Antarctic Crossing: Engineering the Moon-Regan Expedition

Attitudes towards the Antarctic have changed. Robert Falcon Scott called the continent that would claim his life ’a dreadful place’. Apsley Cherry-Gerard, another member of Scott’s party, described his 60-mile foray to find and collect penguin eggs in a book called The worst journey in the world. And now, a British-led scientific expedition is returning to Antarctica with a plan to cross the continent from west to east, and then back again.

Talk to the team behind this latest foray to the icecap, the Moon-Regan Transantarctic Expedition, and you’ll get a quite different point of view to that of those early 20th century explorers. ’The cleanest, most environmentally friendly part of the planet’, they call it; ’the world’s cleanest, coldest laboratory’; ’the biggest wind tunnel you could ever play with’; ’a pristine environment’. The expedition’s co-leader, Andrew Moon, describes the South Pole itself - or, rather, the large US research base located there - as ’an opportunity for some rest and recreation’.