Once Round the Sun

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Excerpt from Once Round the Sun: The Story of the International Geophysical Year The geographical exploration of the earth is all but finished. The days when a man set sail from a Mediterranean port to discover new lands in the west are long since past, the chart ing of the oceans, one of the preoccupations of the eighteenth century, is practically a closed chapter, the nineteenth-century exploration of the unknown continents has given us maps of all the great land-masses except Antarctica, few mountain peaks remain to be climbed. The aftermath of the era Of geographical exploration is, of course, very evident today. We have ocean voyages on drifting rafts, we have lone crossings of the seven seas in a bewildering variety of unsuitable vessels, we have transcontinental journeys in jeeps, jalopies, and land rovers, we have abundant write-ups of camel rides in the desert, canoeing upstream along tropical rivers, safaris in darkest Africa. But these are stories of human endeavour, not of genuine exploration, geographical or scientific. The age of the scientific exploration of the earth is now upon us, which may indeed involve a degree of geographical explora tion, but of which geography is not the essence. Its essential feature is the urge to a better understanding Of the physical properties Of the earth as a whole: its core, its crust, its oceans, and its atmosphere, rather than its surface topography. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.