Losing my mind at the beauty of these color enhanced photographs of the Endurance expedition by @babelcolour on Twitter. The fact that these are color enhanced and not color added makes their existence even more remarkable. You understand why those first explorers couldn’t stay away.

British-Antarctic territories stamps from the 2000 Shackleton's Transantarctic Expedition collection

GUYS NO

I cannot stop thinking about how the Antarctic men of the Shackleton traded things to one another and sort of created their own exchanged. The idea that these men thought of things to gift one another and created a social connection to one another by picking out their own personal belongings or rocks or items. And they gave them as gifts to one another. Effectively giving them meaning to be alive and to carry on. And then I think about items and the things the men of the Franklin Expedition probably gave one another. Clothing. Books. Cups. Tobacco. Chocolate. Things to give. Things to give. Even in the worst of it all there is something they can give. And they gave. To one another.

insane of shackleton to complain that war in the old days made men in 1913. sir why don't you just try to enjoy the last year of the belle époque 1914 is about to hit everyone like a truck

screenshot from the lost men by kelly parker lewis

Radio 3 aired a whole hour+ programme of music and reading about and inspired by Antarctica.

If you call to mind an image of Antarctica, it is likely you will come up with something informed by the heroic but ultimately unsuccessful Endurance Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. That’s because the extraordinary photographs and film from that trip planted the so-called White Continent in our imaginations for ever. Shackleton, who was born in Ireland in February 1874 before moving to London as a boy, might be best known for that failed trip but the fact that his crew survived, when so many did not, is now seen as a credit to his exceptional leadership skills. Today’s Words and Music is a tribute to the frozen landscape that inspired the heroic age of exploration. It is not just remote - it contains the world's highest, driest, coldest and windiest places. And these days it’s a hub of scientific discovery, international diplomacy and environmental change too. We’ll hear fiction from Beryl Bainbridge to Edgar Allan Poe, poetry from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Derek Mahon, memoir from Jenny Diski and Sara Wheeler as well David Attenborough, Maori scientists and other Polar Explorers. Alongside you’ll hear hugely varied music inspired by Antarctica from Vaughan Williams to Tanya Ekanayaka, from The Muppets to Nigel Westlake and Cab Calloway. Our readers are Jessica Turner and John Lightbody.

The Endurance bound in ice.

Avro 696 Shackleton MR1. Long-range maritime patrol aircraft. Type first flew 9 March 1949. RAF 220 Sqdn. At RAF Langar. ca1958

HERO SWEATER

Ernest Shackleton's last voyage

“4th January 1922: At last, after 16 days of turmoil and anxiety, on a peaceful sun-shining day, we came to anchor in Grytviken.  A wonderful evening.  In the darkening twilight I saw a lone star hover, gem-like, above the bay"

Shackleton's last diary entry, written on board The Quest in Grytviken, South Georgia, 102 years ago today

this is MY idol

A Fourth World album by Shackleton (!) - The Majestic Yes (2022)

Taking off from Beaugars Seck’s foundational sabar drum rhythms — recorded by Sam in Dakar in February 2020 — Shackleton has constructed a trio of intricately layered, luminous, enchanted, epic excursions. The second is more dazzled and meandering, with jellied bass, insectile detail, and discombobulated jabbering; the third is more liquid, fleet of foot, and psychedelic, with a grooving b-line and funky keyboard stabs, scrambled eastern strings and hypnotic vocalese. The harmonium in The Overwhelming Yes sounds like Nico blowing in chillily from up the desert shore. The overall mood is wondrous, twinkling with light, onwards-and-upwards; an uncanny, dubwise mix of the ancient and the futuristic. Mark Ernestus’ Version is stripped, trepidatious, mystical, and stranger still, with just a snatch of the original melody, extra distortion and delay, and crystal-clear drum sound. Twenty minutes of startlingly original music, with Shackleton the maestro at the top of his game, and a characteristically evilous dub by Mark Ernestus. Mastered by Rashad Becker; handsomely sleeved. Sick to the nth. Love 4 Ever.

im applying to grad school (again) for history and im wondering how I academically say I want to study arctic exploration in a way that shows humans have always been humans, and the way these people held each other in the cold, tried to keep their frozen eyelids open, brought food and cared for the dying even as their own heartbeats ebbed. In the rawest form of human suffering, where death holds out it's skeletal hands and they instead replied "Not yet, I'm only twenty-three and have a friend to keep warm."

"Also in these latitudes, as nowhere else on earth, the sea girdles the globe, uninterrupted by any mass of land. Here, since the beginning of time, the winds have mercilessly driven the seas clockwise around the earth to return again to their birthplace where they reinforce themselves or one another."

- Alfred Lansing, Endurance