Antarctica Travel Quotes

i had a dream when i was 22 that someday i would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till i came to one of the poles of the earth

Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on Earth has it worse than an Emperor penguin.

I believed that what mattered to God was the direction I was facing not how far away I was. Sin it seemed to me was the refusal to let God be God.

From the standpoint of the world’s biota, global travel represents a radically new phenomenon and, at the same time, a replay of the very old. The drifting apart of the continents that Wegener deduced from the fossil record is now being reversed—another way in which humans are running geologic history backward and at high speed. Think of it as a souped-up version of plate tectonics, minus the plates. By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

No sunrises that stop you dead with their unspeakable beuaty, either, he thought. No whales breaching only yards away from the ship, showering your awestruck self with a cold ocean rain. No songs and whiskey belowdecks at night while the wind plucks at the ship's rigging and the ice beats against her hull.

Over the last decade my life has been almost exclusively pre-occupied by the desire for adventure, my mind relentlessly buzzing with plans for future journeys. And yet, as soon as my wish to disappear over the horizon into some remote corner of the planet is granted, my mind clings onto all the sentimental details of home and I find that my daydreams of escaping across wide open spaces are replaced not just by precious recollections of moments of affection with a loved one but by fond memories of family gatherings, jokes shared with siblings and time with friends. Expeditions temporarily empty my life of all but the basic concerns of eating, sleeping, travel and staying safe. Like clearing undergrowth from a garden to discover the outline of borders and flowerbeds underneath, reducing life to just the essentials reveals the fundamental structure that underpins the whole. I found that, with life at its most basic and my spirit stretched, what was most dear to me was memories of time spent with those I love. I take this as a clear indication that, above all else, this is what is important in my life. It was a lesson I had been taught before, but a lesson I needed to learn again. It was a lesson I needed to remember.

Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica. [M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button. Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground. [V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. [W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. [T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that! There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran". [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. [T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure.

You can only appreciate the engineering feat of the Trans-Siberian railway by travelling along it in winter. They might as well have laid tracks across Antarctica.

An expedition to Antarctica is one of the best kept secrets in adventure travel. You wear the same clothes every day with the side benefit of not having to do laundry. You can create any number of South Pole hairstyles using your natural buildup of oil ‘product.’ You pack up your house every single morning, so you’re treated to a different view every night. You never have to wonder, ‘What’s for dinner?’ because it is always a just-add-hot-water dehydrated meal. Your hole-in-the-ground alfresco bathroom keeps unpleasant odors at bay. And you eat as much as is humanly possible and still lose weight. Yes, an expedition in Antarctica is the ultimate couples’ getaway with endless undisturbed time together.

Among the greatest threats future travelers to Mars are likely to face is an interplanetary version of winter over-syndrome. The unknown icescapes around the earth poles, particularly Antarctica, seemed as remote and forbidding as 19th century explorers as Mars does to us now.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere that traps the sun's heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has risen steadily since the nineteenth century and is now at it's highest levels in 800,000 years. As a result, global temperatures are also rising: 2020 was one of the hottest years on record. But the planet is not warming evenly. The polar regions are heating up five times faster than anywhere else on Earth. As a result, polar habitats are changing dramatically. Snow covers the Arctic for fewer days each decade, and the glaciers over Greenland and Antarctica are melting away. Sea ice is changing, too, getting thinner and covering less ocean. Polar bears depend on Arctic summer sea ice for hunting and traveling, but within a few decades, there might be none left. Changes in climate and habitat have other consequences for polar animals. Some adaptions that supported survival are becoming unhelpful or even harmful. For example, blubber keeps marine mammals warm in cold water (see page 13). As temperatures continue to rise, the same blubber could cause those animals to overheat. When days get longer, ptarmigan turn brown for camouflage when the snow melts (see page 20). If warmer spring temperatures melt snow before the days lengthen, birds that are still white will be more visible to predators. As climate chance continues, these and other polar species may find it harder to persist.

At Concordia, a European science station based in Antarctica, about a dozen intrepid people spend months at a time together in perpetual darkness, farther from civilization than the International Space Station is from Earth.