De-iced diary

Global climate change is causing snow melts at the frozen huts of the early 20th c. Antarctic explorers, revealing Ernest Shackleton's whiskey and photographic negatives from Robert F. Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition. British photographer, surgeon, and zoologist George Murray Levick was a surviving member of that expedition that took Scott's life. Now, more than a century later, the notebook he left behind has been recovered from the melting snow. While it doesn't contain his observations on the sex lives of penguins, it does include lists of dates, subjects, and exposure details that historians can now use to cross-reference with the images in the Scott Polar Research Institute collection at Cambridge. The notebook, which is still remarkably legible, is being conserved by the Antarctic Heritage Trust. After it is digitized, it will be sent back to join other artifacts – which it is thought would have remained frozen forever– in Scott's hut, the most southerly and least visited museum in the world.

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