Antarctica’s Bitter Cold Freezes Early Explorers’ Sites in Time : History: The belongings of doomed expedition leader Robert Scott, and those of other South Pole pioneers, are maintained with help from subzero temperatures.

Capt. Robert F. Scott’s caribou sleeping bag still lies rumpled on his bunk here in his last home, the hut where he spent the winter of 1911-12 before setting out on his doomed trip to the South Pole.

The hut and its contents are so perfectly preserved it looks as if the English explorer and his men just stepped out, and will be back any minute. An eerie silence hangs in the half-light of the hut, relieved occasionally by the whistle of the wind off Cape Evans.

A pair of Scott’s socks and a hot water bottle hang from nails driven into the wall above his bunk. A stuffed Emperor penguin is on Scott’s writing table, one of the scientific samples his expedition collected.

Next to it is one of his notebooks, and a copy of the Illustrated London News.

The shelves hold boxes of Huntley & Palmers biscuits, cocoa, syrup and other provisions, most of them still edible.

Bales of hay for the Mongolian ponies that were supposed to carry the heavy supplies on the trip to the Pole are still stacked outside. The ponies were a dismal failure, sinking to their bellies in the snow and dying of exhaustion. Scott’s men improvised dinner-plate sized, strap-on snowshoes for them, but those also failed.

The freeze-dried remains of a husky dog that was left behind are still chained by its leash to the outer wall of the hut. The dog’s teeth are bared, death’s agony still frozen to its face.

If the building isn’t preserved and maintained, it may vanish, like the hut that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen used in 1911 to launch his assault on the South Pole, beating Scott there by a month. Amundsen’s hut was never used again, and is lost.

The tent, sledge and Norwegian flag that Amundsen left at the Pole on Dec. 16, 1911, are locked 40 feet under the ice and snow, some distance from today’s South Pole. The polar icecap moves about 30 feet each year. A Norwegian expedition to retrieve those artifacts ended in disaster in December, 1993, when one of the crew fell into a crevasse and died instantly.

Scott and four companions reached the pole in January, 1912, thunderstruck to find Amundsen’s tent there already, flying the Norwegian flag.

They turned around and headed back toward their hut at Cape Evans, but perished on the return trip. Scott and the last two survivors died in a blizzard 11 miles from a supply cache of food and fuel that might have saved them, if they could have reached it. They were barely 150 miles from their hut at Cape Evans.

Scott’s crew at Cape Evans sent out a search party that found them on Nov. 12, 1912.

The subfreezing Antarctic climate and the isolation of Scott’s Cape Evans hut has helped preserve it to this day, just as his men left it. Visitors are rare; they have to be helicoptered in from McMurdo Station, about 15 miles away.

Maintenance of the leftover huts, supply depots and other historic sites of the heroic era of Antarctic exploration in the Ross Sea area is provided by New Zealand through the Antarctic Heritage Trust, which also has government representatives of the United States, Australia and Britain on its board.

New Zealanders began their work in the early 1960s, when they found that Scott’s hut at Cape Evans was drifted full of snow to the rafters, driven in by winds that roar down the slopes of Mt. Erebus at more than 100 m.p.h.

“The snow gets in the least little gap,” and once in, it never melts, said archeologist Neville Ritchie. They removed the snowpack and left the cottage as a memorial to Scott’s doomed expedition.

Another Scott hut, built in 1902 for his first Antarctic voyage on the ship Discovery, is at McMurdo Station, the U.S. National Science Foundation base.

This hut is a prefabricated Outback ranch house bought in Australia. It proved to be too large to heat, so it was mainly used as a warehouse, laboratory, clothes-drying shed and even as a stage for performances of the “Royal Terror Theater,” as Scott’s men called their amateur troupe. On those occasions when sledging parties had to seek shelter in it, they usually pitched a tent indoors and stayed inside it, warmed by their cooking stoves.

In 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to cross Antarctica used this hut for weeks at a time as his men laid supply depots for the trip, killing Weddell seals on the nearby ice to use for food and heat.

Today, a ripe pile of seal blubber still lies in a heap against one inner wall of this hut.

In the next room is a brick blubber stove used on occasion by Scott’s men in 1911-13, and Shackleton’s in 1915-17, to warm and feed themselves. They burned the seal blubber on the stove, its oily fat dripping into the fire and sending up soot that still stains the walls and ceiling. They also ate blubber. Today, a large frying pan still rests on the stove, with toasted chunks of blubber left behind since 1917.

The Antarctic Heritage Trust also maintains Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds, built in 1908, and the hut built in 1899 by the British “Southern Cross” expedition, led by Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink, the first group to spend a winter on the continent, as well as dozens of lesser sites.

In January, Ritchie and ethnologist Roger Fyfe straightened up a wall of boxes at Shackleton’s Cape Royds hut, some of which contained fuel and lubricants for the first automobile ever taken to Antarctica.

Shackleton’s hut is as pristine as Scott’s. On the cast-iron stove of the Cape Royds hut, an omelet still sits in a frying pan.

They also recovered a supply depot left at Hell’s Gate Moraine on Inexpressible Island by Scott’s crew from the ship Terra Nova in 1913, when the ship was iced in and the men had to winter over in a snow cave they dug.

Six men lived in a 9-by-12-foot snow cave, eating seal blubber and often reading aloud to each other to retain their sanity. They called the site of their ordeal “Inexpressible Island,” since words could not convey their suffering there.

The Antarctic Heritage Trust’s battle to preserve these sites has recently run into a new, unforeseen enemy: a slight warming of the climate that sometimes raises temperatures above freezing in January.

That unlocks the moisture in the huts and gives rust and mold a chance to do their damage. The moisture also reacts with salt from the sea air that blows in. Visitors have to scrape dirt, ice and salt off their boots before entering the huts.

But even the moisture in the breath of the visitors adds to the long-term erosion of these artifacts.

Even more recent structures have been swallowed up by Antarctica. Visitors to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station are forbidden from the area around the old pole station, abandoned in December, 1974, and now locked under the ice and snow 20 feet down. The ceiling timbers are breaking under the weight of the snow.

“People just walked away one day. There was no effort made to clean up,” said Frank Brier, the facilities manager for the National Science Foundation.

Books and magazines are still lying open to the pages where people set them down, and dishes and cups remain on the tables.

“You get the sense you’re in an old mine that is supported with 6-by-6-inch timbers. A very cold mine, minus 40 to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit,” Brier said.

Beyond the end of the packed-snow runway at the South Pole is about the only site tourists can safely visit. As you approach, the winter sunlight reflects off the impossibly flat snow plane, sparkling as if off a field of diamond dust.

Finally, an object breaks the relentlessly flat horizon--the tail fin of an LC-130R cargo plane that ran off the runway on Jan. 28, 1973, smacked a wing on the snow, and had an engine burn. None of the 11 people on board was hurt.

After stripping all the useful parts off the plane, the U.S. Navy left its carcass beyond the end of the runway, where it served as a landmark for incoming pilots for years--until the drifting snow covered it to the last few feet of its tail fin.

The upwind side of the tail fin has been scoured down to the bare metal by the polar gales; the lee side still wears its bright red-orange paint, looking brand new.

The intrepid visitor can crawl into the body of the plane through the crew escape hatch, and wriggle through the snow filling it and the minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures to the cockpit, admiring the ice crystals that have grown inside.

It’s not recommended for the claustrophobic.