Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
By the beginning of this century, the exploration of Antarctica inspired a dramatic but tragic race to
reach the South Pole. Lying about a thousand miles inland, the South Pole is a high, flat table—the coldest,
most desolate place on earth. A vista of raging blizzards and lifelessness, the pole was reached by Nor-
wegian Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) on December 14, 1911. His party arrived one month sooner than
that of Englishman Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912), whose ill-fated four-man group got to the pole on
January 18, 1912. On their disappointed return trip, Scott's party faced two months of starvation, scurvy,
and frostbite, before all died only eleven miles from the next supply station.
Since its discovery, Antarctica has been the focus of competing claims for what may be unreachable
riches. Only once has there been actual fighting over the territory. In 1952, British scientists were fired on
by Argentine soldiers ordered to prevent the British from rebuilding a destroyed scientific base. They were
disputing the Antarctic Peninsula, a long finger of land that reaches up toward the tip of South America,
only 800 miles away. The British based their claim on their possession of the Falklands, a group of islands
about 450 miles (650 km) northeast of Cape Horn at the tip of South America. (Great Britain's claim to
the Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas to Argentina, led to a war between the two nations on the islands in
1982. After a brief but fierce fight that left 1,000 dead on the two sides, the British retained possession.)
During the 1950s, Australia, New Zealand, France, Norway, and Chile also staked claims to Antarctic ter-
ritory. The United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, South Africa, and Belgium established research stations
by 1959 and were later joined by China, India, and Brazil. Although there is a presumption of substantial
mineral wealth and petroleum reserves under the ice and in the seas around Antarctica, the continent's de-
manding climate, tremendous ice depths, and fragile environment pose huge obstacles to recovering any
of that estimated wealth.
Since 1961, Antarctica has been governed by the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, which declared that
the continent be exclusively used for peaceful purposes, prohibited military operations, and established the
continent as the world's first nuclear-free zone. But that treaty lapsed in 1989 and its provisions are open to
negotiation. Twenty countries have already agreed to forbid oil drilling in Antarctica. Australia and France
have called for a perpetual ban on mineral extraction. But if somebody finds oil tomorrow and a way to get
it out from under the ice, how long will the good intentions last?
In the meantime, Antarctica and the South Pole exist as a rather extraordinary science lab whose miles
of icy depths and unique conditions provide an array of interesting clues about the earth's past and the
atmosphere above. It has already yielded the distressing discovery of the hole in the ozone layer of the
atmosphere. (See Chapter 5.)
Isn't Europe Just a Part of Asia?
This may come as a severe shock to Conservatives in Great Britain's Parliament and to other European
traditionalists who have strong views about Europe's cultural superiority. But sorry, folks. You are just an-
other part of Asia. It's true, geographically speaking. Europe, including the British Isles, is simply a large
western peninsula of Asia. Many geographers, when referring to Europe and Asia, speak of Eurasia. But
political considerations and historical precedents often force geographic realities to take a backseat.
The second-smallest continent, Europe, including the European portion of the former USSR, is estim-
ated to occupy 3.8 to 4 million square miles (10.5 million square km), or about 8 percent of the earth's
land surface. An exact figure is difficult to obtain because of numerous offshore islands and disputes over
exactly where Europe ends and Asia begins. Both Russia and Turkey, for instance, have one foot on the
dock and one foot in the boat, so to speak. But the European states—including less familiar little places
