Following intensive ice training in Norway, Baffin Island, Greenland, Scotland and Austria, with fitness programme assistance from the OMI (Olympic Medical Institute, London) the team will follow the same route to the Pole as Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition of 1908-9.
We will fly in from Punto Arenas, Chile. Having refuelled at Patriot Hills base, we will be dropped on Ross Island, at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. As befits a modern expedition, our trip will be entirely carbon-neutral, with all CO2 emissions offset.
The team will first climb Mount Erebus, the world's most southerly volcano. We then intend to depart from the Shackleton Hut at Cape Royds on October 29th 2008 at 10am, exactly a hundred years to the day since Shackleton and his men set out. Travelling unguided on skis, we will cross the Ross Ice Shelf, individually hauling our expedition supplies in sledges.We will then ascend the seldom-crossed Beardmore Glacier, en route collecting blue ice samples for scientific analysis back in the UK. Then it's on to the Polar plateau, 400 miles towards the Pole itself.
We will keep the outside world notified of our daily progress wherever we find ourselves, via video and journal entries posted online at shackletoncentenary.org
It will be a long, hard march from here to the 97-mile point, which we intend to reach exactly on the centenary of the original team's achievement.
Instead of turning back, as they were then forced to, we will reach the South Pole, and thereby complete unfinished business. The total distance we expect to cover is 900 miles, and journey time is around eighty days.
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