Their return journey soon became a desperate affair mainly due to the exceptionally adverse weather. On 17 February, near the base of the Beardmore glacier, Petty Officer Edgar Evans died, suspected to be from a brain injury sustained after a fall into a crevasse two weeks earlier. Then, in a vain attempt to save his companions, Captain Lawrence Oates deliberately stumbled out of their tent to his death on 16 March after his frostbitten feet developed gangrene. Wilson, Scott and Bowers continued on for 3 more days, progressing 20 more miles, but were stopped 11 miles short of the 'One Ton' food depot that could have saved them by a blizzard on 20 March. The blizzard continued for days, longer than they had fuel and food for. Too weak, cold and hungry to continue, they died in their tent on or soon after 29 March (Scott's last diary entry), still 148 miles from their base camp. Their bodies were found by a search party the following spring on 12 November 1912. Their tent was collapsed over them by the search party who then buried them where they lay, under a snow cairn, topped by a cross made from a pair of skis.
http://www.edwardawilson.com/index.shtml_____________________
Pack Ice Extracts from Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World What is pack? Speaking very generally indeed, in this region it is the sea-ice which forms over the Ross Sea area during the winter, and is blown northwards by the southerly blizzards. Thus it is that floes from a few inches to twenty feet thick go voyaging out to join the belt of ice which is known as the pack. It is clear that winds and currents are, broadly speaking, the governing factors of the density of pack-ice. The tendency of the pack is northwards, where the ice melts into the warmer waters. But the bergs remain when all traces of the pack have disappeared, and, drifting northwards. And the last stages of these, when the bergs have degenerated into 'growlers,' are even worse, for then the sharpest eye can hardly distinguish them as they float nearly submerged though they have lost but little of their powers. A berg shows only about one-eighth of its total mass above water, and a berg two hundred feet high will therefore reach approximately fourteen hundred feet below the surface of the sea. There are two main types of Antarctic berg. The first and most common is the tabular form. Bergs of this shape cruise about in thousands and thousands. A less common form is known as the pinnacled berg, and in almost every case this is a tabular berg which has been weathered or has capsized. The number of