Antarctica doesn't seem to be a part of this planet. It doesn't seem to lie in the same plane as nearby cities or countries, places to which you can imagine flying, trailing an animated red line over a map like in a movie. Antarctica is often missing from maps entirely. The stylised kinds that appear on wall hangings and corporate report covers end at South America. All this adds up to a sense that if you were to organise your own ship and head south, after the familiar lands had disappeared behind you, you would be sailing into a progressively more silent and desolate place; the skies would darken and the colours would become wan; the seas would turn inky and the wind would howl emptily; rocky islands would be forbidding and jagged like teeth and bones; men would become silent, some would go crazy and some would sit in sheltered corners, teeth chattering and eyes staring glassily; and nerves would fray at the constant foreboding, the unshakable fear that over the next wave, behind the next iceberg, will lie Scylla and Charybdis, or the Sirens, or Dragons, or Hades itself. In short, you would be sailing off the map.

Perhaps it is that Antarctica is the true Earth, and the rest of what we are familiar with is just a superficial overlay, as if our political boundaries and street maps are just a crazy artliner mess scrawled over the world's plastic wrapping. Antarctica is where the real planet shows through unobstructed, where the earth becomes a sphere tracing dizzy spirals through the void instead of being a Mercator Projection and a grid of orthogonal streets and avenues. In Antarctica it is harder to ignore the Earth's sphericity: maps of Antarctica use unfamiliar projections, and even the lengths of the days are strange and can only be understood in terms of the cosmic dance. Time becomes Deep Time - the patient slowness of glacial motion, the millions of years of pollen and air trapped deep in the ice, the landscape unchanging and unmoulded by rain or river.

Overhead are the ribbon-like auroras. They expand our perception beyond the cloud layer, beyond the skyspace used by planes, beyond the blue roof. Our environment is seen to reach into the magnetic field that surrounds us like a lung, breathing solar particles in and out, flexing with the changing pressure of the interplanetary wind, cocooning us. North and South are no longer absolutes. A compass needle points geographic east and upwards into the sky. The earth is no longer delimited by ground or water but by its invisible shield thrown into space.

Antarctica links us to the sun by its six-month-long days, and by the patterns made in the sky by the solar particles. It links us to the stars by its name, from the Greek Arktos, the bear of the constellation Ursa Major. It links us to the void of space by the meteorite fragments found embedded in the plateaux. But most of all it links us to the solar system by its ice. Polar caps of water ice are also found on Mars and our own moon; they are extraterrestrial features, shared with foreign worlds. Water ice lurks in shadowed craters on Mercury. Ice fragments circle Saturn to form its rings, reminiscient of the icebergs which orbit the Antarctic continent in the circumpolar current. Jupiter's moon Europa is a vast ice sheet a thousand kilometers thick, floating on a blue ocean. Further out, Pluto is no more than a massive, dirty iceberg circling its neighbour berg Charon, together representing the ferryman and the ruler of Hades. Once again, like the mariner sailing off the map, the trail of the ice has lead to the edge of the known world. And yet its reach stretches further yet - into the Oort Cloud, the mysterious shell of icy fragments fifty thousand times further from the sun than we. The Oort Cloud contains billions of icy comets, some of which are flung close to the sun and streak across our sky. It has been suggested that all the water ice in our solar system originated from comet impacts. Every glass of water, every rainstorm, every ice floe, every berg, every part of the Antarctic ice sheet could be united in its extraterrestrial origins.

Psychologists study Antarctic scientists in order to predict how astronauts will survive in space. Perhaps the effect is greater than just the isolation; perhaps Antarctica forces the realisation that we are all already in space.