Japanese Antarctic Exploration

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Nobu Shirase, the leader of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition from 1910 to 1912
Kainan Maru , Shirase's expedition ship from 1910 to 1912

The Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE) can usually be found in international literature under the heading “Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE)”. It is a collective term for the extensive research that Japan carried out in Antarctica after the Second World War . After the first expeditions in the years 1910 to 1912 as a continuation of whaling and deep-sea fishing in the so-called  Golden Age of Antarctic research , Japan started researching Antarctica in 1956 with the permanent Shōwa station .

National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR)

The NIPR was coordinated and financed through the budget of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology (MEXT) . The annual budget in 1995 was 2.9 million yen.

NIPR provides the entire infrastructure for JARE with the exception of the transport of material and personnel, which the icebreaker Shirase - after the Antarctic researcher Nobu Shirase - takes over, which in turn is maintained by the Japanese Ministry of Defense . The scientific program at Shōwa Station covers studies from the upper atmosphere , meteorology , seismology , gravimetry , geodesy and cartography , oceanography , glaciology , geology , geography , maritime and terrestrial biology and medical science . The following areas can also be explored on board the ship Shirase : ionosphere , meteorology , geomagnetism , gravimetry and physical, chemical and biological oceanography.

history

First Japanese expedition

First Japanese expedition to its southernmost point on the Yamato snowfield on January 29, 1912

The first Japanese Antarctic expedition took place in 1910–1912 under the direction of Army Lieutenant Nobu Shirase with the ship Kainan Maru . After departure from Tokyo on December 1, 1910, the expedition reached the Antarctic ice on February 26, 1911. A landing on the Antarctic continent was only possible the following year on January 16, 1912, when the Japanese met Roald Amundsen's ship Fram . They sailed on and advanced about 160 miles south of their ship landing site to the Yamato snowfield , where they turned back due to adverse weather conditions and dwindling strength. The Japanese could no longer win the race to reach the South Pole. On June 20, 1912, the ship and crew returned to Yokohama after traveling more than 30,000 miles . All expedition participants returned.

Research stations

The Japanese Antarctic Stations (English lettering)

In preparation for the International Geophysical Year (1957/1958), the Japanese government decided in 1955 to set up a national Antarctic research station.

The first station was built from the end of 1956 and moved into in the summer of 1957. It is located on the East Ongul Island , which is located east of the northern part of the Ongul Island on the east side of the entrance to the Lützow-Holm Bay . Originally this island was considered part of Ongul Island. It was not until the Japanese South Pole Expedition (JARE) in 1957 that a fairway between the two parts of the land was discovered. The Shōwa station consisted of three houses with a total of 184 m² of floor space. The Mizuho Station was added in July 1970 and the Asuka Station in January 1985. In addition, the Dome Fuji Station has been operating since 1995 , where primarily deep drilling is carried out. In 2001 all three stations had 48 buildings with a total floor space of almost 6,000 m².

JARE has been an intra- university institution since 1973 . The third polar icebreaker Shirase 5003 has been on the road for the stations in Antarctica since 2008 . Predecessors were the 11,600-tonne icebreaker Shirase 5002 , which went into service in 1983, and Sōya and Fuji before that . The acquisition and equipment of Shirase 5002 cost 24 billion  yen . The annual budget for the research stations in the mid-1980s was between three and four billion yen. The predecessor ship Sōya from Hokkaidō , which was much smaller at the time, at 3,800 tons , has been a museum ship in Tokyo since 1979 , while the Fuji , which was commissioned in 1965 and has a size of 5,250 GRT, is a museum ship in Nagoya .

The International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), to which eight countries belong, has been working since 1990 . As a member of the IASC, Japan is a sub-group of polar research. The focus of the work is the investigation of environmental influences in the atmosphere, the ocean and living beings.

Shōwa station

Shōwa-Station ( 昭和 基地 ,　Shōwa-kichi ), named after the era designation Shōwa , is the mother station of the entire project. It was occupied in January 1957 and, after an interruption from February 1962 to 1965, was continuously enlarged. The interruption was caused by a high level of unreliability in the transport options for both the icebreaker and the helicopter for the transfer traffic between ship and station. At the vehement pressure of the Japanese researchers, Parliament decided in December 1963 to build a new icebreaker, overland vehicles and a new budget. The station is manned in summer and winter. This is where all research results from the other stations come together.

Mizuho station

Mizuho Station ( み ず ほ 基地 , Mizuho-kichi ; 70 ° 41 ′  S , 44 ° 19 ′  E ) was established in January 1970. The station is located about 270 kilometers southeast of Shōwa station at 2,230 meters above sea level on the Mizuho plateau. The Mizuho station is not manned all the time, only in the ten years from 1976 to 1986 there were employees who observed meteorology , glaciology and the upper atmosphere, as it now only happens occasionally.

Asuka station

Asuka Station ( あ す か 基地 , Asuka-kichi ; 71 ° 31 ′ 34 ″  S , 24 ° 8 ′ 17 ″  E ), named after Asuka-kyō , is located at 930.5 meters north of the Sør Rondane Mountains . Erected March 1985. It has a total area of ​​450 square meters and is now mostly under snow and ice. The station serves as a starting point for field research in matters of geology, geomorphology , meteorite search , glaciology and biology in the Sør Rondane. The Sør Rondane are about 160 kilometers long mountain range that rises up to 3,400 meters above sea level. From 1987 to 1991 the station was constantly manned for the purpose of research in the areas of meteorology, glaciology, the core-mantle boundary , which is also called Wiechert-Gutenberg discontinuity after its discoverers, Emil Wiechert and Beno Gutenberg , and the upper atmosphere.

The mean annual temperature between 1985 and 1990 was −18.3 ° C and the wind speed was 12.6 m / s. The maximum temperature of −0.5 ° C was measured on January 5, 1990 and the minimum temperature of −48.7 ° C on August 9, 1987.

Dome Fuji Station

The dome Fuji station ( ドームふじ基地 , DomU Fuji kichi ; 77 ° 19 '1 "  S , 39 ° 42' 12"  O ) is situated at the top of 3,810 meters above sea level high Dome Fuji and was on 29 January 1995 as the last Japanese station to go into operation. It is located about 1000 km south of the Shōwa station.

Here, deep boreholes are primarily made into the ice (up to 2,500 meters) in order to study environmental influences and climate changes. In recent years, environmental protection has been recognized as extremely important for the unique ecosystem in the Antarctic and has been taken into account in accordance with international agreements.

Naming

The Takaki Promontory ( 65 ° 33 ′  S , 64 ° 34 ′  W ) in Antarctica, a peninsula, was named after Takaki Kanehiro , a naval doctor and member of the Japanese mansion . Takaki had helped the Japanese Navy fight the diet-related vitamin deficiency disease beriberi at the end of the 19th century , which made the Antarctic voyage much easier in 1910. Especially with Japanese crews it happened Takakis research after a long diet only with white rice to a large number of lethal diseases, the Japanese army even 1905. The actual cause, a lack of thiamine , was only in 1925 Christiaan Eijkman clarified what this 1929 Nobel Prize received.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernard Stonehouse (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Antarctica and the Southern Oceans . John Wiley & Sons, Chichester 2002, ISBN 0-471-98665-8 , pp. 366 ( digitized from Google Books ).
  2. ↑ a b Archive link ( Memento of the original dated August 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nipr.ac.jp
  3. ↑ http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/hakusho/html/hpae199701/hpae199701_2_021.html
  4. ^ Biography of Nobu Shirase
  5. ^ Roald Amundsen: The South Pole . Vol. II, in C. Hurst & Co 1976, ISBN 0-903983-47-8 .
  6. ^ Nobu Shirase, 1861-1946, at www.south-pole.com
  7. ↑ a b c d Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated May 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nsf.gov
  8. ↑ http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20080217a7.html Japan Times, Feb. 17, 2008
  9. ↑ Masayoshi Murayama: General Statement: JARE South Pole Traverse 1968-69 . In: Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition scientific reports Special issue . tape 2 , 1971, ISSN  0386-5452 , p. 1-22 ( nii.ac.jp ).
  10. ↑ み ず ほ 基地 . (No longer available online.) JARE, National Institute of Polar Research, archived from the original on December 16, 2004 ; Retrieved September 22, 2009 (Japanese). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nipr.ac.jp
  11. ↑ a b あ す か 基地 . (No longer available online.) JARE, National Institute of Polar Research, archived from the original September 26, 2011 ; Retrieved September 22, 2009 (Japanese). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nipr.ac.jp
  12. ↑ ド ー ム ふ じ 基地 . (No longer available online.) JARE, National Institute of Polar Research, archived from the original August 14, 2009 ; Retrieved September 22, 2009 (Japanese). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nipr.ac.jp
  13. ↑ Akira Kadokura, Hisao Yamagishi, Natsuo Sato, Kei Nakano, Mike C. Rose: Unmanned magnetometer network observation in the 44th Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition: Initial results and an event study on auroral substorm evolution . In: Polar Science . tape 2 , no. 3 , September 25, 2008, ISSN  1873-9652 , p. 223-235 , doi : 10.1016 / j.polar.2008.04.002 .

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