Author Mawson Douglas Sir

st ascent of Mount Erebus. Later, he was a member of the first team to reach the South Magnetic Pole, assuming the leadership of the party from David on their perilous return. Mawson turned down an invitation to join Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition in 1910; Australian geologist Griffith Taylor went with Scott instead. Mawson chose to lead his own expedition, the Australian Antarctic Expedition, to King George V Land and Adelie Land, the sector of the Antarctic continent immediately south of Australia, which at the time was almost entirely unexplored. The objectives were to carry out geographical exploration and scientific studies, including a visit to the South Magnetic Pole. The expedition, using the ship Aurora commanded by Captain John King Davis, departed Hobart on 2 December 1911, landed at Cape Denison on Commonwealth Bay on 8 January 1912, and established the Main Base. A second camp was located to the west on the ice shelf in Queen Mary Land. Cape Denison proved to be unrelentingly windy; the average wind speed for the entire year was about 50 mph (80 km/h). They built a hut on the rocky cape and wintered through nearly constant blizzards. On page 133 in The Home of the Blizzard Mawson wrote "... on the evening of May 24, in the form of Herculean gusts ... the momentary velocity of these doubtlessly approached two hundred miles per hour." Mawson's exploration program was carried out by five parties from the Main Base and two from the Western Base. Mawson himself was part of a three-man sledging team with Xavier Mertz and Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis who headed east on November 10, 1912 to survey King George V Land. After five weeks of excellent progress mapping the coastline and collecting geological samples the party was crossing the Ninnis Glacier 480 km east of the main base. Mertz was skiing and Mawson was on his sled with his weight disbursed but Ninnis was jogging beside the second sled. Ninnis fell through a snow-covered crevasse, his body weight is likely to have breached the lid. The six best dogs, most of the party's rations, their tent and other essential supplies disappeared into the massive crevasse. Mertz and Mawson spotted one dead and one injured dog on a ledge 50m down but Ninnis was never seen again.[2] Mawson and Mertz turned back immediately. They had one weeks provisions for three men, plenty of fuel and a primus and a tent cover for which they improvised a frame. Their lack of provisions forced them to eat their remaining sled dogs. Their meat was tough, stringy and without a vestige of fat. For a change we sometimes chopped it up finely, mixed it with a little pemmican, and brought all to the boil in a large pot of water. We were exceedingly hungry, but there was nothing to satisfy our appetites. Only a few ounces were used of the stock of ordinary food, to which was added a portion of dog's meat, never large, for each animal yielded so very little, and the major part was fed to the surviving dogs. They crunched the bones and ate the skin, until nothing remained.[3] There was a quick deterioration in the men's physical condition during this journey. Both men suffered dizziness, nausea, abdominal pain, irrationality, mucusal fissuring and skin, hair and nail loss. Later Mawson noticed a dramatic change in his travelling companion. Mertz seemed to lose the will to move and wished only to remain in his sleeping bag. He began to deteriorate rapidly with diarrhoea and madness. Mertz bit off his own little finger, crunched on it and looked in disgust as he spat his severed digit onto the floor of the tent. This was soon followed by violent raging - Mawson had to sit on his companion's chest and hold down his arms to prevent him damaging their tent. Mertz suffered further seizures before falling into a coma and dying on January 7 1913.[4]. Just 100 g of husky liver contains a toxic dose of vitamin A for an adult male. With six dogs between them (with a liver on average weighing 1 kg), the pair ingested enough liver to bring on a condition known as Hypervitaminosis A. Mertz ate more liver than Mawson as he found the tough muscle tissue difficult to eat.[5] Mawson continued alone. During the return trip to the Main Base, he fell through the lid of a crevasse and was saved only by his sledge wedging itself into the ice above him. When Mawson finally made it back to Cape Denison, the ship Aurora had left only a few hours before. The ship was recalled by wireless communication, only to have bad weather thwart the rescue effort. Mawson, and six men who had remained behind to look for him, wintered a second year until December 1913. In Mawson's book, Home of the Blizzard, he describes his experiences. His party, and those at the Western Base, had explored large areas of the Antarctic coast, describing its geology, biology and meteorology, and more closely defining the location of the south magnetic pole. In his book, The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson talked of "Herculean gusts" on 24 May 1912 which he learned afterwards "approached two hundred miles per hour,"[6] and that the average wind velocity for March was 49 miles per hour; April 51.5 miles per hour and May was 67.7 miles per hour.[7] These winds have been referred to as katabatic: "a wind that carries high density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity".[8] On his journey there, he married Paquita Delprat and was knighted, being completely taken up with the Scott disaster and the outbreak of World War I. Mawson served in the war as a Major in the British Ministry of Munitions. Returning to Adelaide he pursued his academic studies, taking further expeditions abroad, including a joint British, Australian and New Zealand expedition to the Antarctic in 1929–31. The work done by the British Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition led to the formation of the Australian Antarctic Territory in 1936. He also spent much of his time researching the geology of the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Upon his retirement from teaching in 1952 he was made Emeritus Professor. He died at his Brighton home on 14 October 1958 from a cerebral haemorrhage.[9] He was 76 years old. At the time of his death he had still not completed editorial work on all the papers resulting from his expedition, and this was only completed by his eldest daughter, Patricia, in 1975. His image appeared from 1984-96 on the Australian paper one hundred dollar note. Mawson Peak (Heard Island), Mount Mawson (Tasmania), Mawson Station (Antarctica), Dorsa Mawson (Mare Fecunditatis), the geology building on the main University of Adelaide campus, suburbs in Canberra and Adelaide, a South Australian TAFE institute, and the main street of Meadows, South Australia are named after him. The Mawson Collection of Antarctic exploration artefacts is on permanent display at the South Australian Museum, including a screening of a recreated version of his journey that was shown on ABC Television on 12 May 2008.