Self found reading about Antarctica so fascinating that she figured everyone else would, too. Late last night she was just beginning Chapter 7 (“Antarctica”) of the book she is currently reading, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, about the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838- 1842.
Self wrote a post that very helpfully pointed out that the leader of aforementioned U.S. Exploring Expedition was responsible for naming southernmost continent Antarctica. Then she threw in a few more salient facts from the chapter.
So, it serves her right to discover today that no one, absolutely no one is interested in Antarctica. And who can blame them? Who (except for self) can find ecstasy in reading a passage like the one reproduced below, from pp. 149-150 of Sea of Glory? Who in their right minds?
Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
At 5.4 million square miles, the Antarctic Continent is roughly the size of the continental United States and Mexico combined. Almost all of it is perpetually covered in ice that in some areas is more than two miles thick. Since the ice reflects as much as 90 percent of the sun’s solar radiation, this is the coldest place on earth, with an average annual temperature of -22 degrees F. Between 70 and 80 percent of the world’s freshwater is contained in this approximately 6.5-million cubic-mile reservoir of ice and snow, in which is preserved a climate record that goes back 200,000 years. If the Antarctic ice sheet melted, the sea level of the globe would rise by more than two hundred feet.
Antarctica is also the most inaccessible place on earth. Except for the point where the Antarctic Peninsula reaches toward Cape Horn at the Drake passage (a gap of six-hundred plus miles), it is surrounded by a moat of more than two thousand miles called the Southern Ocean. In winter, a six-hundred-mile-wide belt of pack ice seals off the continent. In summer, when the ice begins to retreat, the waters surrounding Antarctica become the mariner’s equivalent of a minefield. Indeed, an appalling vocabulary has been created to describe the appalling variety of icy hazards a navigator encounters as he or she approaches the continent. A “growler” is a piece of sea ice that is about 180 square feet and rises just a few feet above the sea; a “bergy bit” is about the size of a two-bedroom house, while a “floeberg” is described as a “massive piece of sea ice” with a dimpled or “hummocky” surface. But growlers, bergy bits, and floebergs are nothing compared to the vast, flat-topped icebergs that are spawned from the edges of the continent. “Calved” from the fronts of land-based glaciers, these tabular floes are unlike anything seen in the Arctic and are sometimes more that two hundred feet high and a hundred miles long. Making these dimensions even more remarkable is the fact that seven-eighths of a typical iceberg is under water.