Frozen In Time | Continent 7: Antarctica
You ready? Get ready. Are you ready? Yeah.
NARRATOR: Barbara Bollard-Breen and her team are here to create a virtual version of a historic hut that's over 100 years old, in order to help protect it. Here we go.
NARRATOR: And she's about to step inside for the first time.
Oh my god. Wow. I don't even know what I was expecting, but-- It's so beautifully preserved. It's unbelievable. And this is how they left it when they headed out to the pole. It's as if they're just waiting for everyone to come back.
NARRATOR: On October 24, 1911, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and 16 men left this hut on an expedition to the South Pole. They were the second group ever to make it there, but on their way back they were caught in a blizzard that lasted nine days. On March 29th, Scott wrote in his journal, "We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more." Months later, the party was found frozen to death, over 100 miles from the safety of this shelter.
Amazing. It's stunning. It's preserved so well, I feel like we're the first people to discover it. God, everywhere you look, there is just something unbelievable. The boots, and hats on the shelves. It's amazing. You can almost feel their presence here, can't you? You can. You can just imagine it with people in the bunks. Sitting around the table, sharing a meal. Working in the kitchen. The dishes are there! Sugar, cocoa. Oh my god. the Illustrated London News. Saturday, February 29th, 1908. Wow. It cost sixpence. Isn't that something?
NARRATOR: The hut is 25 feet by 50 feet, and Barbara's team has just a few hours inside it to complete their mission. Time to get to work.
How about you go down the center, I'll comb this way, and see how we go? OK. We're making a virtual reality mosaic of the inside of this hut by having multiple cameras at multiple angles, and multiple heights. When we process them on a computer later, we can get a 3D image of the hut. We take thousands of images, and then I stitch those images together to create 3D orthomosaics. We actually have to make every second count, because we've only got a limited amount of time here. It's a very remote location. We've got one shot at this, so it's a little bit nerve wracking, but we want to do it right, because we can't come back again.