Crumbling shells, melting ice - and a wildlife boom: what recreating Scott's Antarctic trip reveals about our seas today

A new polar expedition compared samples with those collected more than a century ago by by Scott, along with voyages led by Shackleton and BorchgrevinkThree glass specimen jars full of satsuma-sized echinoderms, or sea urchins, sit on Dr Hugh Carter's desk in the Natural History Museum. Each one, collected from the depths of the Southern Ocean by polar teams led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, Capt Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink, tells a tale of heroic exploration and scientific endeavour.Now, more than a century later, Carter, the Natural History Museum's (NHM) curator of marine invertebrates, hopes the preserved Antarctic urchins, 50 in all, will help tell a different, increasingly urgent story of modern times: how changes in the world's southernmost waters may be affecting marine life. Continue reading...