History and exploration

Long before anyone saw it, Antarctica already existed on maps. Greek geographers imagined a land in the south that balanced the known lands of the north, and the idea crossed the Middle Ages under the Latin name Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown southern land.

In the 16th century, cartographers such as Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius drew that huge imaginary continent, occupying almost the entire southern portion of the map and approaching South America and New Guinea. Ortelius’s 1570 atlas is one of the best-known examples.

With each voyage that went farther south without finding land, the continent on the maps shrank. Tierra del Fuego, which some thought was its tip, proved to be an island when the Dutchman Willem Schouten rounded Cape Horn in 1616.

The name comes from the Greek antarktikós, “opposite the Arctic.” Arctic, in turn, comes from árktos, bear: it is the region under the constellation of the Great Bear, in the northern sky.

On January 17, 1773, the British ships Resolution and Adventure, commanded by James Cook, crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first time, at about 66.5 degrees south latitude. Cook crossed it two more times on the same voyage, which lasted from 1772 to 1775.

He reached 71°10′ south, the farthest south anyone had reached up to that time, and was stopped by sea ice. It is estimated he passed about 240 kilometers from the continent without seeing it.

Cook concluded that if there were land farther south it would be ice-covered and of no practical use. His account of the abundance of seals on the southern islands, published in 1777, attracted hunters who, decades later, reached the Antarctic coasts.

The continent was sighted for the first time in 1820 by three different expeditions, days or months apart. In late January, the Russian expedition of Fabian von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev came to about 32 kilometers from the coast and recorded an ice field identified with the Fimbul Ice Shelf on Queen Maud Land.

On January 30, 1820, the British officer Edward Bransfield, with Captain William Smith, sighted the Trinity Peninsula, the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. In November of the same year, American seal hunter Nathaniel Palmer, aboard the small vessel Hero, also saw the Peninsula.

Who saw it first is still debated by historians, because the ship logs describe ice and mountains differently. The three names remained on the map: the Bellingshausen Sea, the Bransfield Strait and Palmer Land.

The first person to set foot on the continent is also uncertain. American seal hunter John Davis claimed to have landed on the Peninsula in February 1821, but the record is contested.

Soon after the sightings, dozens of ships went to the South Shetland Islands hunting the Antarctic fur seal, whose pelts were highly valued in Europe, the United States and China. In a few seasons in the 1820s, the colonies were nearly wiped out.

At the beginning of the 20th century came whaling. In 1904 the Norwegian Carl Anton Larsen opened the first shore-based whaling station in the Southern Ocean at Grytviken on South Georgia Island; other stations and factory ships followed, which processed whales at sea.

Blue whales, fin whales and humpbacks in the Southern Ocean were reduced to a small fraction of their former numbers. Large-scale commercial whaling only stopped with the moratorium adopted by the International Whaling Commission in 1982, and the Southern Ocean became a whale sanctuary in 1994.

Remains of that period remain in places such as Deception Island in the South Shetlands, where Whalers’ Bay preserves tanks and buildings of an old station. They are historic sites protected by the Antarctic Treaty.

Historians call the Heroic Age the period from the late 19th century to the early 1920s, when expeditions arrived in wooden ships, with dogs, sledges and almost no communication with the rest of the world.

In 1898 the Belgian ship Belgica, under Adrien de Gerlache, became trapped in the ice of the Bellingshausen Sea, and the crew spent the first winter in the Antarctic region. On board were the young Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the American doctor Frederick Cook.

In 1899 the expedition of the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink, financed by the British, was the first to spend the winter on the continent, in huts at Cape Adare on the coast of the Ross Sea. The huts still stand and are protected as a historic site.

They were followed by Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery expedition (1901–1904), Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition (1907–1909), which reached 88°23′ south, about 180 kilometers from the Pole, and the Australian Douglas Mawson (1911–1914), who explored the coast south of Australia.

In 1911 two expeditions attempted to reach the South Pole. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen departed from the Bay of Whales on the Ross Ice Shelf with four companions and sledges pulled by dozens of dogs. The British Robert Falcon Scott set out from Cape Evans on Ross Island with ponies, motor sledges and, in the final stage, men hauling the sledges.

Amundsen reached the Pole on December 14, 1911, and left a tent there he called Polheim, with a letter for Scott. He returned to base without losing a single man.

Scott and four companions arrived on January 17, 1912, and found the Norwegian tent. On the return journey the five died of cold, hunger and exhaustion; the last three — Scott, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers — perished about 18 kilometers from a supply depot. The tent with the bodies and the diaries was found in November 1912.

The American station that has operated at the Pole since 1956 is named for the two of them, Amundsen–Scott, as noted in Science and bases.

In 1914 Ernest Shackleton set out with the aim of crossing Antarctica on foot, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, via the Pole. In January 1915 the ship Endurance became trapped in sea ice in the Weddell Sea and drifted for months until it was crushed and sank in November 1915.

The 28 men camped on the ice and, when it began to break up, took to three lifeboats and made for Elephant Island in the South Shetlands. From there Shackleton and five companions crossed about 1,300 kilometers of ocean in the boat James Caird to South Georgia and then crossed the island’s mountains on foot to reach the whaling station at Stromness.

The 22 men left on Elephant Island were rescued in August 1916 by the Chilean tug Yelcho, commanded by Luis Pardo. No one from the Endurance died.

The wreck was found on March 5, 2022, by the Endurance22 expedition at a depth of 3,008 meters, a little more than 4 nautical miles south of the position recorded by Captain Frank Worsley. The hull is well preserved and is protected as a historic site under the Antarctic Treaty: it can be filmed and studied, but not touched.

After World War I, the airplane changed exploration. On November 29, 1929, American Richard Byrd flew over the South Pole, and in subsequent decades aerial photography mapped coasts and mountains no sledge had reached.

Permanent presence began early. The Argentine base Orcadas, in the South Orkney Islands, has operated continuously since February 1904 and is the oldest base south of the 60th parallel. During and shortly after World War II several countries established bases on the Peninsula and on the islands, and the American Operation Highjump in 1946–1947 brought thousands of men, ships and aircraft to the coast.

The first overland crossing was made by the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Briton Vivian Fuchs, which set out from the Weddell Sea, passed the Pole and reached the Ross Sea on March 2, 1958, after 99 days. New Zealander Edmund Hillary, coming from the opposite side to lay fuel depots, reached the Pole with agricultural tractors on January 4, 1958.

Between July 1, 1957, and December 31, 1958, scientists from 67 countries took part in the International Geophysical Year, a joint effort to study the Earth, the atmosphere and the Sun. Antarctica was one of the main focuses.

Twelve countries built or expanded stations on the continent and islands. Among them were the American station at the South Pole, the Soviet Vostok on the plateau, and the British Halley on the Brunt Ice Shelf, where decades later the ozone hole was discovered, as discussed in Antarctica and Earth’s climate.

The cooperation during those 18 months, in the midst of the Cold War, showed that rival countries could work side by side on the ice. The same twelve countries negotiated the treaty signed in 1959, which is the subject of The Antarctic Treaty.

To continue coordination, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, SCAR, was created in 1958 to bring together the scientists working on the continent.