When Chiara Montanari, an engineer and the first woman to lead an Antarctic mission, wants to summarize in a single word what those 14 million square kilometers of mountains and ice up to 2,000 meters thick are, it’s “threshold”. That is, “it’s the crossing point between the known, between our certainties, our habits, what we are aware of, and the unknown. Another world, that is not made for man. The Concordia base, where I served my mission, is located at the top of the polar ice cap, it is at 4,000 meters above sea level, there are 4,000 meters of ice stratification, with a temperature of minus 50 in summer and minus 80 in winter. Around you you have an infinite desert completely white and without points of reference, only the line of the horizon that separates the sky from the earth, there are no smells, there are no colors, there are no stimuli, nothing moves.
Black Sea Images / Alamy Foto Stock
It is the place where you realize the presence of absence. All our knowledge, therefore the mental classifications with which we are used to categorizing, to organizing, go into crisis and no longer make sense. You are like a child who finds themselves in the woods at night. It is at that point that our brain, our being, quickly begins to question what it knows, and reorganizes thought according to new categories, forces us to dive deep inside ourselves and find a new vitality within. Crossing that threshold, physical and mental, is a very powerful spiritual experience. Antarctica is a place of transformation”. In recent years, thanks to increasingly advanced means (and a tourism industry always looking for new frontiers), crossing that threshold is no longer just possible for researchers with decades of training behind them, but has become accessible to a happy few high-end travels who can have the thrill of experiencing this non-place with its incredible landscapes, its silences, its wild fauna (penguins, seals, whales, orcas) and a mystery that no camera, however advanced, can yet capture.
The most classic itinerary is the one which, aboard icebreakers converted into cruise ships, cuts through the 1,000 km of the Drake Passage, which separates Cape Horn (the extreme tip of Chile) from the Antarctic Peninsula and its islands. Most cruises to Antarctica explore this peninsula, the only strip of land that is partially further north than the 66° 33’’ of the Antarctic Circle. In the narrow fjord of Neko Harbor you can watch enormous blocks of ice breaking away from the coast and plunging into the sea, with huge colonies of Papua (or Gentoo) penguins in the background.
Another must-see is Paradise Harbor, a bay famous for the crystalline blue of the icebergs that drift through the area’s placid waters.
Michael Nolan / Robert Harding / Alamy Foto Stock
A short distance away is Danco Island, with its noisy population of about 2,000 pairs of penguins and the humpback whales that, at the end of the summer, cross the Errera Channel.
The option that for now is less popular is a cruise to the Weddell Sea, a true ice desert that extends to the east of the Antarctic Peninsula and is famous for its tabular icebergs, on which groups of emperor penguins can be seen. Just a taste, of course, compared to what the extreme world of the solitary hinterland has to offer.
But it is without a doubt a way to experience, at least for a few days, the thrill of that threshold that, as Chiara Montanari says, “allows us to test ourselves against the unknown, to redraw our mental map: not just a physical outpost, but one that leads to a new humanity, to make an evolutionary leap”.
text by Franco Volpi
