Word: antarctica
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tried to follow the Greenwich meridian, the imaginary line that marks 0° longitude. Fiennes and Burton, who were joined by a third explorer, Oliver Shepard, 37, for the first half of the journey, crossed the Sahara by Land Rover before meeting their ship in the Ivory Coast. In Antarctica, the three men proceeded to cross the continent, including more than 1,000 miles of previously uncharted icecap, by snowmobile in a record 66 days. After reaching the South Pole, the team ascended and descended the 9,750-ft. Scott Glacier. Said Burton: "Nobody who wasn't there...
...seems only yesterday (though actually it was 1951) that the Thing was nothing more than James Arness dressed up to look like a rutabaga with legs, galumphing around an Arctic research station, scaring the wits out of its personnel. Now the scientists' camp has moved to Antarctica, and the Thing is no longer a thing. It still comes from outer space, but instead of being a monster, it is a kind of infection worming its way into animal forms, turning them into monsters...
During his doomed dash to the South Pole in 1912, British Explorer Robert Falcon Scott was right enough when he called it this "awful place." But Antarctica, half again as large as the continental U.S., is also a world of spectacular beauty. Beyond its great central plateau, where the ice is more than two miles thick, are towering mountains, volcanoes, and glaciers as big as Rhode Island that creep inexorably toward the sea at rates up to two miles a year. There are even curious, snow-free "dry valleys" where the winds have sculpted the rocks into a phantasmagoria...
...Though Antarctica gets less precipitation than the Sahara (less than 2 in. a year), nearly two-thirds of the world's fresh water is locked up in the polar icecap. Even bacteria are barely able to cling to life in the interior, but the coastal regions abound with seals and penguins, to say nothing of the whales that come from round the world to winter in Antarctica's icy, protein-rich waters...
...iron and coal, including perhaps the world's largest coal field, running more than 1,500 miles along the Transantarctic Mountains. There are strong indications of other treasures as well. More than 200 million years ago, before the world's continents began their slow drift apart, Antarctica was attached to South America, Africa, India and Australia as part of a great landmass that scientists call Pangaea (Greek for whole earth). In strata similar to those of its long-separated continental cousins, Antarctica, like the tip of South America and southeastern Australia, may possess uranium...