Why did Scott's polar party die on the way back from the Pole?

In March 1912 Robert Falcon Scott and two companions were halted by a blizzard 11 miles south of a supply depot, and they never moved again. Two months earlier they had stood at the South Pole. Why did the party that arrived second not get home?

The answer depends on whom you ask. Scott planned to use motors and animals only across the Barrier and to man-haul on the polar plateau. In practice the motor sledges proved only briefly useful and the ponies were affected by their age and poor condition. His main supply point, One Ton Depot, was laid 35 miles short of its planned position, and when Oates advised killing ponies to move it, Scott refused. Near the pole he decided to take five men instead of four, which forced recalculations because everything had been based on four-man teams.

On the way back the party met three critical difficulties on the Barrier: the dog teams did not appear, the temperature dropped unexpectedly, and the depots were short of fuel. Edgar Evans died on 17 February. Scott himself, near death, listed the loss of the ponies, the weather, a fuel shortage he could not account for, and the sickening of Evans and Oates, and put the main blame on the sudden severe weather.

Historians still disagree. Roland Huntford blamed Scott's leadership and judgment of men; the meteorologist Susan Solomon argued that extraordinarily adverse weather decided it. And in 2012 Karen May of the Scott Polar Research Institute drew attention again to Scott's written orders for the dog teams to meet the returning party about 1 March, an order that was not carried out.