Antarctica in Myth, Fantasy & Reality: There Is Really Something Going On

 Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), in his book about the subterranean world, compares the earth to a human body. It drinks in the oceans at the North Pole, digests them in its interior, extracts the minerals, and expels the remains at the South Pole.

This undignified image of Antarctica is not merely northern chauvinism, for the earth itself presents a marked contrast between its two polar regions. In the north, cities such as Oslo, Helsinki, Tallinn, and Leningrad cluster around the sixtieth parallel, to say nothing of Reykjavik at 64ºN. To their north extend vast tracts of useful land, supporting agriculture and abundant forest life.

Coal and other minerals are mined on Norway’s Svalbard Islands (Spitsbergen), which reach beyond the 80th parallel. In the rosy days before the Nazis coopted the myth of Thule, the Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) claimed that “there is no northern boundary beyond which productive enterprise cannot go until North meets North on the opposite shore of the Arctic Ocean as East has met West on the Pacific” – and he should know, having spent five months marooned on an ice-floe....<<<Read More>>>...