Sunday 22 March 2015

Day 31 - a hero



Here we have young scientist Emil Racoviță explaining the Aurora austral to the Antarctic penguins. Later he became a renowned  biologist, zoologist and speleologist, but one of his greatest achievements was going in 1897 on a research expedition to Antarctica, aboard the ship Belgica (it was  the first expedition to winter in the Antarctic region). Now, on the ship Emil did plenty of awesome science things, but this is what I like most: the ship got stuck in ice for more than a year, and at some point people got pretty depressed. So in order to keep the spirits up, every evening Emil would do a cartoon of the day's events. Here's one of them (yes, in the corner it's written "universe specialist (?) explaining Aurore austral to the inhabitants of the South Pole").

2 comments:

  1. Emile, it's my 2nd name... but I never spoke with any penguinin Antarctic, unfortunately.

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  2. THis is an amazing story and I've never heard of it and I will research it as soon as I can.

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