Awesome Antarctica

King Penguins at the beach against the high snow mountains of South Georgia

A combination of Aurora Borealis, twilight and Ursa Major (the plough).

29th December 1965: Three U.S. Navy icebreakers push an iceberg out to sea to clear a channel leading to McMurdo Station, Antarctica. The ships are, left to right: the U.S.S. Burton, U.S.S. Atka and U.S.S. Glacier. Credit: Arthur W. Thomas, Hulton Archive.

Nov 1956: Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealand mountaineer and explorer, training for the Antarctic expedition on the Tasman glacier with one of his dogs. Credit: Topical Press Agency.

1912: English Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868 - 1912), who perished with his team in the South Pole. Photo: Hulton Archive.

1952: A snowcat balanced precariously over a crevice, during a Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Credit: Fox Photos.

Anti-whaling ships the Robert Hunter and the Farley Mowat confronting Japanese whaling ship the Kaiko Maru February 12, 2007 at sea off Antarctica. Activists from Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have been hounding the Japanese whaling fleet in a bid to prevent them from harpooning up to 850 minke whales and 10 fin whales during the December to March whaling season. Photo courtesy Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

A polar bear diving underwater in Arctic waters.

December 2006: Southern Ocean, Antarctica: A combination of five pictures shows (from top, and L to R) a new species of Epimeria, a 25 mm long amphipod crustacean sampled near Elephant Island; a Antarctic male pycnogonid bearing its eggs (a marine distant relative of spiders); a giant Antarctic barnacle sampled at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula; a new giant Antarctic amphipod crustacean nearly 100 mm long belonging to the genus Eusirus; and a still unidentified Antarctic sea star sampled in the area formerly covered by the Larsen B ice-shelve during the Polarstern cruise ANTXXIII-8.
The collapse of two ice shelves in Antarctica has exposed an massive and diverse seabed ecosystem, including species of crustaceans and marine anemones that had never been identified. The insight into Antarctica's hidden marine world has come from the break up of the Larsen A and B ice shelves, 12 and five years ago respectively that has formed huge icebergs. Photo credit: Cedric d'Udekem d'Acoz, AFP.

Picture shows an Antarctic octopus (Paraledone turqueti). Photo credit: Elaina Jorgensen, AFP.

This photo taken 27 January 2007 shows boxes with samples of ice crystals kept in a cave at the Franco-Italian research station Concordia, perched on top of the Antarctic Plateau, two miles above sea level. Here scientists gather in the extreme cold to examine the depleted ozone layer several times a day. Credit: Guy Clavel, AFP.

A 120 film slide scan of The Northern Lights.
Twilight sky with Aurora Borealis.

May 23 2002: The Southern Lights over the geodesic dome at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. The aluminium dome has housed the main station buildings since the 1970's. Photo: Jonathan Berry, AFP.

This wide view shows a picture released by the Japanese Antarctic observation team, 24 November 2003, of the solar eclipse taken from the Dome Fuji, 1,000 km south of the Japanese observation base at Showa. It was visible for barely two minutes, but showed a rare solar wonder, a total eclipse above the South Pole. Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images.

Scientist Herve Trinquet, from the University Astrophysics Laboratory in Nice assesses the optical qualities of the Antarctic sky at the Franco-Italian base of Concordia in Antartica. Credit: Guy Clavel, AFP.

March 22, 2001: NASA image reveals what appears to be a new crack in the Antarctic's icy armour. The massive iceberg-to-be was captured by a NASA satellite that was also tracing hidden continental features that shape the future of the world's largest ice sheets. Landsat 7, a cooperative mission between NASA and the United States Geological Survey completed its second annual continent-wide mapping of Antarctica at that time. With its capability to see features as small as 15 metres across, it provided the most detailed observations then available of the remote continent including many parts which had never been mapped at this resolution before. Photo by NASA.