Transantarctic Mountains

And we have a mountain range like that in Antarctica.

The Transantarctic Mountains are exactly that.

So it seems to me that the most likely location is Antarctica.

However...

But although this course had been documented, it proved slow and laborious.

Meanwhile, despite an initial false start, Amundsen's five-man team made good time, using a previously uncharted route through the same Transantarctic Mountains.

They stayed ahead of Scott's team, and on December 14th arrived first at their desolate destination.

To avoid the ambiguity that surrounded Cook and Peary's North Pole claims, Amundsen's team traversed the area in a grid to make sure they covered the pole's location.

So Margaret didn't have any experts in New Zealand on fossil fish, and that's my specialty, Devonian fishes.

And they were mapping this vast area of the Devonian, the old-fashioned way, with sledges, where you'd be dropped in by a Hercules aircraft to a remote part of the Transantarctic Mountains, and then you'd have your, your sledges and your Ski-Doos to pull them along.

You'd put up a base camp, and you'd go out and work and then, then move along.

And, um, so she invited me to come down in 1988.

So we planned the whole thing again, and I went back again in '91, '92, and that was, for me, the big expedition.

We spent three months down there sledging through virtually unknown territory.

They'd been to one or two of these sites before, but we eventually made it to a whole area of the Transantarctic Mountains that no one had ever mapped or studied before.

And fossil sites were everywhere.

It wouldn't look like a snowy desert.

Instead, you would see mountains and valleys, and that's because running across Antarctica is a massive mountain chain called the Transantarctic Mountains.

Now, scientists use these mountains to separate Antarctica into two different sections.

You have East Antarctica and West Antarctica.