Category: Stories & Inspiration

Stories & Inspiration

Who owns Antarctica?

Standing on the deck of an expedition cruise ship as you arrive at the Antarctic Peninsula, don’t look for any flag flying high over the territory. It doesn’t have one. Research bases fly the flags of their nations and when visitors arrive on expedition cruise ships they proudly wave banners to celebrate landing on the […]

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Stories & Inspiration

12 Famous Antarctic Explorers

Three names dominate the public consciousness when it comes to famous Antarctic explorers, more than a century after they first stepped foot on the White Continent. ‘For scientific discovery give me Scott,’ wrote the old polar hand Raymond Priestley. ‘For speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope […]

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Stories & Inspiration

A History of Polar Exploration in 50 Objects

In her new book A History of Polar Exploration in 50 Objects: From Cook’s Circumnavigations to the Aviation Age, polar historian Anne Strathie weaves the story of exploration in both the Antarctic and Arctic through a series of objects that often have surprising interconnections.  For Swoop, she has picked five of her favourites that help […]

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Stories & Inspiration

How Antarctica became the stage for a world record scuba dive

Very few people get to go scuba diving in Antarctica. The extreme cold water conditions mean that it’s a location reserved for experienced divers, but for those who are able to meet the challenge, it can be like no diving location on earth.  For some divers however, the idea of diving in Antarctica isn’t enough. […]

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Stories & Inspiration

The hunt for Antarctica’s million year old ice

If you take an ice cube out of your freezer, you’ll see that it’s full of tiny bubbles: microscopic pockets of air that were trapped in the water the last time you refilled the ice cube tray, a week or a few months ago. Pluck a piece of floating glacial ice out of the water […]

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Stories & Inspiration

Saving Macquarie Island: Australia’s Subantarctic gem

Islands are nature’s laboratories. Their small self-contained ecosystems can allow animals and plants to flourish that wouldn’t be possible elsewhere. But their size means that those ecosystems can be fragile when exposed to outside influence. Within 60 years of the first sailors landing on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, the flightless dodo had been […]

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