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Chapter 7 - The Secret Land
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Chapter 7 The Secret Land ntarctica was a dream long before it became a reality. The coldest, windiest , and one of the highest places on earth is a dome of ice (from the coast one travels “up” not “down” to the South Pole) millions of square miles in dimension , pierced by a high mountain range shaped roughly like a question mark and cut through with enormous glaciers. This empty theater of fog and storm, of shrieking wind and stunning silence, of tranquil beauty and raging tempest lay for eons undiscovered at the bottom of the world, wrapped in “billowy white robes of snow weirdly luminous with amethysts and emeralds of ice.” Each year as the austral summer reluctantly gave way to polar night, “iridescent ice halos around the sun and moon” faded, and “horizons painted with pastel shades of pink, gold, green, and blue” turned deepest black. “The last greeting from the departing sun” was always spectacular. “The refraction of it appeared as a large red elliptical glowing body to the north-west, changing gradually into a cornered square, while the departing day seemed to revel in a triumph of colors, growing more in splendour as the sun sank, when the colors grew more dainty; and surpassed themselves in beauty.” In the inky blackness temperatures dropped to inconceivable levels, and great blizzards lashed and scoured the dark, frozen terrain. All the while enormous sheets of frozen liquid imperceptibly flowed down the dome, forming the mountain glaciers and vast Ross and Ronne-Filchner ice shelves that at the coastal edges—or barriers—periodically calved off into the surrounding seas upon which they sat like great white cakes. The vast tabular bergs that resulted slowly drifted northward, grinding their way through the pack ice and out onto the world ocean where they became the steadily shrinking sentinels of an unearthly land.1 181 The ancients, with their passion for logic, had posited great landmasses on each side and at top and bottom of a flat earth. Their dream of an “antarctica” first took substance one clear, cool October day two thousand years later when a tiny Spanish sailing fleet commanded by Ferdinand Magellan prepared to enter the narrow straits that linked the Atlantic with the Pacific at the tip of South America. Glancing southward, the great navigator saw a “tierra del fuego,” a land of fire, and assumed it to be the continent of classical Greek lore.2 He was wrong. Tierra del Fuego is a large island separated from the South American continent by that narrow body of water through which Magellan sailed and which now bears his name. But subsequent discoveries of New Zealand and other southern lands fired adventurous Western minds to seek out the real Antarctica and learn its dimensions, its nature, and its secrets. Between 1772 and 1775 the greatest seafarer of his age, Captain James Cook, circumnavigated the globe, spending much of his time sailing just below the Antarctic Circle. He endured stormy seas, fog, and pack ice before returning to England to report that any continent that might exist lay far below the ice belt and was of little worth to mankind. But his word was belied by the artist and naturalists who sailed with him and brought back tales of rich sea life. Whalers and sealers soon rushed southward in search of profit. In the latter decades of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth , Antarctica stole slowly into the human consciousness. The thin belt of islands that surrounded it was found, explored, and, where possible, lightly settled with whaling stations and processing plants. In 1820, Nathaniel Palmer, an American with the Stonington whaling fleet, and Russian admiral Thadeus Bellingshausen were the first to see the continent itself as they sighted the long peninsular arm that Antarctica flings out several hundred miles toward South America.Thereafter , the explorers rushed in, stimulated at midcentury by advances in electromagnetism that ignited a race to find the South Magnetic Pole. Great sailors, including Ross, Biscoe, Ballenz, Durville, and Wilkes, were followed after 1870 by steamship captains led by the Englishman George Nares in Challenger. These men and their successors began the arduous task of breaking through the formidable ice pack to map tiny portions of the Antarctic coastline. But viewing an icy coast from shipboard did not satisfy restless minds determined to unlock the world’s final frontiers in the heart of Africa, the mountains of Asia, and the polar regions. With the South...