The discovery and exploration of the Antarctic is very recent in terms of human history -- all the great discoveries about the continent have taken place in the space of just 200 years. But from the time of Columbus on, map-makers nearly always included a mythical continent described as 'Terra Australis Incognita " ('The Unknown Southern Land') situated exactly where today we know Antarctica stands.

There were numerous voyages by the sailors and explorers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into subantarctic waters. The first recorded crossing of the Antarctic Circle, however, was in 1773 by British Captain James Cook and his crews aboard the Resolution and the Adventure. Altogether Cook made three voyages through Antarctic waters. Though never actually sighting the continent, he was convinced that there was "a tract of land at the Pole that is the source of all the ice that is spread over this vast Southern Ocean." Cook reached 71° S, a higher latitude than anyone before him, and in three years sailed some 62,000 miles (1000,000 km) in possibly the greatest sea voyage ever made.

These voyages were followed by a period when American and British sealers traveled south discovering subantarctic islands. From these islands they slaughtered fur seals for skins and giant elephant seals for oil. It was possibly a member of one of these sealing parties, Russian Admiral Von Bellinghausen, who made the first sighting of the Antarctic continent in January 1820. A British officer, Edward Bransfield, sighted the Antarctic Peninsula a month later, and Nathaniel Palmer, an American sealer, also claimed a sighting in November of that year.

Scientific expeditions followed in the wake of the sealing parties. From the late 1830s onwards investigations into the earth's magnetic fields encouraged expeditions to set out to locate the South Magnetic Pole. The magnetic poles, one in each hemisphere, are the points where the earth's magnetic lines pass into the Earth. At these points, the magnetic or dip poles, a compass needle will stand vertically. The North Magnetic Pole had been discovered in 1831, sparking great interest among scientific teams from several different countries to find the southern equivalent.

The Frenchman, Dumont d' Urville, and American Charles Wilkes, from the United States, searched for the South Magnetic Pole in 1840. The following year James Clark Ross of Great Britain sailed into what is now known as the Ross Sea, and determined the approximate position of the South Magnetic Pole but was unable to reach it. He was successful, however, in charting unknown territory. This included discovering a giant iceshelf the size of Texas, which was later named after him.