mawson's lone trek back to the Commonwealth Bay hut after the accidental deaths of his two companions, Ninnis and Mertz, has to rate as one of the most incredible tales of human endeavor, pure courage and raw strength. I make no hesitation in stating right here that Mawson is my favorite of all the heroic explorers, mainly because he was a scientist who made these gallant efforts for the advancement of science; yet his bravery in getting his work done surely must rate up there with that of any of the other early polar explorers.

Today Antarctica still holds much mystery and inspires much awe due to its extreme and unpredictable climate and the fact that it is a vast continent, most of which has never been explored on the ground by humans. While it is true that the greater part of it comprises the boundless polar plateau of ice and snow, even the Transantarctic Mountains belt has only been explored in select regions, mostly those areas easily reached from the bases that fringe the continent. To understand the nature of how difficult it is to get to remote parts of Antarctica, one need only look at the map shown in this book and the scale of the continent.

Whereas a limited number of bases with helicopters can give ac-

cess to destinations within a few hundred kilometers of each base, anywhere else on the continent can only be reached by a major plane flight. Today the US Antarctic program (USAP) uses a fleet of C-130 Hercules aircraft, specially modified for work in Antarctic conditions for this purpose. Through this scheme of logistics both American and New Zealand expeditions have gained rare access to the most remote inland parts of the continent to explore and sample its long-guarded scientific secrets.

Such expeditions are dubbed “deep field” because they are out of helicopter reach (more than a 200-kilometer radius from the base) and must rely on being put in and pulled out by Hercules aircraft. Thus, the expeditioners are reliant solely on their radio contacts with the base to plot positions and for an aircraft to be available to pick them up at the end of the expedition. Sometimes this is not so simple as by the end of the season planes are often out of action due to mechanical problems, or weather can turn sour at very short notice, and so field parties that have completed their work may have to wait patiently for several weeks just to be picked up.

I had always wanted to go to Antarctica and search for fossils ever since hearing the tales of early fossil-hunting expeditions recounted to me by my good friends Dr. Alex Ritchie (now at the Australian Museum) and Dr. Gavin Young (at the Australian National University). Both are specialists who study the fishes of the Devonian period (355-408 million years ago), an age when the evolution of fishes was probably the most exciting thing happening around the world— when fishes first evolved into land animals, conquering amazing hardships to leave the water and invade the land.

Alex and Gavin had been on an expedition to the Skelton Névé region in 1970-71 with a group from the Victoria University of Wellington (hence named VUWAE expedition 15) and had been the first scientists to systematically collect fossils from the rocky outcrops exposed in the region. There are now some 30 different species of fossil fishes described from the Devonian age rocks exposed in southern Victoria Land. This research has enabled strong correlations to be made between the fossil fish fauna of Antarctica and those of similar age in Australia, South Africa, and other Gondwana countries.

Unfortunately for me, the Australian bases were not close to any of the fossil sites I was interested in visiting. During the course of my doctoral work I, too, had become hooked on studying the fishes of the Devonian period, so I desperately wanted to continue the search for new fossil sites in Antarctica. The previous sites visited by Alex Ritchie and Gavin Young, some 20 years earlier, had produced many splendid fish fossils, yet only in the late 1980s had New Zealand field parties discovered that these same fossil-bearing rocks (called the “Aztec Siltstone” after a pyramidal mountain that somewhat resembled an Aztec temple) actually extended at least 200 kilometers further south than previously thought. These new exposures in the Cook Mountains were unexplored, so the potential for major new discoveries was very high indeed.

Margaret Bradshaw, a veteran of Antarctic geology, first made this discovery in the 1988-89 field season. I was stuck back at Scott Base at the time anxiously hoping to join the last leg of her trip to collect fossils while she and her colleagues were out making their discoveries in the southern part of the Cook Mountains. Unfortunately, I didn't get to these fossil sites on that first trip so a much larger expedition had to be planned, which would take in all the possible mountain ranges where the newly discovered exposures of the Aztec Siltstone should occur. This meant going into a part of the Transantarctic Mountains into which no humans had previously ventured. We would have to sledge up glaciers for the first time, climb mountains for the first time and, hopefully, discover many new fossil sites. So what got the whole thing kick-started in the first place?

In 1985 I attended an Australasian paleontological meeting in Christchurch, the Hornibrook Symposium—named in honor of a famous New Zealand paleontologist. I visited the Canterbury Museum and examined the superb fish fossils that Margaret Bradshaw, then Curator of Geology at the Canterbury Museum, had collected on her various trips to Antarctica. Margaret came across as a headstrong, physically fit woman, clearly one of the new breed of fearless female Antarctic explorer-scientists. She always wore a somewhat cheeky grin, had a frizzled-out hairstyle and maintained that kind of cheery enthusiasm for her work that would make most nine-to-fivers sick. Raised in

Nottingham, England, she moved to Christchurch, where she carved a niche for herself in New Zealand as the expert in Devonian invertebrate paleontology and eventually moved on to looking at similar fossil assemblages occurring in Antarctica. By 1985 she had been to Antarctica several times, mostly on deep field expeditions. Her husband, John Bradshaw, a lecturer at Canterbury University, is also a veteran of many trips studying geology down in Antarctica.

Women were excluded from working or participating in any Antarctic expedition right up until almost the mid-twentieth century. The old notion of Antarctica being “no place for a woman” went without saying in those days. It wasn't until 20 February 1935 that Caroline Mikkelsen, a Norwegian, became the first woman to step foot on the frozen continent. In 1946 two American pilots, Harry Darlington and Finne Ronne, took their wives to Stonington Island on a spur of the moment decision, but not without some dissent from the other men who signed a petition trying to stop it happening. In the end both wives accompanied their husbands on the southern cruise of The Port of Beaumont, thereby becoming the first women to winter over in Antarctica. Jennie Darlington wrote a book on her experiences entitled My Antarctic Honeymoon, published in 1956.

However, it wasn't until 1957, in the International Geophysical Year, that Russia became the first country to take a woman down to Antarctica to work there. This was the first time a woman went to Antarctica who actually wasn't married to an expeditioner! Australia brought its first woman to Antarctica shortly afterwards, in 1959, but the Americans didn 't follow suit until ten years later. Today, I'm pleased to say, there is a large proportion of women active in scientific research programs or working around the bases in Antarctica, although the gender balance is still nowhere near equitable.

Margaret Bradshaw's particular field of expertise was the study of fossil shells of the Devonian period (particularly bivalves or clams), but she had also turned her attention to investigating the trace fossils (the fossilized remains of animals burrows, footprints or feeding trails) and sedimentary geology of the older Devonian sequences in Antarctica to reconstruct its ancient environments.

So it was on that day in December 1985, while we were working in the Canterbury Museum, that she told me that she was going back

down to Antarctica, and asked me casually: “Why don't you come along as the fish fossil expert on our field party?” I jumped at this opportunity and we put the proposal to the various funding bodies, both through the New Zealand Antarctic Research Program (NZARP) in New Zealand and the National Geographic Society of America. Both proposals were approved soon after, so Margaret had the field party and logistics organized, and I had the funding from the National Geographic Society to participate from Australia.

The burning question that everyone asks me about Antarctic fossils is: where do you find them? Do you dig holes in the snow for them? Some have even asked me if the animals were frozen in ice, like the famous cases of the woolly mammoths of Siberia, trapped snap-frozen by a sudden snowstorm. The true answer is that fossils occur in layers of sedimentary rocks, and these are exposed in the mountainous regions of Antarctica simply because these are the only areas not covered by a thick layer of ice.

It is interesting to follow the history of the early fossil discoveries in Antarctica, as all of the main expeditions were set up primarily for scientific purposes. Roald Amundsen, who just wanted to be the first person to reach the South Pole, was perhaps the exception. Nevertheless, his men still made various observations on the geology, climate, and magnetism along the journey and when they finally reached the pole made some useful scientific measurements. Edward Wilson, scientist on both of Scott's expeditions, said before the second attempt on reaching the South Pole: ‘We want the Scientific work to make the bagging of the Pole merely an item in the results.'

However, when seen from the perspective of paleontology, the collections made by some of the early explorers were at that time of immense scientific importance. It was, after all, only half a century since the publication of Charles Darwin's controversial On the Origin of Species, which outlined his theory of evolution by natural selection, and at a time when drifting continents and the great southern supercontinent of Gondwana were fanciful concepts.

In terms of the birth of the great scientific ideas that these specimens were to inspire, the rocks and fossils that those heroic men collected are some small justification for the hardships they endured and, in some cases, for the ultimate sacrifices of their lives that they made.