Blood Falls, AntarcticaLegend A glacier that appears to bleed. A plume of rust-red saltwater seeps out of the snout of Taylor Glacier into the McMurdo Dry Valleys and stains the ice crimson. Griffith Taylor found it in 1911 and the first guess was red algae;... Open it on the map · Read the story
Deception IslandLegend You sail your ship into the volcano. Deception is a horseshoe about 79 square kilometres across whose middle is a flooded caldera, Port Foster, entered through a gap 500 metres wide called Neptune’s Bellows. The American sealer... Open it on the map · Read the story
Lake VostokLegend A freshwater lake 250 km long and 50 km wide, about 12,500 square kilometres, sitting under four kilometres of ice and 500 metres below sea level. It may have been sealed off for 15 to 25 million years, which makes it one of the... Open it on the map · Read the story
Mount ErebusLegend The southernmost active volcano on Earth, 3,792 metres of it standing on Ross Island, with a lake of molten phonolite lava churning in the summit crater. There are only five long-lived lava lakes on the planet and this one has... Open it on the map · Read the story
The McMurdo Dry ValleysLegend Four and a half thousand square kilometres of Antarctica with no ice on it. Katabatic winds, cold dense air pouring downhill under gravity, scour the valleys so hard that snow evaporates within hours in summer, and the... Open it on the map · Read the story
Every one of these is sourced
Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.
