National Geographic: Antarctic Wildlife Adventure Page #5

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and dispatches that are decades old.

...shall be returning home about

June and anticipate finding

civilization somewhat bewildering.

So would like to be considered for

service as relief warden

at a small hostile in the highlands.

It's the kind of thing, now over

and it really is the kind of thing

now you can say,

it's part of the history of this place

And it should, really should be

preserved and looked after

to keep it like this.

And all this food!

You'll never get food

like this again-these boxes.

No one eats this kind of stuff anymore

But this is how a British base

worked 30 years ago.

And it's really worthwhile keeping

and doing something about.

The men who lived and worked in

bases like these

were taking part in an extraordinary

study effort in the Antarctic

led by a dozen countries during the

International Geophysical Year, 1957.

The scientists paved the way for

governments go to on cooperating,

and eventually, there was an

Antarctic Treaty.

It's worked ever since to hold

Antarctica as a scientific reserve.

Today, tourist ships send groups

like this one from New York's

Museum of Natural History ashore

to the sites where once

only scientists went.

Antarctica's past and present

meet here,

and perhaps show the way to the

future as well.

Some environmentalists want to see

the entire continent

now made into a world park

no development or exploitation allowed

the Antarctic to remain as it is

a place for research,

and for amateur naturalists to see

the greatest unspoiled wilderness left.

Some of the old Geophysical Year

stations are still operating.

The British base Faraday,

for instance, plays a role in

researching the periodic

huge loss of ozone in the atmosphere

over the southern polar region.

Further south

another British base Rothera,

serves as a headquarters for inland

science projects that can

only be reached by plane.

The flights take off from a runway

cleared from the glacier,

with a path well marked

so the aircraft doesn't slide into

one of the nearby crevasses

that split the surface.

From the air,

an observer easily sees the extent

of one of the great treasures

and paradoxes of Antarctica

ice.

This is the driest continent.

Hardly any snow or rain ever falls.

But what does fall is frozen

in place and remains.

So Antarctica is both the continent

with the least precipitation

and the one with the most water

almost all of it locked up in ice

Some estimates are that 70 percent

of the world's freshwater is here.

The ice here on the plateau also

provides an ancient atmospheric record

that's key to studying new

phenomenon

such as the greenhouse effect.

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