What recreating Scott’s Antarctic expedition reveals about our seas today

The research trip retraced the routes of Borchgrevik’s Southern Cross, Shackleton’s Discovery and Scott’s Terra Nova expedition in January. Photograph: Courtesy of Dr Hugh Carter

Three glass specimen jars full of satsuma-sized 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.