Terra Incognita Read Free Page A

persistently rolling towards the coast, forcing its way between mountains, turning itself into glaciers split by crevasses and inching its way into a floating ice shelf or collapsing into the Southern Ocean. As a result, ice shelves surround the jagged Antarctic coastline. One of them, the Ross Ice Shelf, is larger than France.
    The continent consists, broadly speaking, of two geological zones divided by the Transantarctic mountain chain. Greater Antarctica (also known as East Antarctica) is generally thought to be one stable plate. Lesser Antarctica (or West), on the other hand, consists of a lot of smaller, unstable plates – that’s why all the volcanoes are in it. Besides the Transantarctics slicing down the middle, mountains form a ring around much of the continent. Beyond these coastal heights, in the interior, topography tends to disappear into thousands of miles of apparently flat ice – the enormous polar plateau. Mountain ranges as high as the Appalachians are hiding under this flat ice. The South Pole, the axis of the earth’s rotation, is located in Greater Antarctica, on the polar plateau.
    For much of the year, Antarctica enjoys total darkness or total daylight. The cusps between the two are short and exciting: it might be eight weeks from the moment the sun makes it first appearance over the horizon to the day it never sets. The summer season, broadly speaking, runs from mid-October to late February.
    One of Antarctica’s most salient characteristics is that of scale. The continent, one tenth of the earth’s land surface, is considerably larger than Europe and one-and-a-half times the size of the United States. It has ninety per cent of the world’s ice, and at its deepest, the ice layer is over 15,000 feet thick, pushing the land under it far below sea level. Thousands of cubic miles of ice break off the Antarctic coast each year. It is, on average, three times higher than any other continent. It never rains and rarely snows on most of it, so Antarctica is the driest desert in the world.
    Into this land of superlatives I plunged. My plan was to fly in from New Zealand with the Americans in November, just as the austral summer was under way. Their main base is on one of the many hundreds of islands scattered around the Antarctic coast, and from there I could travel to a variety of field camps on the continent itself, perhaps make the Pole for Christmas, and later hook up with the New Zealanders, who were based nearby, and the Italians in Victoria Land only a couple of hundred miles away. At the end of January I was going to make my way over to the British Antarcticans, all working on the peninsula, the finger tapering off towards South America. As this was on the other side of the continent, I was obliged to travel back to New Zealand on an American military plane and take a fiendishly roundabout route to the Falklands (so diabolical was it that I ended up back in my own flat in London in the middle) in order to catch a lift on the British Antarctic Survey Dash-7 plane down to the Antarctic Peninsula. I was going to travel with my compatriots for two months, by which time night would have begun its swift descent, and then sail up the peninsula in an ice-strengthened ship and arrive in the Falklands in early April.
    In my grandmother’s youth a restless spirit would probably have got her as far as Spain, then as exotic as Xanadu. The world has shrunk, and I was able, now, to go to its uttermost part.
    By the end of the beginning I understood something, at least. I understood that Scott was right when he endorsed Nansen’s exhausted remark, ‘The worst part of a polar expedition is over when the preparation has ended and the journey begun.’
    When someone asked Jonathan Raban why he was making his journey down the Mississippi, he said he was having a love affair with it. Antarctica was my love affair, and in the south I learnt another way of looking at the world. What I