Newly Released Collection Offers Rare Look at Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition

A hidden piece of history has finally come to light. The Royal Society in London has launched a digital archive of more than 50,000 weather-related images that span three centuries. The collection includes records from the early 1900s Discovery expedition to Antarctica, which featured the only Australian on the team — a scientist named Louis "Bunny" Bernacchi. Researchers hope the archive will help people better understand long-term weather patterns and the brave scientists who faced Antarctica's harsh conditions.

Bernacchi was a Tasmanian physicist who almost never made it onto the expedition. The scientist who was first chosen to go was dismissed — reportedly because of his teeth. That unusual decision opened the door for Bernacchi to become part of history. His notebooks, diagrams, and photographs are now available online after nearly 10 years of work by Royal Society historians to scan and digitize the collection.

Royal Society historian Louisiane Ferlier says the archive gives a personal look at what life was like during the expedition. "You actually get to see what they're doing on a daily basis," she told the ABC. She described photographs of the team's mid-winter celebrations, where they decorated their dining area and drank beer to cope with the long, dark polar winter. These human details make the archive special beyond just its scientific value.

Life on the expedition was far from easy. The scientists had to deal with frozen thermometers and instruments that were never designed for Antarctica's extreme cold. "All of the instruments that were designed in Britain had never been in those conditions," Dr. Ferlier explained. The team had to figure out how their equipment would hold up as they went — a challenge that sometimes led to gaps in their data.

Some of those gaps had a more surprising cause: human error. Dr. Ferlier noted that on at least one occasion, the crew was too busy celebrating mid-winter to take their weather readings. Other gaps happened when someone forgot to replace a roll of paper in a recording instrument. Even so, the expedition gathered a huge amount of valuable data that scientists still use today.

The Discovery expedition is just one part of the new archive, which holds records going back as far as 1706. Royal Society historians believe it includes the oldest weather record ever made in Australia — a book of observations taken on a ship in Port Jackson in 1788. That predates other Australian weather records by about 50 years. The archive also features a detailed weather register from 1840 from Port Arthur, in what is now Tasmania, carefully filled out by a man named Thomas James Lempriere.

Lempriere's register tracked daily measurements like air pressure, temperature, and wind direction. It was presented as a dodecagon — a 12-sided shape — where each tiny square stood for one day's observation across a full year. The visual design made it easy to spot patterns over time. It is a remarkable example of how early scientists found creative ways to record and share data.

Today, scientists are using all of these old records in new ways. By comparing historical weather data to modern climate models, they can check whether current predictions match what actually happened in the past. This process is called reanalysis. Australian scientists in particular have been digging into these records to trace weather trends as far back as possible — not just to compare the past and present, but to understand how climate changes over long periods of time.