 And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Antarctic continent is the largest essentially unknown region on earth. The ancient Greeks first guessed the existence of the great southern continent. Deducing the world was a sphere, they imagined there had to be a landmass to the south, to balance Europe and Asia in the north. Otherwise, they believed the globe would topple over! From Columbus' time on, European cartographers nearly always included a continent described as "terra australis incognita", or the Unknown Southern Land. Still, despite rumors and inferential evidence, it was not until 1820 that mariner Nathaniel Palmer logged the first recorded sighting of Antarctica. Today, despite all the advances in exploration and science, Antarctica still remains largely unknown. Antarctica's mainland covers about 15.4 million square miles (7 million km2), about one-and-a-half times the size of the United States. Nearly all of it is perpetually hidden beneath the largest ice cap on the planet. Yet this ice cap means the size of Antarctic itself is far from static -- it varies with the seasons, since the area covered by ice doubles in the winter as the sea freezes over. The variations in the area covered by the sea-ice have enormous consequence for the climate, ecology and isolation of continental Antarctica. |
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| Photography ©Jonathan Chester, Extreme Images | © 1995 Terraquest. All Rights Reserved. |