Exploration of antarctica

Antarctica was first seen from ships more than a hundred and fifty years ago. About a hundred years ago, explorers began to land on the Antarctic ice, and soon expeditions were setting out to reach the South Pole. This developed into a "race," which was won when Roald Amundsen of Norway reached the Pole in December, 1911. Five weeks later the English explorer, Robert Falcon Scott, also reached the Pole, but he and his entire party died on the way back.

The chief explorer of Antarctica has been an American, Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd. In 1929 he established a permanent base there, called Little America, about which there is a separate article. Actually, Little America is not on the continent of Antarctica, but on a great area of ice called the Ross Shelf Ice, which covers more than 50,000 square miles of a section of the Pacific Ocean, called the Ross Sea, that reaches into a big bay in Antarctica. No one knows yet who "owns" Antarctica, because several different countries claim parts of it. The United States is one of these countries. The value of Antarctica lies in minerals that may be found there.