The Explorer December 2023

This edition of The Explorer shares the launch of the Trust’s digital image archive Icy Heritage. The culmination of a two-year project to catalogue and upload the Trust’s images to a secure digital archive, this global digital heritage asset makes 10,000+ images publicly accessible for the first time. It showcases the last 21 years of the Trust’s Ross Sea Heritage Restoration Project (RSHRP) in Antarctica and our Inspiring Explorers™ programmes.

In this issue of The Explorer read about the Trust’s ninth Inspiring Explorers Expedition™ taking 22 young New Zealanders to South Georgia Island as part of the Shackleton Centenary Year Expedition. A huge thanks to our Inspiring Explorers™ Programme Partners MetService and Royal Society Te Apārangi and Inspiring Explorers™ Fund donors for helping us with this special trip honouring Shackleton’s final expedition.

We share with you the important work our conservation teams will be undertaking on the Ice this season, which includes collecting digital imagery using LiDAR and photogrammetry at Shackleton’s Nimrod hut at Cape Royds and Scott’s Terra Nova hut at Cape Evans as well as our annual essential monitoring and maintenance programme at each of the Ross Island explorer bases we care for.