Our Mysterious 7th continent

Our travels often tend to the extremes! From 40C (104F) in one of Australia’s hot arid deserts in February 2019, 12 months later we are travelling to a frozen arid desert 40F (4C).  We are about to head off on an extraordinary journey to the Ross Sea, Antarctica, due south from NZ in the wake of intrepid frontier explorers, fearless men from the 'heroic' or 'golden age' of exploration. 

Our route south to the seventh continent! 

Antarctic explorers: Robert Falcon Scott (L). James Clark Ross  (top R), Ernest Shackleton (Bottom R) 

Why choose this destination? Remoteness and an all-consuming curiosity to journey to the bottom of the world. The Ross Sea region of Antarctica is one of the most remote places on earth. With shipping restricted by impenetrable pack ice to just two brief months each austral summer, few people have ever visited this strange and beautiful place: apart from scientific personnel only a handful of tourist expedition ships visit each year, although that is bound to change soon! The Ross Sea takes its name from Sir James Clark Ross who discovered it in 1841. The British Royal Geographical Society chose the Ross Sea for the now famous British National Antarctic Expedition in 1901-04 led by Robert Falcon Scott. That one expedition spawned what is sometimes referred to as the 'Race to the Pole'. Ernest Shackleton almost succeeded in 1907-09 and the Japanese explorer Nobu Shirase tried in 1910-12. Scott thought it was his, but was beaten by his rival, Norwegian Roald Amundsen in the summer of 1911. Shackleton's ambitious Trans-Antarctic expedition in 1914-17 marked the end of this 'golden age' of exploration, but many of the relics of this era remain, including some huts which we were hoping to visit.

I knew little about the rather exotic Antarctica so I did a little background research before we boarded our wee ship, the Spirit of Enderby, to plough the waves of the mighty Southern Ocean. This, the world’s seventh continent, seemed rather an enigma - at least to me. A mysterious place, one of the last frontiers. Since the C1 AD, people believed there existed a vast southern land to ‘balance’ the northern lands of the ‘known’ world, but the first confirmed sighting of the continent is commonly attributed to a 1820 Russian expedition under the direction of Fabian Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev. That expedition aimed to reach the Southern Ocean in order to prove, or disprove, the existence of a suspected seventh continent, Antarctica. They did it!

Just to set the scene before we launch into this adventure, this vast white continent Antarctica is the world’s largest desert region covering an area larger than the Sahara, Arabian, Gobi, and Kalahari combined. Many valleys are glaciated but there are also dry valleys made up primarily of bedrock, large boulders, and gravel plains; these haven’t seen rain for at least 2 million years! But they are dotted with a number of frozen and non-frozen hyper-saline lakes. Given the valleys’ arid environment, any ice that does break off the surrounding glaciers immediately turns into vapour, totally bypassing the liquid stage. That’s not exactly the picture you think of when you hear ‘White Continent’ yet the effect is caused by the snow-covered Transantarctic Mountains. This towering range, which divides the continent, serves as a natural barrier for the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. But I get ahead of myself …. Nevertheless it is truly a unique and intriguing continent. 

Slashing through the centre of the continent runs the Transantarctic Mountains which divide the continent into East and West

The average winter temperature in its polar deserts is around -29C and can drop as low as -68C; during summer months it can warm up to a balmy -1C which produces short-lived streams that link the lakes in the dry valleys. While explorers long believed that these dry valleys could not sustain life (Robert Falcon Scott, who discovered the region in 1903 calling it “a valley of death”), scientists in the 1970s unearthed a number of microorganisms in the area. Since then, nearly 350 vascular plant species have been found, and it is estimated that nearly 5 percent of Antarctica’s polar deserts are covered in some flora, although the tallest shrubs reach no more than three feet in height. But again I get ahead of myself ……. It was a huge relief to be finally heading off. Less than 7 weeks after we returned from expeditions in the Arctic, Lindsay was lying on an operating table undergoing triple bypass surgery! It was a huge scare but with our Antarctic expedition merely 3 months away, the question was whether his doctors (and insurers!) would allow him to travel to such a remoter place.  Try stopping him - and we were away!