Today it's very hard to realize that we are as far away from the rest of the humanity as one can possibly get without leaving the planet.  The South Pole has a busy airfield with several intracontinental arrivals every day, the base area extends over several kilometers and is bristling with activity - and inside the magnificent new station building we could easily be at Civilization, Anywhere. The place is almost as well connected too. Our team mates who left us the day before yesterday are already in Christchurch, and they will be home well before the upcoming holiday. Only the temperature, the diamond dust in the air and the curious phenomenon of a sun circling the horizon at the exact same elevation day and night remind us that we are at a place very different indeed.

Not so in Amundsen's days. The expedition took more than a year to get here from Norway: sailing around the planet on the polar vessel 'Fram', then establishing a winter camp at the Bay of Whales, and overwintering there to be able to start the final, overland leg of the journey sufficiently early the following spring. After a series of depot-laying trips during the autumn of 1911, the pole team - five men, four sledges and 52 dogs - finally set off from the 'Framheim' camp on October 19, 1911. The climb up the Axel Heiberg Glacier to polar plateau was completed just over a month later, on November 21.  Here the dog team was reduced to 18 dogs and three sledges for the final 400 kms to the pole, with Oscar Wisting, Helmer Hanssen and Olav Bjaaland driving. Finally, in the early afternoon of December 14, 1911, Amundsen called a 'halt'. They were here! 

Or at least nearly here; Amundsen of course had no GPS to pinpoint the exact position. He had to navigate the oldfashioned way, by sextant and dead reckoning. This took the team to an approximate position within some kilometers of the pole, and they had to spend another 3 days of meticulous solar observations with a theodolite to narrow the margin of error down to a few hundred meters. The final trip to this carefully calculated position was done on December 17, with the skiing champion Olav Bjaaland leading the way.  The return journey to Framheim took another 39 days - completely uneventful - and not until March 7, 1912, did the expedition get back to Hobart, Tasmania. Only then could Amundsen get his news through to Norway and the rest of the world.

Although the irregular satellite connections (ordinary, geostationary communications satellites are not visible from the South Pole) limit our email connectivity with the rest of the world to a few hours per day, we have to say that communications and work conditions at the planet's southern extreme are rather different from those 97 years ago.  Nevertheless, we can only hope that our return trip will be as uneventful as Amundsen's, and that we have been able to live up to what Amundsen regarded as the prerequisites for a successful expedition:

"I may say that this is the greatest factor -- the way in which the expedition is equipped -- the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order -- luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck."

Mementos in the South Pole conference room. Photo: Stein Tronstad.