"Made in England" an omen of Antarctica disaster

The soldiers at Matienzo Base in Antarctica made an odd discovery in January 1995—an antique dog sled, unlike any they had ever seen, bound together by leather straps, with a label reading “Made in England.”

Matienzo was an Argentine research base on a small island 30 miles off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. It was surrounded by a vast plain of white—a slab of glacial ice, 700 feet (215 meters) thick, that floated on the ocean. That floating slab, called Larsen A Ice Shelf, covered an area of water the size of San Francisco Bay. It had existed for a thousand years or more. But this hot summer it looked strange. The men had to go onto the ice shelf to collect snow for drinking water, and it made them uneasy.

The ice shelf was crisscrossed with narrow cracks—which the men nervously jumped over—and dotted with deep blue melt ponds. It was there, protruding from a melt pond, that they found the sled. It must have been discarded by a British expedition that passed through decades before.

That old sled turned out to be an omen of disaster, like a long-buried coffin that resurfaces when a city is ravaged by floods. It showed that Larsen A had been quietly deteriorating for years.

Read the National Geographic story - “Scientists Are Watching in Horror as Ice Collapses.”