SOUTHERLY CHANGE
Ever since a boatload of Norwegian sealers first set foot on the world’s southernmost continent in 1895, humans have attached grand and dramatic stories of conquest, survival and death to Antarctica. In preparation for my own expedition I diligently read up on the cowboys of cold I’ve been raised to admire from the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. But at the first sight of land I paced the deck sobbing behind my sunglasses and, when the tears dried, laughed at the notion that we think anyone has somehow conquered such a place.
Antarctica’s proportions are epic beyond comprehension: a continent nearly double the size of Australia with less than one per cent of its surface exposed and the rest under a 29-million-cubic-kilometre ice sheet, up to four kilometres thick. It has massive inland lakes, active and dormant volcanoes and the world’s largest glacier at 40 kilometres wide and 400 kilometres long. The lowest temperature ever recorded of
