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Five Really Interesting Facts About Antarctica
Ever since New Zealand was finally discovered in about 1300 CE – a mere 47,000 years after its larger neighbor Australia – humans have been the ultimate cosmopolitan species. Comfortable, or at least able to survive, in every habitat from the Arctic circle to the Sahara Desert, there’s not a continent on Earth that hasn’t been overrun by our species.Except one.Nobody owns it (but plenty of people claim to)Depending on who you ask, Antarctica is “owned” by anything from an international group of several dozen countries, to nobody at all.If that makes it sound like a lawless free-for-all, it couldn’t be further from the truth. “The [Antarctic] Treaty, which dates from 1959, governs all activities in Antarctica,” said Henry Burgess, then the Deputy Head of the Polar Regions Department in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in a 2015 interview with the Royal Geographical Society. “It puts in place a unique and globally important system of international governance and establishes the continent as a region exclusively for peace and science,” Burgess continued. “It also prohibits military activity and sets aside all territorial claims.” That said, there’s quite a few countries who’d like us to think they own it. “Only seven countries have ever formally claimed parts of Antarctica: the United Kingdom, Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand and Norway,” explained Burgess. “During the 1940s and 1950s the competing claims between the UK, Chile and Argentina in the Antarctic Peninsula caused international tension.”Look at a political map of Antarctica, and you’ll soon see the result of this “tension”: the top-right quadrant in particular is a mess of overlapping borders between the three nations. So, whose claim takes precedence?Well, the other four nations in the Antarctic club tend to favor the UK’s claims – they’re “sort of a club within a club of mutual recognition of territorial claims,” Adrian Howkins, now a Reader in Environmental History at the University of Bristol, told Atlas Obscura.But internationally, the view is somewhat simpler, he added: “I think pretty much every other country in the world doesn’t recognize any of these claims.”It’s the biggest, driest, windiest, and coldest desert in the worldWhen you think of a desert, chances are the first word that comes to mind isn’t “ice”. But the defining characteristic of a desert isn’t sand, or heat – it’s lack of precipitation.“While Antarctica does have a lot of water in the form of ice, its cold temperatures keep the ice from turning into liquid water even in the summer,” explained Christopher S. Baird, author of The Top 50 Science Questions with Surprising Answers and Associate Professor of Physics at West Texas A&M University. “The cold temperatures also freeze the water vapor out of the air. The end result is that Antarctica is not only a desert, it is the driest continent in the world.”“Biggest” and “coldest” kind of speak for themselves – at around 13.7 million square kilometers, or 1.4 USAs, Antarctica is the world’s fifth largest continent on its own, and it can see temperatures as low as -80°C (-112°F). In fact, the lowest temperature ever seen on Earth, a chilly -89.2°C (-128.6°F), was recorded at Vostok station in 1983.But that’s not the only extreme weather the continent sees. “Antarctica’s environment has special conditions that make it the windiest continent on Earth,” explains the Australian Antarctic Program.“Antarctica is usually surrounded by a belt of low pressure which contains multiple low centers. This is called the ‘circumpolar trough’,” it notes. “But the interior of the continent is dominated by high pressure.” Combined, these conditions create what are known as “katabatic winds” – areas of very cold, dense air that form at the top of the Antarctic ice sheet and are pulled downhill by gravity. The air speeds up as it radiates outwards towards the coast, where low-pressure climate systems can increase their strength further. By the end of the process, “resulting wind speeds can exceed 100 km/h [62 mph] for days at a time,” the Program explains. “Wind gusts well over 200 km/h [124 mph] have been measured.”It’s weirdly similar to Mars, and it can make you go insaneFor researchers living in Antarctica, the frozen continent can sometimes feel like a different world.Literally: “I have come to call [Antarctica] ‘White Mars’,” Alexander Kumar, a research MD based at the Concordia research station in the center of Antarctica for the European Space Agency, told the BBC in 2012.“Living here is the closest anyone can come to living on the surface of another planet,” he said.And, as you may have gathered from his job title, that has made the pole very interesting to various space exploration agencies – particularly those hoping to one day send humans to Mars. There’s a couple of reasons for that: firstly, there’s the physical aspects – “the dry valleys of Antarctica are a prime destination,” points out the American Museum of Natural History, “because, with less than an inch of precipitation a year and an average temperature of -20[°F, -29°C], they are the most Mars-like places on Earth” – and secondly, there’s the crushing psychological torture of it all.“Our crew has been completely isolated since February. We are more isolated from civilization than the astronauts living onboard the International Space Station. It is impossible for us to leave the base until mid-November,” Kumar said.“Such isolation is a personal journey and challenge,” he continued. “I liken overwintering to dredging the ocean’s depths of your mind. You never know what you will find.” Crews in the research station can experience extreme psychological distress, Kumar explained, with his colleagues reporting feeling “dead” and “not real”. They experience physiological changes, with senses becoming “blunted” and reaction and cognition times slowing markedly. They lose their circadian rhythm; they experience memory problems and lose their ability to concentrate. Throughout the entire mission, Kumar said, “we only talk about and look forward to one date – the arrival of the first plane, our first contact with the outside world, expected in November.”“If you let your mind wander during the Antarctic winter to dwell upon […] negativity, I have seen it can be very dangerous and spiral out of your control,” he added.“There is no release – you are in a prison of your own mind here.”It’s insanely difficult to mapSpeaking of Mars: you know, until extremely recently, we literally had better maps of the Red Planet than we did of Antarctica. In fact, look at any map including the southern polar continent from before the mid-eighties – and yes, that’s barely four decades ago; our understanding of Antarctica is technically a Millennial – and you can pretty much guarantee it won’t be accurate.“It wasn’t until 1983 that the first broadly accurate map of Antarctica was produced,” explained Adrian Fox of the British Antarctic Survey’s Mapping and Geographic Information Centre, aka MAGIC. “That was the first time a map brought together enough information for us to be pretty sure that we’d got all the major features in the right places.”You might say that’s not surprising – after all, as Fox pointed out, “the reasons why so much of the highest, driest, coldest and windiest continent on Earth remains so poorly mapped are obvious.” Look at this map from 1957, for example, and you can see the continent outlined in a relatively thin band of yellow – it’s not a decorative choice, but an indication of the only areas “explored or seen by man” by that point.Plus, logistically, mapping Antarctica is kind of a non-starter: the place is huge, almost completely empty, and, thanks to the Antarctic Treaty, basically useless from a colonization or resource extraction perspective. To put it another way: mapping the continent would be a whole lot of work for not much practical gain.“But wait!” we hear you cry. “Isn’t the whole point of science that we do these things anyway? For the pure love of the game?” And the answer is, well, yes – but even then, there’s been one massive reason why we never got around to mapping Antarctica: the ice.Now, admittedly, if you’re setting out to do anything regarding Antarctica, some amount of frozen water is to be expected – but what doesn’t often come across to those of us used to more temperate climes is just how icy the South Pole can get. Consider, for example, the Gamburtsev Mountains, an Antarctic range similar in size to the Alps and completely hidden under two to three kilometers of ice (about 1.5 miles).“Most of the Earth’s land surface has been mapped in great detail and we have an extensive understanding of mountain heights, valley depths and coastlines,” noted Becky Sanderson, a PhD student in the University of Newcastle’s Department of Geography. “Antarctic[a]’s bed topography is a notable exception to this.”It would take the development of satellite imagery, RADAR, and echo sounding before we could get a real idea of what’s going on at the planet’s southerly pole – and even now, it’s uniquely ill-understood among the continents. Still, that’s a big step up from where we used to be – because…It was either discovered a lot more recently than you think… or a lot lessYou might think it makes sense that people tend not to live in Antarctica – after all, we’ve already been pretty clear that it’s not the most livable place on the planet. But to just point out that we didn’t colonize the continent is to do its inhospitableness a disservice, frankly: in fact, it’s so remote and inaccessible that we didn’t even know for sure that it existed until 1820.So, who discovered the massive expanse of ice and land at the bottom of the planet? It depends who you ask: “The first person to actually see the Antarctic mainland has been debated,” notes Royal Museums Greenwich. “In the last week of January [1820], Thaddeus von Bellingshausen reported seeing ‘an ice shore of extreme height’ during a Russian expedition to the Antarctic,” it explains; a mere three days later, “Royal Navy officer Edward Bransfield reported seeing 'high mountains, covered with snow' during a British mapping expedition.”That people hadn’t discovered it before this surprisingly late point – for context, we had already discovered Uranus, radioactive decay, and bicycles by the time we confirmed the existence of Antarctica – wasn’t for want of trying. People had long theorized that there must be some huge continent at the bottom of the world; they even made allowances for it on maps, which is why you can sometimes see what clearly looks like an Antarctica on pre-modern maps.1570 map by Abraham Ortelius depicting "Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (The southern land yet not known)" as a large continent on the bottom of the map.Image credit: Abraham Ortelius, public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsBut after centuries of searching for this hidden counterbalance to the North Pole – and yes, that was genuinely the logic people were using; they were correct, but not really correct – people had just about given up by the late 18th century. “I firmly believe that there is a tract of land near the Pole, which is the Source of most of the ice which is spread over this vast Southern Ocean,” wrote Captain James Cook, the explorer most famous for his voyages throughout the South Pacific, after three years’ unsuccessful searching for the proposed landmass. But, he continued, “the risk one runs in exploring a coast in these unknown and Icy Seas, is so very great, that I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”Cook was indeed being bold. Not only would he be proven wrong a mere 50 years later – but chances are, Polynesian explorers beat him by more than a millennium.“Polynesian narratives of voyaging between the islands include voyaging into Antarctic waters by Hui Te Rangiora (also known as i Te Rangiora) and his crew on the vessel Te Ivi o Atea, likely in the early seventh century,” notes a 2021 paper from researchers in New Zealand that looked at the oral histories and artwork of Indigenous communities. “In some narratives, Hui Te Rangiora and his crew continued […] a long way south. In so doing, they were likely the first humans to set eyes on Antarctic waters and perhaps the continent.”Which, after all that, might just answer who should own Antarctica. Finders keepers and all that – congratulations, New Zealand: we guess it’s yours.
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