Scott's Hut (1911), Antarctica on Google Street View

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This is Scott's Hut located on Antarctica's Ross Island as it appears on Google Street View. It was built in 1911 by Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition and has been almost perfectly preserved by the cold. Scott's Hut (via John Curley)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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http://www.facebook.com/keith.welch Keith Achmet Welch

Poor Scott. He really wasn’t cut out for the Arctic.
- mccrum
  
  Or the Antarctic for that matter. Truthfully, I’m not sure what exactly he was cut out for. Not good in the Navy, not the best husband, about the only thing he could do really well was convince certain men that they should abandon all meticulous plans years in the making and take an extra guy to the South Pole leaving them all ill-equipped and short of needed supplies.
http://profile.yahoo.com/MWNNAJTTXSXFUN4A6FLTKAT264 Michael

Amazing, thanks so much for sharing. I see lots of food on the cupboards but no books, although some appear to be bookshelves. Being able to read the labels on the containers so clearly I was hoping to see what someone read to pass the time.

The sign outside says “Read the handout that accompanies the keys” and warns visitors not to touch the artefacts. Wonder how visitation works. Seems like a huge opportunity for theft but I couldn’t find more information on the Antarctic Heritage Trust Web site. Admittedly it’s not a simple matter to reach the location.
- bobby
  
  Everyone in Antarctica is a scientist or military, and if you do find yourself there – I would image pilfering a 100 year old cabin would be the least of your worries.
  - JRMK
    
    Not true. I’ve been there several times and I’m not a scientist or in the military. I was a contractor. I’ve even been to this hut.
  - mccrum
    
    And by “scientists” you must be referring to the loose definition that accompanies the tourist companies using “research” ships that go there as well.
    
    http://www.coolantarctica.com/Travel/Trip_details/antarctica_cruise_11.htm
- mccrum
  
  I presume they took their books back with them, since it was a two month or so voyage back to England…
  - Jonathan Roberts
    
    If they had survived, I’m sure they would have done that.
    
    Edit: It seems this hut was from Shackleton’s expedition, which did return to England.
    - mccrum
      
      Not everyone on Scott’s expedition died. He had a support team of officers, scientists, and sailors.
      
      Apsley Cherry-Gerard then spent the next sixty years regretting that he had misunderstood Scott’s last instructions and that if he had moved the cache 12 miles further in then at least 3 of them would have made it back. So at the very least he would have taken Scott’s books and papers back to his widow.
- David Speller
  
  What you’re taking to be bookshelves are repurposed wooden boxes.
geech

This is made ever more cool since I recently read At the Mountains of Madness. Kind of brings it all back home.
winkybb

I’ve always felt that permanent human presence in Antarctica is a tragedy in some sense, and certainly not worthy of celebration. Antarctica is a wonderful place, worthy of preservation simply for its own sake. Preserving monuments to man’s activities down there somehow cheapens it in my mind. This hut is really little different to if I was to mount some sort of epic expedition and just left behind all the stuff I couldn’t be bothered hauling out. Pack up the huts and bring them back to a museum somewhere. Leave the wilderness alone.
- mccrum
  
  I’m not sure Scott’s hut is a monument to the man as much as it is a monument to the limited resources to pull stuff out of Antarctica. When the Discovery showed up late in the season to pull out the survivors, taking the hut down was likely the last thing on their minds.
  
  Lucky for Shackleton’s men it was there years later when his ship waiting to pick him up was caught in the ice and carried off to sea. They lived in it for two years while waiting to be rescued.
  
  Given the warming temperatures and wood beginning to rot in the summer, I’m sure it’ll be gone in a decade or less anyway.
azaner

Fantastic stuff. Note that the second image you posted above is actually from the interior of Shackleton’s hut, not Scott’s. Different expedition, legendary and astonishing in its own right.
- Jonathan Roberts
  
  They do look a bit like proto-hipsters in this picture; it could be the cover of their first album, or just proving that they were into Antarctica before it was cool (sorry).
eris_kallisti

I wonder if the hams are still good.

And what were they supposed to burn in the stove, penguins?
- Preston Sturges
  
  Some driftwood would probably show up now and then. And of course freeze dried excrement.,
- Jonathan Roberts
  
  There are some reports of people eating mammoth and a more reliable one of people from the University of Alaska eating 36,000 year old bison in a stew:
  
  “A small part of the mummy’s neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables,” Guthrie wrote. “We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.” Kurten later wrote that the bison stew was “agreeable.”
  
  According to the Russian zoologist Alexei Tikhonov who supposedly tried a bite of mammoth; “it was awful. It tasted like meat left too long in a freezer.”
mawsoni

Here’s an historical reinactment of Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole, filmed in Antarctica, at Scott’s Hut. The story is told ala Drunk History. Well worth your 17 minutes if you want to see Antarctica, the people who live there now and, maybe, just maybe, learn a bit from this historically accurate (though drunk) account.

http://vimeo.com/35084075
Preston Sturges

Global warming deniers say that it’s OK if Greenland melts because there has been slight increases on Antarctic snowfall.

Notice how little it snows in the Antarctic? In Greenland, WW2 airplanes are under 40 ft of snow and ice.
- Jonathan Roberts
  
  Who’s paying you to write this propaganda? Why do you hate freedom, Preston?
CLamb

This would look very different if penguins had spray paint.