Antarctica

thumb| Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), it contains the geographic South Pole. Quotes And thro’ the drifts the snowy clifts   Did send a dismal sheen;Ne shapes of men ne beasts we ken—   The Ice was all between.The Ice was here, the Ice was there,   The Ice was all around:It crack’d and growl’d, and roar’d and howl’d—   Like noises of a swound. S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1797) I like to say, if you take everybody who's not tied down they all sort of fall down to the bottom of the planet, so that's how we got here, you know. We're all at loose ends, and here we are together. I remember when I first got down here I sort of enjoyed the sensation of recognizing people with my travel markings. I was like, hey, these are my people. PhDs washing dishes and linguists on a continent with no languages. William Jirsa, in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) Unlike Scott and Shackleton, who viewed the ice as this sort of static monster that had to be crossed to get to the South Pole, we scientists now are able to see the ice as a dynamic living entity that is sort of producing change, like the icebergs that I study. For me it's been a wild ride. First of all I found out that the iceberg that I came down to study not only was larger than the iceberg that sank the Titanic, it was not only larger than the Titanic itself, but it was larger than the country that built the Titanic. That's pretty big. Doug MacAyeal, in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. R. F. Scott, Journal entry (17 January 1912), quoted in Scott's Last Expedition (1913), vol. 1, ch. 18 External links Category:Continents