Case file · Declassified record
Byrd alone at Advance Base
In the winter of 1934 Byrd lived alone for about five months in a buried hut on the Ross Ice Shelf to record the weather, and was slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide from his stove and generator.
1934 CE · -80.13, -163.95 · status: official
The account
His radio messages to Little America became so erratic that Thomas Poulter, E. J. Demas and Amory Waite drove out through the polar night to reach him, finding him gravely weak; he was flown out on 12 October. Byrd's book 'Alone' (1938) described the isolation and slow poisoning and became a classic of solitude.
The sceptical view
Fully documented by Byrd, his rescuers and his diary; it is a medical emergency, not a mystery.
Connections in the atlas
- The Belgica: the first Antarctic winter and its madness
- Byrd's flight over the South Pole
- Winter-over syndrome and the 'Antarctic stare'