Posted on Sep 19, 2018
In the bleak, almost pristine land at Antarctica’s bottom of the world, there are the frozen remains of human bodies – and each one tells a story of humanity’s relationship with this harsh, unforgiving continent.
Even with all our technology and knowledge of the dangers of Antarctica, reports Martha Henriques in BBC News, it can remain deadly for anyone who goes there. Inland, temperatures can plummet to nearly -90C (-130F). In some places, winds can reach 200mph (322km/h). And the weather is not the only risk.
Many bodies of scientists and explorers who perished in this harsh place are beyond reach of retrieval. Some are discovered decades or more than a century later. But many that were lost will never be found, buried so deep in ice sheets or crevasses that they will never emerge – or they are headed out towards the sea within creeping glaciers and calving ice.
Livingston Island, among the South Shetlands off the Antarctic Peninsula, continues BBC News, harbors a macabre mystery: a human skull and femur have been lying near the shore for 175 years. They are the oldest human remains ever found in Antarctica. Discovered on the beach in the 1980s, Chilean researchers found that they belonged to a woman who died when she was about 21 years old. She was an indigenous person from southern Chile, 1,000km (620 miles) distant.
Analysis of the bones suggested that she died between 1819 and 1825. The earlier end of that range would put her among the very first people to have been in Antarctica. But, how did she get there? The traditional canoes of the indigenous Chileans couldn’t have supported her on such a long voyage through what can be incredibly rough seas.
“There’s no evidence for an independent Amerindian presence in the South Shetlands,” says Michael Pearson, an Antarctic heritage consultant and independent researcher. “It’s not a journey you’d make in a bark canoe.”
The original interpretation by the Chilean researchers was that she was an indigenous guide to the sealers travelling from the northern hemisphere to the Antarctic islands that had been newly discovered by William Smith in 1819. But women taking part in expeditions to the far south in those early days was virtually unheard of.
The stories behind these deaths range from unsolved mysteries to freak accidents. In the second of our new series Frozen Continent, BBC Future explored what these events reveal about life on the planet’s most inhospitable landmass.
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