15 The Seventh Continent

Antarctica, the last continent to be discovered, is the most inaccessible, coldest, driest, and windiest. It has an area of 13.7 million sq km, well surpassing the nearly 10 million sq km of the continental US. The ancients had long suspected that Earth had a seventh continent, out of sight somewhere far to the south. An early Greek cartographer, Marinus of Tyre, named it Antarctica since it had to be oppositely situated from the Arctic. By the seventeenth century, mariners had rounded both Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, suggesting that Antarctica was likely surrounded by water and was large enough to qualify as the seventh continent. In 1773, Captain James Cook in HMS Resolution crossed the Antarctic Circle at 66°S, not quite close enough to spot the continent. That distinction is credited to Russian Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who in circumnavigating the globe in 1820 ventured within 30 km of the long-suspected land mass, close enough to discern it.