The Great Cold Beckons: Early Explorations of the South Pole

[Un article de The Conversation écrit par Marie-Béatrice Forel – Maître de Conférences, Centre de Recherche sur la Paléobiodiversité et les Paléoenvironnements, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN) – et Pierre Sans-Jofre – Maître de conférences en géologie, responsable de collection de géologie et minéralogie, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN)]

Later, between 800 to 1040 AD. About the Vikings, the Vikings explored a large part of the northwest of the northern hemisphere aboard their solid ships, the knarrparticularly adapted to navigation on the high seas. The Norwegian Erik Le Rouge would have been the first to sail to Greenland, where he would have settled around 983. His son, Leif Erikson, was the first European to set foot in America, reaching Newfoundland and North American coast.

A few hundred years later, from the XV^e A century, Europeans began to look for sea routes to reach Asia without crossing the Middle East. The hypothesis of the existence of a passage to the north of the American continent, the “North-West passage”, was issued by the Venetian navigator Giovanni Caboto in 1497. then opened around three centuries of exploration in search of this famous way, dotted with many shipwrecks but also major discoveries like those of the Hudson river estuary in 1524 and Saint-Laurent in 1534. It was not until 1906 that the North West Passage was crossed, by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. A way to Asia passing through northern Scandinavia and Russia, the “passage from the northeast”, was also sought; After numerous unsuccessful attempts, she was discovered by Finnish Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in 1879.

The existence of Antarctica had been theorized from Antiquity by Greek scholars: a gigantic southern continent had to exist to counterbalance the continental masses of the northern hemisphere … This Terra Australis Incognita Thus appeared on many European cards from the 15th century, long before the real discovery of Antarctica, at the beginning of the XIX^e century. Until this time, many expeditions had been sent to search for this territory and a possible passage from Europe to Asia, this time from the south. They had allowed, in addition to observations of water covered with ice and icebergs, major discoveries: in 1498, the Portuguese Vasco de Gama exceeded for the first time the Cap de Bonne-Espérance, at the southern tip of the African continent; In 1616, Cap Horn, at the end of the land of fire, was crossed by the Dutch Willem Schouten and Jacob the mayor; In 1772, the Frenchman Yves Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec discovered an archipelago, later appointed “Kerguelen Islands” in his honor by the British James Cook. It was another Briton, William Smith, who first cried him “Terre!” By seeing Antarctica on February 19, 1819, paving the way for the exploration of these regions as bewitching as they are inhospitable. It was then not until 1840 and the observations of the American Charles Wilkes for a certainty to emerge: it was a continent, and not an archipelago.

Baudin expedition: first steps towards the south

The recognition and exploration of the Antarctica were very progressive. Many expeditions succeeded each other, always pushing the progress a little further in this Earth of ice and the field of scientific description. It is impossible to evoke here all the trips, all the efforts, all the courage and all the penalties of the crews which embarked towards the “white continent”. Certain expeditions, however, constituted particularly important milestones, as well by the geographic discoveries as they caused by their scientific collections, thus marking major stages of the construction of naturalist knowledge of the polar regions, whose collections of the National Museum of Natural History are witnesses and guarantors for future generations.

This is the case of the expedition led by Nicolas Thomas Baudin, part of Le Havre on October 19, 1800 aboard the Geographer and Naturalist In the direction of the southern seas, beyond the Cap de Bonne-Espérance. The two corvettes never reached the Antarctica or the Polar Circle, but they allowed embedded scholars to achieve the first truly scientific descriptions of a large number of southern territories, like Australia, then called “New Holland”. The experience of these scientists also made it possible to lay bases for subsequent explorations.

Dumont d'Urville expedition: Discovering Adélie soil

Aboard The astrolabe and the zealousbetween 1837 and 1840, the expedition led by Jules Dumont d'Urville marked not only the discovery of the Adélie land, but also the constitution of the very first collections of the Museum devoted to Antarctica. Scientists who were part of the trip represented all the disciplines of the natural sciences: surgeons, anatomist preparer, hydrographers, designers, zoologists, botanists …

The expedition had received two missions: explore the Pacific and navigate as far as possible in the south towards Antarctica, to the point of finding the magnetic southern pole, whose location was calculated for the first time by a member of the crew, the hydrographer Clément Adrien Vincendon-Dumoulin. These words written by Dumont d'Urville in 1845 on the trip to the South Pole and in Oceania on the Corvettes The astrolabe And the zealous reflect the state of mind of explorers, eager for discoveries:

“We immediately paid ourselves to work, in order to collect all that this thankless land could offer curious for natural history. »»

The astrolabe And the zealous left Toulon on September 7, 1837 and reached the Strait of Magellan, in southern Chile, at the end of November. On the road, the scholars carried out a number of observations and naturalist and geographic studies, considerably enriching the knowledge of the time on biodiversity, both continental and marine, thanks to many collections of molluscs, echinoderms, insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, plants, rocks, sands. These collections allowed, for example, to describe Usnea Magellanicaa kind of lichen which “grows in long beards on the branches […] dead ”, named in reference to the earth, full of scientific promises, on which it was discovered.

It was not until later, on January 20, 1840, after the exploration of the Pacific, that the Antarctic land was seen. On January 21, a group of men fired the ground of what they would call the “Rocher du landing”, an islet northeast of the Pointe-Géologie archipelago, in the Dumont-d'Urville Sea, within the Indian Ocean area which borders the Adélie land. This name of “Pointe-Geologie” can surprise; He refers to the rocks taken during the landing which illustrated for the first time the geological diversity of the Antarctic continent, the “geological framework of these lands”, in the words of Dumont d'Urville himself. In 1841, several kilograms of these rocks described as Gneiss (and today identified as paragneiss and amphibolites) were deposited at the Museum. The nature of these rocks and the mechanisms of their training have been specified recently: a team bringing together French and Italian scientists has been able to demonstrate, by comparison, that other rocks deposited in other French institutions did not come from Antarctica. More than a century later in the same place, in 1951-1952, the explorer Paul-Émile Victor built the Pointe-Géologie station at the request of Jean Prévost, holder of the zoology pulpit (“Mammals and birds”) of the Museum, to study the biology of the Emperor penguin (Forsteri Aptenodytes). The sailors returned to Europe with some Adélie penguins which allowed the description of this species, then called CATARRHACTES Adeliae and today classified in the genre Pygoscelis. Its type specimen (that is to say this one, unique in the world, from which the species has been described) is preserved in the collections of the Museum.

The richness of the collections reported by the Dumont d'Urville expedition and the research and discoveries that they allowed is dizzying. Let us quote only one figure: it is no less than 180 species of gastropod molluscs that were described following the collections carried out throughout the route of the two corvettes! If Dumont d'Urville and its crew did not manage to reach the magnetic pole, their contribution to the natural sciences is immense: although collected almost two hundred years ago, the samples which served as reference for the description of all this biodiversity and this geodiversity then still unknown are always preciously preserved in the Museum and frequently consulted by researchers from the whole world, which continue to study them the constant improvement of methods and analysis instruments.