Saturday 19 November 2016

Random weird questions

Is there a secret place there where people might be living, and how long might they have been there?
Ooh - who knows?? Do you think there might be?? 
The idea of a secret place located amongst the snow and ice of Antarctica has teased people for many years. The mystery of what might be hidden there has inspired many films and books. 
Some people even believed in the Hollow Earth Theory, which claimed that the earth was hollow with entry holes at the North and South Pole, and ancient tribes and woolly mammoths living deep inside. Jules Verne wrote a famous science fiction book about this called A journey to the centre of the earth

Is there anyone buried there under the ice and snow?
Yes! and it is a slightly creepy but very sad story.
For many years, there was a race to see who would be first to teach the South Pole. In 1908, the British explorer Ernest Shackleton had to turn back when he was just 180km away. He didn't reach the Pole, but he didn't lose any of his men, either. 
In 1910, Captain Robert Scott set off from England to lead his second expedition to Antarctica. He and a small hand-picked team reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, only to discover they had been beaten by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team, who had arrived 5 weeks earlier. Captain Scott and his four companions then had to try and walk all the way back to the safety of their hut at Cape Evans, 1300 km away. 
Edgar Evans died of a head injury in February 1912. Lawrence (also called Titus) Oates felt that he was holding the others up, and very bravely walked out into the snow to try and give them a chance of reaching safety without him. He was never seen again. 
On 22 March 1912, Captain Scott, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers were within three days of a food depot, but by then they were very weak. Then a blizzard trapped them in their tent and they could go no further.    
Nobody knew what had happened to them for many months. After the winter, a rescue party set out from Cape Evans and on 12 November 1912, they spotted a tent pole sticking up out of the snow, with three bodies inside it. The rescue party learnt what had happened by reading the men's diaries. They built a cairn over the tent and left the three men buried there. 
Nobody has ever seen the cairn again, and it is now buried under metres of snow. But because the Antarctic ice fields move gradually towards the Southern Ocean, the bodies of the famous explorers will eventually - in a few hundred years - fall into the sea, or even drift away in an iceberg. 



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