Stark, cold, beautiful desolation. Since its discovery by European explorers in January 1820, the coldest, driest, iciest, windswept landmass in the Southern Hemisphere has long remained one of the most inhospitable habitats on Earth. Surrounded by jagged mountains shrouded in snow that soar more than a mile high above ice-strewn waters, Antarctica has no history of human habitation, no trees or significant plant life of any kind except for lichens, algae, and bacteria, and no native land mammals, amphibians, or reptiles. Antarctica’s frigid, oxygen-rich, ocean ecosystem supports penguin colonies, seabirds, whales, seals, fish, small zooplankton like krill, and microscopic plant-like organisms called phytoplankton, which is the base of the marine life food chain. Capped by a massive inland glacial ice sheet that is as much as 2.7 miles thick, scientists have proclaimed that the land hidden beneath the ice sheet is less well known to us than the surface of Mars. All to say, it felt somewhat surreal to be drawing a breath in the last unexplored and unspoiled continent on Earth.

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