Rod Downie: Robert Falcon Scott's South Pole Legacy: 100 Years on

Rod Downie is the Polar Policy and Programme manager at WWF-UK. He joined the organisation having spent 14 years at British Antarctica Survey working on environmental management and policy. He has also been part of the UK delegation on the Antarctica treaty consultative meetings for nearly a decade.

"Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority."

Such were the sentiments of Capt Robert Falcon Scott exactly 100 years ago today, as he reached the geographic South Pole, having followed in the sledge tracks of the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

It's a matter of record that Scott and his men were not the first to reach the pole. But arguably, his was a far greater 'reward' - an incredible legacy of science and conservation which has endured and flourished for a century.

Meteorological data, rocks, fossils and marine samples collected by Scott's party laid the early foundations of our scientific understanding of Antarctica - its geology, climate, and wildlife, including the amazing marine biodiversity of the Southern Ocean....

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