The 

British National Antarctic Expedition (1901–04), led by British

naval officer and explorer Robert Falcon Scott on board the Discovery,
set a new record for reaching the farthest point south when Scott,
together with Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest H. Shackleton and English
explorer Edward A. Wilson, reached 82°17′ S on the Ross Ice Shelf on
December 30, 1902. Scott also went aloft in a tethered balloon for
aerial reconnaissance, and Shackleton first used motorized transport
at Cape Royds, Ross Island, during the Nimrod expedition (1907–09).
Other early heroic era expeditions were launched from
France, Germany, and Sweden. Some were privately funded, and some
were state funded. Most involved the nationals of several countries.
The latter part of the heroic age centred on the race for the South
Pole and other Antarctic firsts.
Discovery of the Antarctic poles
National and personal prestige in attaining the Earth’s poles, as well as
territorial acquisition and scientific inquiry, provided strong
motivation for polar exploration in the early 1900s. The
south magnetic pole, the point of vertical orientation of a magnetic dip
needle, which was predicted by the German physicist Carl Friedrich
Gauss to lie at 66° S, 146° E, inspired the unsuccessful quest, about
1840, of the seafarers Charles Wilkes of the United States, d’Urville,
and Ross (Ross had earlier discovered the north magnetic pole). The
point was reached on January 16, 1909, at 72°25′ S, 155°16′ E, on the
high ice plateau of Victoria Land by Australian geologists T.W.
Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson on a sledge journey from Cape
Royds.