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I hope you enjoy the program. Hello at the southern extremity of this planet lies an

icy wind-swept and virtually uninhabitable landmass.

Antarctica is the world's fifth largest continent, a bleak and freezing place almost entirely covered by ice

and plunged into darkness for much of its long winter.

The geographer, Marinus of Tyre, coined the name Antarctica in the second century

AD, and many civilizations from the ancient Greeks onwards believed in the existence of a great

undiscovered southern land but it wasn't until the 1840s that humans laid eyes on

the continent. Since the earliest of the last century the Antarctic has provided the

scene for some of the greatest

triumphs and tragedies of human exploration, most famously the death of Robert Falcon Scott

on his return from the South Pole in 1912. Almost 50 years later an international treaty set aside the entire continent as a scientific reserve and protected it from territorial claims.

With me to discuss the history of the Antarctic from its origins to the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, and Jane Francis, Professor of

Pelio Climatology at the University of Leeds, Julian Dardswell, Director of the

Scott Polar Research Institute and Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Cambridge,

...