In the footsteps of Shackleton

Sean Smith BBC Timewatch

McMurdo Sound is only accessible at the end of the Antarctic summer

A few weeks ago I was in a tiny aircraft, a Twin Otter ski-plane, flying above the vastness of the Antarctic continent.

My destination was the historic shore of McMurdo Sound, the starting point for the British attempts on the South Pole led by Shackleton and Scott, during what is now called "The Heroic Age" of Polar exploration 100 years ago.

I was with three men who were about to embark on one of the toughest endurance tests on the planet - an unsupported 850 mile (1360km) trek to the South Pole.

It is a journey that will take them across hundreds of miles of featureless ice shelf, then up one of the largest and most treacherous glaciers in the world, the Beardmore Glacier. This opens on to the immense polar plateau itself - the coldest, windiest, most inhospitable place on earth.

The Shackleton Centenary Expedition is being used to launch the