Several suggestions have been made to explain the factors which were involved in the disastrous outcome of Robert Falcon Scott's race to the South Pole in 1911-12, in which his returning party died in a blizzard. According to a report published in Science for November 19, 1999, the reason for the disaster was an extraordinarily cold spell of weather affecting Antarctica in March, 1912. It could not have been foreseen, and it made all the difference between survival and death.
Scott and his party reached the Pole in January, a month after the achievement of Roald Amundsen. On their return journey the loss of a member of the team and of the ponies used to pull the sleds seriously retarded their progress, and bad weather closed in on them. Scott and his companions Wilson, Oates and Bowers were trapped in their tent in March by continuous blizzards and temperatures reaching as low as –38C which developed in less than a week. In his journals, Scott recorded on several occasions a temperature below –40C indeed.
Scientists in the United States have now traced monthly temperatures over a period of 15 years, recorded at four automated weather stations along the route followed by Scott's party during the retreat towards their base in 1912. Late February and early March were some seven degrees warmer than the figures mentioned by Scott in his journals. Moreover, on his journey Scott had carried the records of Ernest Shackleton, which conveyed warmer conditions than those in 1912. Thus, it seems clear that the disastrous outcome of Scott's expedition must be attributed, as many have suggested, to an atmospheric freak which nobody could have foreseen, and not to bad planning or sickness which other critics have invoked.