Day 15: My Data

One of the main reasons that I got interested in Geography was because my dad had experienced a lot of it in his life and consequently told us about it. He had been a Geologist for the British Antarctic Survey and had done some pretty wild adventuring as part of his job and more generally in the 1970s. This included Antarctica, the Himalayas and the Andes. I have never been to any of these places, potentially as a result of the volume of slide shows that I have seen.

This was my dad in Antarctica with his lead dog called Sue who he trained up from a puppy. This generation of explorers used dogs extensively for transportation - off topic, but there is a really interesting book on this.

This is another one of him looking more adventurous on his sledge. The pipe he is holding was purely an aesthetic choice to make him look more adventurous apparently.

My dad has a huge numbers of Antarctic stories, but the one that I really like as a Geographer is that he has a mountain named after him. Well the top of a mountain peeking out of the snow, as formally it is a Nunatak. He was the first person to go there and then also map it - this is an extract of the full map:

There is more about Singleton Nunatak on its Wikipedia page.

This map extract comes from the full publication, which can be downloaded in full from the NERC archive:

Singleton, D.G.. 1980 The geology of the central Black Coast, Palmer Land. Cambridge, British Antarctic Survey, 50pp. (British Antarctic Survey Scientific Reports, 102).