South Pole

Dec. 14 marks an anniversary which should not pass unnoticed. Seventy-five years ago, on Dec. 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen discovered the "last place on Earth," the South Pole. When he reached the Pole, Amundsen achieved the last great explorer's goal and brought to a close the age of terrestrial discovery. More than this, by at last making the Earth wholly known to its inhabitants, he freed mankind to begin to plan in earnest for its next great age of discovery: exploration beyond the limits of its own planet.

This post has been corrected, as indicated below. Saturn's icy moon Enceladus has earned a certain amount of attention for its waterworks show - it was caught squirting plumes of mineral-rich water out of “tiger stripe” cracks near its south pole in 2005. Scientists thought that  could be a sign of a liquid ocean beneath its frozen shell, but couldn't be sure. Now, using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, they have found gravitational evidence that a vast sea the size of Lake Superior could extend out from around the southern pole.

Norwegian polar explorer Monica Kristensen, dangerously behind schedule, has abandoned a bid to reach the South Pole and ordered her four-member expedition back to base camp, the Oslo daily Verdens Gang said Saturday. The group, making slow progress across the frozen Antarctic wastes after a late start in December, was 275 miles short of its goal when Kristensen, 36, decided to return to their ship at the Bay of Whales.

Jupiter's icy moon Europa squirts water like a squishy bath toy when it's squeezed by the gas giant's gravity, scientists say. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, they caught two 124-mile-tall geysers of water vapor spewing out over seven hours from near its south pole. The discovery, described in the journal Science and at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, shows that Europa is still geophysically active - and that this world in our own solar system could hold an environment friendly to life.

Ending a seven-week solo ski trek, Norwegian Erling Kagge on Thursday became the first person to reach the South Pole alone and without assistance, his spokesman said. Kagge, a 29-year-old lawyer, completed the 812-mile journey after 50 days of travel in temperatures that fell as low as minus 40, the spokesman, Hans Christian Erlandsen, said he was told by telephone. Kagge started out from Berkner Island at the edge of Antarctica. He pulled a sled loaded with 265 pounds of supplies.

Raytheon Polar Services, the Colorado company that manages the polar station on Antarctica, said that a rescue flight reached the South Pole to pick up an ailing worker at a research station. Snow and wind delayed the rescue attempt for five days. If weather permits, the rescuers will fly to the British Rothera Air Station on Antarctica, 1,346 miles from the pole, and then to Chile for the return flight to the United States.

An international team of astronomers said Tuesday that Neptune's south pole is about 18 degrees warmer than the rest of the planet -- not much when the average temperature is colder than 320 degrees below zero. The apparent reason is that the pole has been in the summer sunlight for about 40 years. Neptune is nearly 2.8 billion miles from the sun. A Neptunian year -- the time it takes to orbit the sun -- is equivalent to about 165 Earth years.

Two military planes headed for the bitter cold of Antarctica on Thursday to bring home a doctor who for three months has been treating herself for a lump in her breast. Dr. Jerrie Nielsen is the physician for a crew of 41 researchers at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. She is believed to have been treating herself with chemotherapy since mid-July, when drugs and medical equipment were air-dropped into a howling snowstorm. Among those on the flight is a replacement doctor for the station.

George Clardy, 44, of Camarillo plans to to run a marathon. Nothing unusual about that except it's at the South Pole . The event, which will be held next Sunday, is fittingly called "The Last Marathon." "I think he's nuts," said his wife, Marcia. "I think running a marathon alone is nuts, but to do it at the South Pole. . . ." Add Clardy: "Most of the runners are people who are going through a mid-life crisis." Obviously.

Three British explorers who set out 14 months ago to retrace the steps of Capt. Robert Scott through Antarctica reached the South Pole on Saturday, expedition coordinator Peter Christopherson said. It was the first trek to re-create the expedition of Scott, who reached the pole Jan. 17, 1912, after a losing competition with Norwegian Roald Amundsen.

Prince Harry is heading south - way down south. To the South Pole, in fact. And he's walking a good part of the way. The prince will join the Walking With the Wounded South Pole Allied Challenge in November and December, he said at a news conference Friday. The 208-mile journey will be undertaken by three teams: U.S., Britain and the Commonwealth. The trek grew from humble beginnings, with four founders only three years ago, Harry said. This time around, teams will be "racing each other to the bottom of the world," the royal serviceman said,  "though we're not allowed to officially call it a race, But I think we all know what will happen.

Click here to download TV listings for the week Nov. 4 - 10 in PDF format This week's TV Movies       SERIES Richard Hammond's Crash Course:  In this new episode, Hammond takes on a bull at a rodeo (7 p.m. BBC America). The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills: The unscripted series returns for a new season (9 p.m. Bravo). Witness:  The premiere of this four-part photojournalism series features images Eros Hoagland captured in Juarez, Mexico, where drug-related violence is prevalent (9 p.m. HBO)

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has found that the Shackleton crater at the moon's frigid south pole contains about 22% ice on its surface, astronomers reported Thursday in the journal Nature. To their surprise, the team apparently saw more ice on the walls of the crater than on its floor. Such ice could prove very valuable for any extended moon mission, providing water and a potential fuel source to astronauts. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, known as LRO, was launched in June 2009 to prepare a detailed map of the moon's surface.

NASA scientists announced Friday that they had picked a 60-mile-wide crater near the moon's south pole as the place where they will send a rocket to punch a hole in the lunar surface next month in search of water. Instruments aboard other satellites and on Earth have detected a significant amount of hydrogen, a telltale marker for water, on the northwest rim of the crater known as Cabeus A. "We're very confident we're going to hit a good place," Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, mission, said at a briefing at Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

Late this year, if all goes as planned, a 90-year-old James Lovelock will rocket into suborbital space as Virgin Galactic's premier spaceflight tourist. It's a two-hour-plus trip that includes several minutes of weightlessness, during which Lovelock will be able to take an affectionate look at his first love, Gaia -- our blue planet.

Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, who was the only physician at an isolated South Pole research station when she diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer before being evacuated in a daring 1999 rescue, has died. She was 57. FitzGerald died Tuesday at her home in Southwick, Mass., her family announced. Her cancer had been in remission but returned in 2005.

It took a few days for Steve Barwick to get used to the high altitude, the 24-hour-a-day sunshine and temperatures hovering around minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit at the South Pole U.S. research station. Once he did, though, the UC Irvine astrophysicist plunged into the arduous work of burying sophisticated photographic equipment deep in the Antarctic ice pack in hopes of exploring the cosmos by means of high-energy neutrinos, elusive particles emitted by distant stars.

Six ski teams set off on an international race to the South Pole, nearly a century after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen beat Britain's Robert Scott to it, organizers said. The teams, which include an Olympic rower and a blind Irishman, will travel 430 nautical miles across the Antarctic ice cap. Their race is billed as the first to the pole since the Amundsen-Scott rivalry that ended with the Norwegian's triumph in December 1911, a month before Scott reached it. The competitors will camp out in tents and pull 154-pound sleds.

Anywhere on Earth this would be a big telescope, as tall as a seven-story building, with a main mirror measuring 32 1/2 feet across. But here at the South Pole, it seems especially large, looming over a barren plain of ice that gets colder than anywhere else on the planet. Scientists built the instrument at the end of the world so they can search for clues that might identify the most powerful, plentiful but elusive substance in the universe: dark energy. First described just nine years ago, dark energy is a mysterious force so powerful that it will decide the fate of the universe.