Charting the Frozen Continent
Boing Boing special feature: Charting the Frozen Continent:
This year, Morin and his crew were preparing to camp in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleysóa place that serves as an analog for Mars on Earth. As the name implies, there’s little snow in the dry valleys. There’s also very little life, just cyanobacteria and the occasional seal that wandered in and died.
We all have a mental image of what Antarctica must be like (maybe from “The Thing”), but it’s more diverse than most imagine.
Call it a mental exercise, but lately I wonder what other parts of the Earth look like. These images from Boing Boing help paint a more detailed picture of Antartica’s landscape – and help dispel any continental stereotypes we have.
Part of the pleasures of travel is that, when someone mentions a place you’ve been, you can retrieve a reliable picture of it in your brain. Tell me about Arizona, for instance, and I can pull up a few images: broken Route 66 running parallel to the interstate, alpine Flagstaff and its snowy ridges, the Black Mountains and the doom they inspired. It’s all in my head because I’ve been there.
But there are far more places I haven’t been than have. It’s a logistical fact of life that, unless you’re some modern-day Magellan, a trip around the world is impractical. We do the best we can to get out and see the world.
So what does Siberia look like? Or inland China? Or the Eastern coast of Africa? How about those islands smack-dab in the middle of the Atlantic? Or the herding plains of Argentina?
That’s why I can get lost in a map. It’s so easy to spend time imagining what those topographical grooves look like in real life, or what high-tailing down this or that highway would feel. Dots connecting to dots, with so much along the way – what is life like from point to point? What is there to see? Is it worth the trip.
Photo journeys like the brief one at Boing Boing help ease the craving for more landscapes. I’ll never see the majority of the Earth, but any little bit I can gather is worth it.