A Constant Pull; Tragedy & Triumph: Heroic Age of Polar Exploration; Special Editions; by John Horgan; 3 Page(s)

I just started teaching my spring classes, and on the first day a student asked me if my work as a science journalist had taken me to any cool places. I said that in 1985 I rode a trolley into a tunnel at the Nevada Test Site in which a nuclear bomb would be detonated the next day. In 1991 I stood at the edge of an oil field whose wells, ignited by Iraqi troops during the first Gulf War, shot huge jets of fire into the sky, which was so black with smoke that I could barely see my notebook. In 2002 I sat in a tepee on a Navajo reservation eating peyote with 20 members of the Native American Church. But by far the coolest trip I have ever taken, I said, was to the South Pole in 1992.

I just started teaching my spring classes, and on the first day a student asked me if my work as a science journalist had taken me to any cool places. I said that in 1985 I rode a trolley into a tunnel at the Nevada Test Site in which a nuclear bomb would be detonated the next day. In 1991 I stood at the edge of an oil field whose wells, ignited by Iraqi troops during the first Gulf War, shot huge jets of fire into the sky, which was so black with smoke that I could barely see my notebook. In 2002 I sat in a tepee on a Navajo reservation eating peyote with 20 members of the Native American Church. But by far the coolest trip I have ever taken, I said, was to the South Pole in 1992.

The Antarctic has received lots of press lately. Just over a century ago, on January 17, 1912, Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole only to discover that Roald Amundsen had arrived there more than a month earlier. Scott and his men perished on their return journey, and ironically their failure is commemorated more than Amundsens success.