More than 10 years of hard work wrapped up in this short video reflecting on some of the key moments from the Scott Expedition.

Please watch, enjoy and share!

Ben and Tarka have today arrived back in the UK to a fantastic welcome from friends, familiies and partners Land Rover and Intel at Heathrow Airport.

Here are a couple of pictures as they touched down and a snapshot into a report on their return. More to follow shortly....

In the meantime tune in to ITV Daybreak tomorrow morning at 7.45am GMT to hear more from them about their epic adventure.

I'm typing this from a folding camp chair where I'm sat with my feet up by the stove, in a heated Weatherhaven tent, a few hundred metres from the snow runway at Union Glacier, a small base that's established each year by ALE on the Chilean side of Antarctica to support tourists and private expeditions.

We arrived here in the early hours of yesterday after a six-and-a-half hour flight on the same Basler ski plane that dropped us off on McMurdo Sound's sea ice last October, a journey that left Tarka and I excited about being a huge leap closer to home, but utterly confused about what time (or even day) it is, as Union Glacier operates on Chilean time, 14 hours behind New Zealand, the time zone we'd switched to when we reached Ross Island last week. We're the last expedition left in Antarctica this season, and there's a skeleton staff left at Union Glacier who'll fly out with us as soon as the weather's good enough for the big Ilyushin transport aircraft to get in from Punta Arenas.

The good news as far as Tarka and I are concerned is that one of this small gang of nine is a fabulous Norwegian chef who, in the 16 hours since we landed, has rustled up a selection of goodies that has included bacon and eggs, huge salads, rice pudding, giant burritos, home-made chocolate brownies, risotto, chicken wrapped in bacon, roast pumpkin and sweet potato, smoked salmon and cream cheese, raspberry smoothies and slices of fresh orange. I'm also happy to report that devouring this amount of non-freeze-dried food has had no ill effects beyond the discomfort of stuffing ourselves until we're entirely full at each meal.

The Basler's crew are here with us too, grounded until the weather releases its hold and they can leave Antarctica for their long flight north to their next job in Arctic Canada(!) an odyssey that entails six days of continuous flying over the Americas with stop-offs as improbable and exotic as the Cayman Islands. Jim Haffey, the pilot, is deeply respected in this small community, and his modest nature means it's taken a while to persuade him to regale us with tales from a career that spans tens of thousands of flying hours. His clear blue eyes sparkle with joy and the creases around his eyes deepen in smile as he talks about the practice of "tickling" a snow runway with the aircraft's skis. His three-man Canadian crew are dressed in heavy, insulated Carhartt jeans, fuel-stained hoodies and battered baseball caps; their faces bearded and weathered after their long season's work here. They nod appreciatively over cans of Chilean Polar Imperial beer as we coax stories from their Captain.

As for our story, the memories of more than a hundred days on the ice have become strangely blurred for both Tarka and me now we're back in relative civilisation; so many hard, hard days condensed to a single super-memory of whiteouts, sticky surfaces, sledges that never seemed to become lighter, rumbling stomachs, homesickness, sleep deprivation, deep fatigue and a land with a scale that defies comprehension and description. A scale that threatened at times to crush our spirits and to utterly exhaust our bodies, yet a scale that also left an impression on us that will stay for the rest of our lives. Emotionally I'm still feeling numbed by the whole thing. I'd expected to be skiing the last few hundred metres on to Ross Island in tears, but they never came, and I think it'll take a while for our all-consuming tiredness to lift, and for the immensity of what we managed to do to start sinking in.

The latest forecast predicts a brief window in the cloud tomorrow (or even today, by the time you read this) and therefore a sliver of hope that we'll soon be back in Punta Arenas.

Ben and Tarka arrived safely at Union Glacier at 0400GMT this morning in the Basler ski plane. They will have to wait for the weather to improve before flying onto Chile in an Ilyushin IL-76 (pictured above).

If you want to look at the current webcam and weather at the Blue Ice Runway at Union Galcier have a look at http://thistle.org/wx7/.

Bags packed, sleds loaded and plane refuelled! Ben and Tarka are now in the air.

Next stop will be Union Glacier then on to Chile.

Providing the weather stays clear they'll be back in Punta Arenas within the next 24-48 hours.

For an idea of the landscape they'll be flying across watch the short video above - taken nearly four months ago as they caught their first glimpse of Antarctica, the vast continent that they've come to know so well.

For plenty more videos from the ice and the wider expedition click here.

If you (like us) are suffering from blog withdrawal this morning watch this short video looking back on Ben and Tarka's incredible journey.

There's plenty more to follow in coming weeks so do stay tuned. Ben will be blogging as he and Tarka make their way back to the UK. We're also looking forward to getting a first peek at the footage and more photos from the final days.

Thank you everyone for your incredible messages of support and congratulations, both over the last 48 hours and throughout the expedition as a whole. 

Ben and Tarka will be in touch again before too long...  Do keep an eye out @scottexpedition and @polarben on Twitter and on the Scott Expedition Facebook page though in the meantime. For more videos the Scott Expedition YouTube Channel is certainly worth a peek.

Apologies for the delay in sending this update - it turned out to be a very long day indeed and I've only just had a couple of hours' sleep...

Antarctica seemed livid at the fact we were lying happily in our tent yesterday morning, eating well and contemplating our final few kilometres, and it went furiously about trying to bury us and our few belongings with spindrift, and occasionally as far as trying to shake our tent down and blow it away completely. The wind was gusting to nearly 50 knots, the hiss and spray of the snow hitting the windward end of our shelter sounded like heavy rain on a fast-moving car's windscreen, and erratic, gusts made the taut fabric boom and rumble with an alarming violence. It occurred to me that we were lying almost the precise distance away from Scott Base as Scott lay from One Ton Depot, and I thought of him as I lay there in the storm, trying to keep fear from creeping into my thoughts.

What to tell you of yesterday? We dismantled our green Hilleberg Keron tent -home for fifteen weeks now- in the early evening, as soon as the blizzard seemed to abate a little, and headed on a bearing towards a snow airstrip called William's Field (Willy's Field to the locals) and then on to the rough ice road that links the airfield with Scott Base and McMurdo beyond. We had been given two forecasts that suggested worst weather tomorrow, so we forced ourselves out of our sleeping bags and into the cold air once more. Low cloud and windblown snow blocked our view of almost all of the mountains and volcanoes that surround us, but we caught occasional snatched glimpses of Castle Rock and Observation Hill as we descended towards the sea. The wind came at us from our left, and our light sledges were blown out to our right-hand sides at crazy angles as we leant forwards and shoulder-barged our way into it, staying warm by skiing with short strides and a fast cadence, driving hard with our arms. It was weather that on any other day would have been miserable, but today it brought a grin inside the warm depths of my jacket hood rather than a gritted-teeth grimace; it can't stop us now, I told myself, and it obviously knows it.

After an hour we started to make out the huts and vehicles and flags of Willy's Field, and soon after that we were on the ice road that leads to Scott Base and McMurdo beyond. Skiing well past midnight, on a beautiful hard-packed surface, things started to get surreal. We skied past (and waved at) a fat seal, squirming along the side of the road in the opposite direction. A red US National Science Foundation truck approached us after a few more minutes, and I half-lifted a ski pole as a wave. The driver (Chris, from Charleston, South Carolina) stopped, clambered out and surprised us with an incredibly warm welcome. Thank you Chris; you cheered us up immensely on what was becoming a never-ending plod from flag to flag!

As we rounded the corner towards Scott Base, we could finally see the sea of McMurdo Sound, and hear the (glorious!) sound of waves lapping at the nearby shore. I thought I could make out a figure walking our way, to where the road turned from ice to rock; the transition from sea to land and our finish line for this giant trek. "Wait a minute", said Tarka, "There are a few more coming down the hill". It turned out to be almost the entire crew from Scott Base -and a few others from McMurdo- turning out to wave us over the line, on what was a chilly, windy afternoon. I was expecting a quiet finish, and was totally overwhelmed by the warmth of the reception we had from this wonderful gang.

Emotionally, Tarka and I are still numb and exhausted, and we are doing little more than eating and sleeping around the clock now. That he and I are here at all, at the end of this journey, with an unbroken 1,795-mile looping ski track behind us, is something I owe to an awful lot of wonderful people and companies that have carried on believing in me and in this dream, often for many years, and often when it seemed time and again that all hope of even starting it had been lost. There are too many to list and thank in one blog post, but I want to extend as much gratitude as I can wring out of clumsily-chosen words to Land Rover and Intel for breathing life into this expedition, and for making everything you have read about for the past four months possible. I also want to thank KCOM, Drum Cussac, CF Partners, Mountain Equipment, Bremont, GSK, Hilleberg and Field Notes.

My UK-based team have borne me humbly and tirelessly on their shoulders for so long, and I'm sending my sincerest love and thanks to Andy, Chessie, Tem, Gillie and Ryan. Further afield, I'm indebted to Jerry Colonna, Tony Haile, Al Humphreys, Martin Hartley, Anthony Goddard, Steve Jones (and the entire ALE team), Kate Bosomworth, James Lindeman, Alistair Watkins, Stuart Dyble and Philip Stinson.

Tarka and I are both so thankful to our loved ones and to our friends for being there for us always, and for putting up with us not being there for them for so long.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge my brilliant companion for the past three-and-a-half months of suffering and striving, the inimitable Monsieur L'Herpiniere. He has been reliable to the very end of the world, and to the very limits of endurance; both an anchor and a lighthouse in every storm this expedition has weathered. And even if no one had ever heard about this journey; if we had skied in secret, the chance to spend so long in this man's company is something I'm truly grateful for, and I can only hope that, long after we return home, I can continue to learn from and emulate his indomitable spirit, his stoicism in the face of deep discomfort and struggle, his generous and modest nature, and his remarkable self-reliance. He is, to borrow John Ridgway's highest accolade, a good man.

Right now it's time for more food and sleep, but I'll write again soon. Thank you all so much for following, for thinking of us, and for your messages and comments. With my brain addled and dulled by so much hard physical work and by so little in the way of rest and recovery, it's often been a struggle to do this journey justice in words and I fear I've fallen short on many occasions, but I hope you've enjoyed the story. Perhaps the best line I can think of to end on today is a piece of advice Tarka gave me several weeks ago on improving my skiing technique, but it's something that holds true for pretty much everything in life: "With each step, try to reach a bit further forward than you think you can".

On Friday 7th February at 01.15am  Ben and Tarka have re-written history as they completed, for the first time ever, the ill-fated journey of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s iconic Terra Nova expedition.

Having trekked 1,795 miles across the inhospitable landscape of Antarctica on a return journey to the South Pole and back, Ben and Tarka have achieved the world record for the longest polar journey on foot in history.

The journey, which has taken a total of 105 days (just over ¼ of a year), has pushed the limits of physical and mental fortitude and reset the bar for polar expeditions of the future. Ben and Tarka hauled sleds with a starting weight of almost 200kg each and walked on average 17 miles daily in temperatures as low as -46oC wind chill.

Ben Saunders said, “It is almost impossible to comprehend what we have achieved. Completing Scott’s Terra Nova expedition has been a life-long dream and I’m overcome to be standing here at the finish. The journey has been a mammoth undertaking that has tested the bounds of our bodies and minds each and every day.” 

“At times we found ourselves in dire straits in the intense cold, wind and altitude of the high plateau, weakened by half-rations and closer to the brink of survival than I had ever anticipated this journey taking us. In that light, both Tarka and I feel a combination of awe and profound respect for the endurance, tenacity and fortitude of Captain Scott and his team, a century ago.”

Captain Scott and his men died having covered almost 1,600 miles and this feat has never been surpassed in over 100 years, until today.

Land Rover and Intel are co-presenting partners of the Scott Expedition and have both played an important role in facilitating the expedition. Land Rover having assisted Ben in his training which has taken him to many inaccessible places across the UK, Europe and Greenland; and Intel provided Ultrabooks powered by its latest 4th generation Intel® CoreTM processor technology allowing Ben and Tarka to share their journey with the world along the way in their daily blog (www.scottexpedition.com/blog). Intel put the technology through its paces over several weeks prior to Ben and Tarka’s departure by freezing the Ultrabooks at temperatures of -40C.

Mark Cameron Jaguar Land Rover Director, Brand Experience “ It has been a true privilege for Land Rover to have played a part in this incredible expedition.  I have followed Ben and Tarka each day, trying in some small way to live the experience so vividly and eloquently described through Ben’s blog. To complete this journey has taken the very highest levels of physical and mental fortitude as well as a sheer determination to succeed.”

“We all need heroes, incredible individuals or teams to provide inspiration to spur us on to achieve better for ourselves and the people around us.  There are few feats of any description that exemplify more appropriately the Land Rover mantra of going ‘Above and Beyond’.  Congratulations Ben and Tarka.”

Commenting on Intel’s support of the Scott Expedition, Patrick Bliemer, Regional Manager for Intel Northern Europe, said: “We are honoured to have played a small part in this record-breaking Scott Expedition by Ben and Tarka.  We are incredibly proud that Intel technology has helped him share his experiences with audiences around the world – this unprecedented access is the first of its kind and one which will change the future of expeditions to come.”

Ben will be in touch shortly with the full low down and pictures from this historic moment. In the meantime - a massive thank you to all of you, our amazing followers. World - let's celebrate!

As I type this, we're camped about 15km from our Ross Island finish line, which is less than four hours' skiing away. We'll have a massive lie-in tomorrow before setting off in the afternoon, principally as the bases here run on New Zealand time, which is 11 hours ahead of us, so if anyone's going to be there to wave us over the line and take a photo for our holiday snaps, we need to fit in with their time zone.

Antarctica, true to form, didn't make life easy or comfortable for us today, and the weather seemed to be messing* with us in a spookily adversarial fashion; luring us - wearing far too little - out of the tent with bright sunshine and a still warmth first thing, before pelting us with a blizzard barely ninety minutes later. The wind intensified just as we stopped to eat and drink at our first break, and as we sat on our sledges with our down jackets on and our backs to the gale, whirling eddies and vortices of sandy spindrift were spun up into our faces, filling our pockets and sledges and anything else left unzipped for more than a few seconds with fine, gritty snow. It calmed down before we started skiing, then revved up again at the next break, in a pattern that dogged us for most of the day.

As I mentioned yesterday, our sheer exhaustion seems to be overriding any chance of outright back-slapping glee at being so close to pulling this vast journey off (our GPS says we've clocked a cumulative 2,859km now, which is 68 back-to-back marathons dragging sledges) but team morale is definitely much improved, and the prospect of skiing a mere 15km after a big lie-in seems infinitely more manageable than another mammoth day. Interestingly, despite never having seen the view we faced today, skiing past White Island towards the giant flanks of Mount Erebus until we picked up our final (hundred-day-old!) depot, before hanging a left and heading past Castle Rock towards McMurdo Sound, the scenery felt strangely familiar after so many years of dreaming of reaching this point.

We'll start skiing tomorrow in the late afternoon UK time so don't be alarmed if the tracker doesn't budge for a while after our usual kick-off. We should finish in the evening, but it may take us a while to get online again and send a blog post back, so watch this space. I'm sure Andy, Chessie and the team in London will update the site as soon as we phone in from Ross Island, so you'll be the first to know when we're home and dry.

At the moment, the magnitude of it all hasn't really sunk in yet, though I'm excited about getting more than five hours sleep for the first time in weeks, and I suspect lying here tomorrow morning the excitement - and if I'm honest, the sheer relief - may start to finally kick in...

*This may not be the precise word Tarka used as we were shouting at each other in the blizzard, but it was hard to hear him over the wind.

Despite our proximity to the finish line, today was as tough a day as we've ever had out here. The weather was similar to yesterday, though with a cold wind (at our backs, luckily) that stayed until the early evening, when it calmed down and things warmed up a bit. Starting the day was incredibly hard, and I was in equal parts relieved and distressed to hear that Tarka was struggling with the same weary lethargy and flagging mojo that I was.

Objectively, we're both in no doubt that our extreme physical fatigue is dragging our emotional states down, but we've both shared an unusual feeling lately of something approaching disappointment; we'd perhaps hoped Antarctica would hold more moments of beauty and joy, but the reality is that this has been - for the most part - a vast challenge that has taken us to the very outer fringes of our physical and mental endurance. Exploring those seldom-trod human realms has been a fascinating journey, but it's a frustratingly hard story to convey, as no one will ever know what it was truly like for us.

The other side of this frustration, however, is a bond with Tarka that I'll share for life. "Closer to home, closer to home", was a mantra that I started repeating to myself with each stride today, part-way through a 45-minute session that I began to fear I couldn't make it to the end of. We both fell over again on invisible sastrugi in the flat light, and at one point I feared I might have broken a bone in my forearm. These last days are proving as difficult as any that have preceded them. And speaking of last days, we plan to finish our very final one at the shore of Ross Island, by the New Zealand Antarctic station Scott Base.

It seems a logical - and historically relevant - spot to finish as it's the same point Scott would have aimed for (and the one that Shackleton and Wild reached in late February 1909 before being picked up by boat, as Scott would have been). It's impossible for us to walk from here to Scott's Terra Nova hut as we're at the end of the summer and McMurdo Sound is now open water, just as it was a century ago (though there's also an American icebreaker that burns 4,500 gallons of fuel per hour keeping the Sound ice-free these days too).

The aircraft we've chartered to take us back to Chile can't pick us up from here until the 8th, so we've decided to split tomorrow's giant day into two normal days, and we should arrive at Scott Base on the evening (UK time) of Thursday 6th. Keep your eye on the map!

This continent seems to be throwing everything it has at us in our final few days. Today we slogged away under heavy cloud cover again, luckily with a sliver of horizon that  - as you can see in the photo - gave us a glimpse of Black Island and made navigating relatively easy, though that was the extent of our view for ten hours on foot. The contrast was too poor for us to see the snow surface and the mess of small ridges and sastrugi underfoot, and it felt at times like we were trying to cross a frozen ploughed field on rollerskates. I fell over hard twice, and even Tarka (who lives in the Alps, whose mother is a ski instructor, and who I believe had his first pair of ski boots fitted shortly after his umbilical cord was cut) stacked it badly this afternoon. We laughed at each other when we slipped over three months ago, but now we're like two frail old men, living in fear of fracturing something in a fall at the eleventh hour of this Goliath trek.

Despite our proximity to the finish line, our sheer exhaustion seems to be standing in the way of us getting excited just yet, and lying in the tent in the evening getting psyched-up for another day of the same after too little sleep is never easy. Tarka's pep talk this evening contained one of his best lines yet: "Mate, we've gone a hundred and two rounds with Antarctica and we've won every one of them. Tomorrow we're going to win round one hundred and three."

That's all for now, as I desperately need some sleep! We plan to do a "normal" day of 38-40km tomorrow and then a jumbo last day on Wednesday 5th, with about 30km before picking up our first depot, where we'll pick up one day's food, pitch the tent, scoff it all, sleep for an hour or so and then carry on for roughly 25km to the shore of Ross Island. Watch this space...

The good news, weather-wise, was that we've had clear blue sky directly overhead all day today. The bad news is that we've had either low cloud or peculiar banks of freezing fog at ground (or indeed ice) level, so we've barely seen a thing in terms of scenery again, and we certainly haven't been able to spot Mount Erebus, Mount Terror, White Island, Black Island or any of the landmarks I've read and dreamt about for so many years that will guide us back to our finish line at the shore of Ross Island near Scott Base (I'll write about exactly where we're finishing in a day or two).

It's getting properly cold during the middle of the day now, as the sun dips lower and lower, and we had an ambient temperature of -20 degrees C. as we stopped halfway through today's ten hours. The surface continues to make life very hard indeed, and Antarctica certainly isn't letting up as we approach the final few miles. We picked up another depot today, the second we dropped on the way out, so we're well stocked-up with food and fuel, and we have the backs of the sledges to lug around now too, just to add to the fun.

While we still feel physically very weak, especially with an extra few kilos on the sledges, the additional calories we're taking on now have made a huge difference to our mental states; we're both able to hold trains of thought for far longer, and the sessions during the day seem to pass more quickly as a result of being able to lose ourselves in intricate daydreams and detailed future plans rather than drooling over imaginary burgers every few minutes.

Finally, I've finally been given the all-clear to let you in on something I've been excited about for the past year or so: the custom-made Bremont watch I'm wearing, called the Supermarine Terra Nova (named, of course, after Scott's last expedition). I've been working with Bremont for several years now, and I'm a huge fan of the brand, the incredible timepieces they make, and of the two inimitable brothers who started it all, Nick and Giles English. They're an inspiring duo, and they've worked astonishingly hard to do what many thought impossible, in building a British watch company from scratch that can not only stand its ground against some long-established and deeply-respected competition, but lead the way too. A reliable watch is one of the most critical tools of my trade, and I've been lucky enough to work with Bremont in creating my dream expedition watch, and one that will go on sale a little later this year.

Here's some more detail on the watch that has tracked every second of my 101 days in Antarctica so far from Giles himself:

"This is a custom mechanical watch developed for Ben to be a very effective tool for his expedition, made with an aircraft-grade titanium to reduce weight increase strength and make it 2000m water resistant. The mechanical movement is built with a special vibration mount that has the ability to protect the watch against extreme shocks and that also functions as a thermal insulator. Quartz (battery-powered watches) are prone to being affected by very low temperatures so the Bremont Terra Nova uses a mechanical automatic movement tested to -40c before Ben's departure. This is Bremont's first non-chronograph GMT watch giving a second time zone. This, when combined with the use of the 360 degree bezel, can be very effective as a tool for solar navigation. Scott would be pleased that the watch was developed and built in the UK."