Word: poling
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...thickness of 2,155 meters (7,090 ft.). That accounts for 90% of the world's ice and 68% of its fresh water. Although the sun shines continuously in the summer months, the rays hit the land at too sharp an angle to melt the ice. At the South Pole, the average temperature is -49 degrees C (-56.2 degrees F) and the record high is -13.6 degrees C (7.5 degrees F). During the . perpetual darkness of winter, the temperature falls to almost inconceivable levels. The lowest ever recorded was in 1983 at the Soviet Union's Vostok Base: -89.2 degrees...
Along with the exploiters came explorers, searching for nothing more than scientific knowledge and personal and national glory. In 1841 Britain's James Clark Ross became the first man to find his way through the sea ice and reach the mainland. The ultimate goal for the adventurers -- the South Pole -- was not reached until seven decades later, during the dramatic and ultimately tragic race between British explorer Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen. Relying on dogsleds, which proved to be more dependable than the breakdown- prone mechanical sleds used by Scott, Amundsen's party arrived triumphantly at the pole...
Airplanes made Antarctic travel much less perilous. In 1929 Richard Byrd, an American, became the first person to fly to the South Pole, a 16-hour round . trip from Antarctica's west coast. And in the 1930s, German aviators claimed part of the continent for the Third Reich by dropping hundreds of stakes emblazoned with swastikas...
...South Pole, meanwhile, astrophysicists were taking advantage of a heat wave -- the temperature had soared to -23 degrees C (-10 degrees F) -- to set up detectors that would peer at the faint microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang explosion, which theoretically started the universe. In the high altitudes atop the pole's ice cap, the detectors are well above the densest, murkiest layers of atmosphere and can peer through some of the dryest, clearest air on earth to help determine whether the original Big Bang was unique or was followed by smaller ones. A few hundred yards away...
...jackets and booties. Even so, the journey has been brutal for the animals. Fifteen of them became so exhausted that they had to be airlifted out temporarily to Patriot Hills. One of Steger's favorites, an eight-year-old named Tim who had gone with him to the North Pole, died during the blizzard...