CHAPTER XII
POLAR REGIONS—ANTARCTICA
A continent twice the size of the United States lies sleeping beneath a mantle of snow and ice at the south pole. No vegetation save a few mosses and lichens exists anywhere on this vast expanse. No four-footed animals rove over it; no human beings inhabit it.
Hundreds of thousands of square miles of pack-ice, glaciers, and ice-walls jealously guard it on all sides. On one side, for a distance of five hundred miles, extends a great ice barrier whose perpendicular ice-wall is from thirty to three hundred feet in height. Behind this wall are vast ice-fields, and beyond these immense plateaus of ice having an elevation of six thousand to twelve thousand feet where fierce winds and a biting cold prevail. On these elevated plains the thermometer stands in the middle of summer sometimes as low as forty degrees below zero.
Great fields of ice and huge icebergs cover the sea in all directions and in winter extend far beyond the antarctic circle. In these regions the ice forming on the surface of the ocean attains a thickness varying from five to seventeen feet. Long ranges of snow-clad and ice-mailed mountains are found with ermined peaks towering from ten thousand to fifteen thousand feet in height.
A long winter night, with its intense darkness relieved at times by the light of the moon and brilliant chromatic displays of the aurora australis, succeeds a day of perpetual sunshine. All these are on such a scale of sublimity that no pen can adequately describe nor brush portray them. Nowhere else on the face of the globe does there exist such a wide expanse of utter desolation. Yet an undefined attraction lures bold men to fathom the mysteries of these forbidding regions. Dating from 1772, many exploring expeditions have visited the south polar regions in the interests of science.
The compass is the mariner's guide across the trackless ocean, and it is essential to find out everything possible about that mysterious agent, magnetism, which directs the compass needle by its attractive force. The earth itself is a huge magnet with positive and negative poles. The poised needle of the compass maintains its relative position because of the magnetic poles of the earth, one located in the north polar regions, on the western side of the peninsula of Boothia, and the other in the south polar regions, on Victoria Land. Except in a few localities the compass needle does not point due north and south—that is, toward the real poles of the earth, but toward the magnetic poles. And these magnetic poles are ever shifting, as is shown by the changing direction of the compass needle, which year by year increases or decreases its deviation from true north and south.
It is necessary to chart the variations of the magnetic needle for the use of the navigator. To observe the deviations and to locate the south magnetic pole have been the chief objects of south polar expeditions for several years, geographical information being of secondary importance.