My tweet yesterday – ‘all saved from the ship of fools’ – has turned out to be premature. The havoc created by Professor Chris Turney’s Antarctic expedition has since increased. The Xue Long, the Chinese ship which provided the helicopter to airlift Turney and his colleagues from the Akademik Shokalskiy to the Aurora Australis, has itself now become stuck in ice. Meanwhile 22 Russian crew remain aboard the Shokalskiy. Both ships are stronger than the Endurance, Shackleton’s ship whose timbers were crushed in similar circumstances in 1915, prompting his famous voyage and trek to the whaling station on South Georgia, but both ships remain in danger from further movements of the ice.
Turney is no Shackleton, even if he does describe himself as ‘scientist, explorer and writer’ on his website. But hopefully he is enough of a scientist to learn the moral of this tale: never treat a scientific debate as if it is closed.
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