A diary kept by a crew member of Captain Scott's ill-fated 1912 expedition to the Antarctic has provided a valuable insight into conditions on the explorer's final voyage.

The fragile volume, encrusted in penguin faeces, was discovered yards from Scott's hut, which still stands in the perilously-cold icescape.

Pictures of the document have been released for the first time to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the last diary entry in Scott's record of his fight to beat a team of Norwegian explorers to the South Pole.

It has been painstakingly conserved by a British student from the University of Northumbria, in Newcastle, using special inert plastic protective sleeves in a laboratory in New Zealand.

Entries were recorded by the unknown crewman who kept a sporadic log of chores aboard the Terra Nova, the ship which carried Robert Falcon Scott to the frozen wasteland.

Experts have no idea of the occupation of the diarist who used a 1910 magazine produced by Scottish distillers, Dawson's Whisky Company, to chronicle day-to-day events.

One diary entry read: "Very little wind, ship still rolling badly. In the dog watch a lot of washing clothes, officers flitting around in loin cloths doing their own washing, & fishing over the side for specimens."

The diary has been held at the Antarctic Heritage Trust, in Christchurch, New Zealand, since its discovery last summer.

Kirsten Elliott, a 26-year-old conservation of fine art student at Northumbria University, carried out the arduous task of cleaning the document and stabilising the pages so they could be analysed by historians.

She said: "The diary does start to provide a background from the crew members who went to the Antarctic and the hardships they endured when they went there.

"The magazine was in a terrible state. It was found buried in an ice pack outside Scott's hut.

"The Antarctic weather conditions left the magazine in an extremely fragile state.

"Seasonal ice melts and re-freezing caused severe damage to the pages, which were dirty and ice-damaged and the paper was badly cracked and splintered.

"The magazine had been frozen, buried and covered in penguin droppings for over 80 years.

"The texture of the paper was one of the strangest things I've ever felt. It was fabric-like and spongy, which is unusual when working with paper, which generally becomes brittle with age.

"One theory is that the water managed to get between the paper fibres, and as the magazine froze, the expansion of the water pushed the fibres apart."