It is 100 years ago this year that the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott was pipped to the South Pole by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. As if this were not disappointment enough, he and the four men who accompanied him on the trek to the Pole never made it home, slipping instead into unconsciousness on the icy wastes of this bleak continent.

So dramatic was this climax of Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic that it has eclipsed the real purpose of the expedition: scientific discovery. This is the contention of the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson in his latest meticulously researched and beautifully written offering.

An Empire Of Ice maps out the origins and evolution of our fascination with the Southern Continent, with its roots in the late 18th century, when ‘Nature was static and Antarctica, if it existed, an eternal wasteland’ to the outbreak of the First World War. Larson covers key 19th-century achievements, notably the British Admiralty’s 1840s effort to determine the position of the magnetic South Pole under the leadership of James Clark Ross, the Royal Society’s bountiful Challenger Expedition in the 1870s and the experiences of explorers in the more accessible Arctic. These accomplishments set the scene for the ‘heroic age of Antarctic exploration’ on board three British vessels – the Discovery, Nimrod and Terra Nova.

These expeditions were complex imperial enterprises. But ‘Empire is not only about the physical conquest of territories; for the British it was always about scientifically exploring and systematically exploiting them,’ writes Larson. ‘Science wove through every part of them, both influencing and being influenced by their other aspects – including such critical intangibles as leadership and choices.’ Few books on Antarctic exploration have taken this science-centred approach and it gives a new and coherent view of these bold journeys into the unknown.

Following word that Scott had been beaten to the Pole and then perished on his return journey, British commentators trumpeted the expedition’s scientific ambitions. Yet the recovery of Scott’s diaries in 1913 – notably his dying ‘Message to the Public’ – changed how he and the Terra Nova expedition would be remembered, argues Larson. Their massive contribution to biology, geography, meteorology, geology and glaciology was forgotten in an instant; instead the expedition became a model of British pluck, the heroic self-sacrifice of its protagonists entrenched by the inspirational role they played during the First World War.

Superficially at least, Into the Silence takes on similar subject matter, recounting the extraordinary stoicism of British explorers in search of a geographical extreme, this time the summit of Mount Everest. There is imperial ambition, ice, frostbite, derring-do aplenty and a tragic ending to boot.

But the three expeditions that act as the narrative focus for Wade Davis’s breathtaking book took place in 1921, 1922 and 1924; its protagonists had survived the Great War, most of them had witnessed its horrors first-hand and their ascent of Everest only makes sense in the light of this fact. For them, writes Davis, Everest had become ‘a sentinel in the sky, a place and destination of hope and redemption, a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad.’

It is a compelling thesis delivered in a gripping narrative style. The assault on Everest is shot through with the mountaineers’ harrowing wartime experiences. ‘Headless torsos, faces on fire, blood shooting out of helmets in three-foot streams, bodies cleft like the quartered carcasses in a butcher’s shop, splinters of steel in brains, shattered backbones and spinal cords worming and flapping about in the mud.’ Graphic flashbacks like these, which continually disrupt the Himalayan plot, echo the recurring horror these shell-shocked men suffered in alienated silence.

George Mallory, who took part in each of the three Everest expeditions and perished on the last, was severely affected by what he had witnessed at the Somme in 1916 and he provides the biographical backbone of the book. Davis also draws deeply on the more wide-ranging wartime travails of his many mountaineering colleagues to lay bare the senseless waste of the conflict’s major campaigns.

Out of these depths of despair, Mallory and his fellow climbers push their way through repeated setbacks to reach ever greater heights. When it comes, the death of Mallory and his climbing companion Sandy Irvine on the mountain in June 1924 is not quite the tragedy that it appears to be. It certainly does not come close to the tragedy of the Great War that Davis captures so effectively. This is a highly original, truly moving and brilliantly executed account of one of history’s darkest periods.