Page 6 - The Call of Antarctica: Exploring and Protecting Earth's Coldest Continent

The Ross Ice Shelf was one of the first parts of Antarctica encountered
by human beings. It covers an area of the ocean nearly the same size
as France.

Earth’s North Pole—the very top of the world. Antarctica is its
opposite, surrounding the pole at the very bottom. An ancient Greek
geographer Marinus of Tyre gave Antarctica its name.
Ancient peoples never visited Antarctica. But ancient geographers
suspected it existed because they believed that the way Earth achieved
balance was for each landmass to have a complementary landmass on
the opposite side of the globe. The Arctic had a landmass surrounded
by an ocean in the north, and so from a very early time, cartographers
depicted a large landmass surrounded by an ocean in the south. In 150
CE, the Greek geographer Ptolemy called this region Terra Australis
Incognita, meaning “unknown southern land.”
Over the following centuries, European explorers learned more
about Earth’s geography. From Europe, ships sailed south, around the
southern tip of Africa and then east to Asia. They traveled west to the
Americas. The explorers mapped the lands and bodies of water they
encountered. Cartographers created maps of the world, such as the Piri
Reis map of 1513, the Orontius Finaeus map of 1532, and the Mercator
map of 1569. All these maps show a continent at the bottom of the
world, even though no one knew for sure that it existed.

12 THE CALL OF ANTARCTICA