This means the stories that formed our earliest understanding of Antarctica have been handed down to us by those who made the journey-the heroic men who called themselves explorers and adventurers, with names like Cook and Amundsen and Shackleton, the “pioneers” after whom places of import on the continent are named today. Antarctica is the only continent in the world that is home to no Indigenous human population. For much of history, it’s been a question mark in people’s minds and on maps, known only as Terra Australis Incognita, or unknown land of the south. At the same time, it’s superlative: it’s the coldest, the windiest, the driest the Antarctic Ice Sheet is the largest single piece of ice on earth the continent is the most remote, impenetrable and inhospitable place on the planet. The continent has no cities or borders, and not even trees can survive there.
The continent is designated as a global commons, which means nobody owns it. I’m ashamed to admit that if I had thousands of dollars to spare, I can’t rule out that I might be tempted onto a cruise ship.Īntarctica holds mythical appeal in our popular imagination as a place defined by purity, and by lack: untouched, unspoiled, unblemished, and unpopulated. It doesn’t take long for the conceptual whiplash to set in as I toggle between Antarctica as one of the epicenters of climate disaster and Antarctica as the pinnacle of adventure tourism. Or, if I wanted to spend a bit more, for $98,500, I could catch a private charter jet and go glamping at the South Pole with a company that touts itself as “pioneering luxury in Antarctica.” I blink at the word “pioneering” as short videos loop in the background of smiling, bundled tourists against shades of bright whites and blues. For around $13,000, I learn, I could book a 12-day cruise to the last continent. The bad climate headlines already too familiar, I click down the Antarctica tourism rabbit hole. But in recent years Antarctic tourism has begun to boom-this past season, over 100,000 visitors checked the continent off their bucket list. For most of history, travel to Antarctica was the exclusive purview of explorers and researchers, leaving the continent vastly untouched by human hands.
#Google earth antarctica how to#
The other path you can cut through the internet is unprecedented in its own way: travel stories detailing how to get to Antarctica as a tourist-the Earth’s final frontier, according to Forbes-and what to do once you get there. The missing puzzle piece of frozen water the size of Greenland is hearkening proclamations like “unprecedented,” “record-breaking” and “historic” for its possible impact on hastening sea level rise. One, familiar and horrifying: Headlines linking the continent’s increasingly erratic behavior to a foreboding planetary future-in this case, that the sea ice that was expected to form around Antarctica during its austral winter hasn’t arrived. If you’ve typed “Antarctica” into Google lately, you might have noticed that the results page maps out two dramatically divergent search engine paths you could venture down.
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