A Brief History
On January 19, 2007, 3 intrepid Britons and their equally intrepid Canadian comrade made an incredible journey across Antarctica, using only leg power driving skis and the assistance of kites, to reach a point known as the Antarctic pole of inaccessibility.
Digging Deeper
The team, called “Team N2i,” trekked almost 1100 miles over the frozen terrain to the place called POI, for short, a spot on the globe previously visited by explorers using motorized tracked vehicles and aircraft back in 1965.
So, what is this “POI?” It is defined as the point in Antarctica that is furthest from any ocean shore in any direction, a place the Soviets visited in 1958 and a later American expedition visited in 1965. In between these visits, the Soviets made a second trip there in 1964. Yet another expedition on foot was completed in 2011, this time by only 2 men, again by foot and kite-ski.
The exact location of the POI has been modified by new calculations a few times, though the general area of each point is quite close to the others. The average temperature there is -72.8 degrees Fahrenheit!
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Keegan, Claire. Antarctica. Grove Press, 2002.
Zagier, Sergio. Antarctic Continent Waterproof Exploration Map. Zagier & Urruty, 2016.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Cookson69 at English Wikipedia of the old Soviet temporary Base (“Pole of Inaccessibility”) reached by Team N2i on 19th January 2007, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
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