Southern Exposure: The Race Begins in 26 Days

Monday, May 03 3:26 pm

The story has been likened to Indiana Jones with snow. Thrilling and action-packed, yes, but it was no film fantasy when two men — Roald Amundsen of Norway and Britain’s Robert Falcon Scott — set out in 1910 on a quest to plant their county’s flag on the last great geographical prize: the South Pole. Only one could be first. Only one would return home.

This high-stakes drama is played out in all its chilling detail in the Museum’s new exhibition Race to the End of the Earth, which opens May 29 and runs through January 2, 2011. The exhibition is curated by Ross D. E. MacPhee, a curator in the Museum’s Division of Vertebrate Zoology and author of Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott, and the Attainment of the South Pole, which is being published this month by Sterling Innovation in conjunction with the exhibition.

Robert F. Scott photographed in his quarters during the British Antarctic Expedition. © AMNH Library

To heighten the experience of Race to the End of the Earth, each visitor, on entering the exhibition, will be offered a card featuring information about one of the members of either Amundsen’s or Scott’s team. Moving through the exhibition, visitors will find clues about their characters’ experiences, see actual items of clothing and tools they used, and look in on life-sized models of rooms in the respective base camps—all set against a spectacular backdrop of Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights, and field recordings of cracking ice, gusting snow, and howling winds. Compelling interactive exhibits will help visitors understand the challenges of exploration a century ago, along with paintings, astonishingly beautiful photographs reminiscent of images that captivated the public’s imagination in the Museum’s exhibition The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition a decade ago, and rare historical artifacts, including personal effects of Amundsen’s and a copy of one of Scott’s last letters home. Read more »