Antarctic region marine observations for 1895-1915

Early Antarctic region data in ICOADS

The marine observations from some Antarctic expeditions have already been digitised and included in ICOADS. Unfortunately it's not easy to find out which, as the ship names are not stored in the IMMA records, and the deck and source identifiers cover too wide a range of data to identify individual expeditions.

So to find out what was already done, the observations south of 55S for each year between 1895 and 1938 were extracted from ICOADS 2.3 (the latitude cut-off was extended to 63S for the longitude range 200-320E, to exclude traffic around Cape Horn). These observations were then plotted, for each Antarctic summer season, using Google Maps. Comparing these plots with published accounts of the expeditions allowed identifcation of many of the expeditions. For example, in the 1903-4 season ICOADS includes data from a voyage to the western side of the Weddell Sea and a voyage to McMurdo Sound in the Ross Sea. Comparison with published maps shows that the former is the Scottish National Expedition on the Scotia; and latter is the Morning, in support of the British Expedition - data from the two other ships in that expadition, the Discovery and the Terra Nova are not in ICOADS.

It's generally possible to identify this way the expeditions that have been digitised, in some cases it is difficult - there were three expeditions to the Ross Sea in 1910-12, but probably all the observations in ICOADS are from the British expedition (Scott in the Terra Nova).

In ICOADS 2.3

  • 1901-3, German South Polar, Gauss
  • 1901-4, Swedish South Polar, Antarctic
  • 1901-4, British National (support ship), Morning
  • 1902-4, Scottish National Antarctic, Scotia
  • 1908-10, Fourth French Antarctic, Porquoi-Pas IV
  • 1910-13, British Antarctic, Terra Nova
  • 1911-14, Australasian Antarctic, Aurora

Not in ICOADS 2.3

  • 1897-9, Belgian Antarctic Expedition, Belgica
  • 1898-1900, British Antarctic Expedition, Southern Cross
  • 1901-4, British National, neither Discovery nor Terra Nova
  • 1903-5, Third French Expedition, Francais
  • 1907-9, British Antarctic, Nimrod
  • 1910-12, Norwegian Antarctic, Fram
  • 1914-17, Imperial Trans-Antarctic, neither Endurance nor Aurora

These lists are uncertain - in particular it is easier to be sure that an expedition has been included than that it is definitely missing. Not all the expeditions of the period are listed above, some we didn't know enough about to check for. Note also that data for expeditions in ICOADS may well be incomplete - the data from the Morning lacks pressure information, for example; and comparison of the 1911-12 data from the Terra Nova show that some of the observations in ICOADS have dubious times and others are missing. A strong case could be made for re-digitising observations from all the expeditions.