From digging the depths of uncharted oceans and seeking life on other planets to the urban exploration of secret subways and catacombs under our cities, the fire of adventure and exploration continues to burn strong.
Exploration is intrinsically about being first. First to map a landmass. First to a designated and previously impenetrable spot on land, in the sky or under the sea. First to capture and catalogue the local flora or fauna and give each new discovery a name. A mere 10 per cent of the Earth’s ocean floor has been mapped, but only a few remote jungles, deserts or ice-covered landmasses remain unexplored. Areas of Colombia, Siberia, Amazon rainforest and Papua New Guinea mountain ranges have so far thwarted explorers. The reduction in unexplored territory worldwide combined with advances in technology has prompted a second round of firsts, measured by the manner of getting to a tricky destination – first by plane, first to navigate a body of water solo, first to climb a particular side of a particularly perilous mountain, first to free dive into, base-jump off, or swim to without stopping.
The frozen continent of Antarctica has been dubbed “the last unexplored place on Earth”, this moniker referring primarily to the subglacial waterways located more than 3km beneath the ice crust. Explored once over by pioneers Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott and Byrd, Antarctica is being retraced by modern explorers seeking their own new firsts. Adelaide-based Tim Jarvis, sponsored by National Geographic, plans this year to be the first person to re-create Shackleton’s entire journey by whaling boat and on foot across Antarctica using only 1916 technology, food and equipment. Precocious 13-year-old American Jordan Romero has his own designs on the ice with plans to climb the Vinson Massif in Antarctica, becoming the youngest person to summit the highest peaks of all seven continents.
As young sailors of both sexes crisscross the globe in their quest to be the youngest solo circumnavigators, Google is working furiously with its research partners and the general public to map not only our Earth, but also our sea, sky, Mars and the Moon. Now any person with online access can explore what was once virtually inaccessible from the comfort of their ergonomically designed workstations. Much to the chagrin of real-life explorers, chair-bound browsers can be bona fide first-there explorers: using Google Earth, British scientists identified an unexplored forest in Mozambique, now named Mount Mabu, where they then headed to discover new species of butterflies and snakes. Similar Google natural discoveries range from previously hidden beaver dams in Canada to new fossil fields in South Africa. Astronaut Frank Borman, one of the first men to circle the Moon, described exploration as “the essence of the human spirit”. But is this still the case when almost any of us can examine the world’s surface with a half-bored twiddle from home?
In pursuit of what National Geographic calls our “quest for knowledge through exploration”, humans continue to scratch at the surface of the Earth, but we cannot always be physically present in the environments that remain unexplored. Although technology is helping send people further into space and deeper into the Earth and the ocean, remote devices and unmanned craft are the only way explorers and scientists can currently probe our earthly, watery, galaxial and seismic extremes. Resisting the pointy end of our technology, huge tracts of Earth remain unexplored. About 40 per cent of the ocean floor consists of flat, extremely deep abyssal plains. First identified as a distinct feature in 1947, the plains teem with unexplored life, but it is probable that we know more about the planet Mars than we do about the detail of our abyssal plains.
Slightly closer to the Earth’s surface, about 3km to 6km below, is an entirely separate biosphere known as SLIME or Subterranean Lithoautotrophic Microbial Ecosystem. This mass, comprising a vast array of bacteria and microscopic fungi, may be larger than all life on the surface. Speculation abounds as to what these life forms could yield in medical and fuel discoveries. SG-3 in the Penchenga-Zapolyarny area of Kola Peninsula, Russia, is the deepest drilled hole in the world at 12,262m, but due to a lack of funding the drill site was abandoned in 2008. BP’s Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico measured 10,683m in 2009, but regurgitated some 680 million litres of oil when the exploration didn’t go to plan. Being the deepest, most extensive or furthermost in doesn’t come without substantial risk.
Conquering and bettering our natural terrain is getting harder because the remaining unexplored bits are remotely located, but a different terrain has developed in parallel with the explored world. This is an accessible geography ripe for firsts. Civilisation has created a layering of architecture that is constantly being explored and rediscovered. Abandoned cities, sunken cities, subterranean cities and forgotten city infrastructure are the domain of the urban explorer – an adventurer with a very different drive. Unlike archaeologists who examine architecture and past built environments in order to find clues about human society, the urban explorer or infiltrator sets out purely to explore abandoned or forbidden man-made territory. Unlike the heavily sponsored and incessantly blogging modern-day explorer, these infiltrators keep their adventures closely guarded.
The catacombs of Paris are a deep subterranean palimpsest of French Resistance escape routes, German bunkers and cemeteries fitted into early quarry tunnels. These and much earlier Roman catacombs are possibly the most famous explored underground networks. Less ancient historic underground complexes were often created for defence or for felonious activities. Moscow has a Metro 2 secret subway system. Built in the Stalin era to evacuate Kremlin officials in an emergency, it was discovered in 1994.
In other cases, entire cities have been rebuilt over time and created a lower layer in the process. California’s capital, Sacramento, was a booming gold-rush town when it was flooded in the mid-1800s. An ensuing cholera epidemic almost caused the city to be abandoned, but it was rebuilt 3m higher, creating a sublevel of shopfronts and pavements ripe for exploration.
The modern equivalent of these man-made labyrinths are the train and drain infrastructures of our cities. The urban explorers drawn to these usually out-of-bounds warrens appear to subscribe loosely to a philosophy of psychogeography, a concept popular with artists and first defined by French social revolutionary Guy Debord in the 1950s. Psychogeography has been described as “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities”. Where traditional exploring revolves around mapping discoveries for others to share, psychogeographers want each person’s experience of a journey or place to be different – so recording and sharing is the antithesis. However, a strong online community and small-scale zines and clubs loosely link the world’s urban explorers and throw up the occasional glimpse of the treasure they see for the browsing public.
One such eye-opener is Tokyo’s flood control G-Cans Project, the world’s largest sewer with five 32m-diameter concrete silos connected by 64km of tunnel, 50m below the surface. Looking like something out of Star Wars, G-Cans would be scoffed at by serious urban explorers because it is open for tours, but it is noteworthy for sheer scale.
National Geographic has an extensive exploration sponsorship program to support aspiring adventurers, scientists, photographers and storytellers as “emerging explorers”. They include the obligatory scientists and engineers plus a “mobile technology innovator”. Musician Feliciano dos Santos sings songs of hygiene – washing hands, boiling water, building toilets – to his countrymen in Mozambique. “If you put those messages to music,” dos Santos explains, “they are no longer taboo” and will hopefully halt the spread of diseases such as polio, which dos Santos contracted as a child. It is a worthy mission, but is it exploration? National Geographic says yes.
Trawling through the listed “explorers in residence”, plus those coming, reveals a swing in endorsement from the celebration of traditional feats of “first” in endurance and distance to firsts in social and environmental innovation. Subterranean stories still deliver a side serve of adventure to the altruism happening above the ground – German cave explorer Michael Laummans was funded in 2008 to crawl and map what turned out to be the longest cave in Gabon; while in Tennessee, Marion Smith, who has explored more caves (according to National Geographic) than any other person in the US, told his story of discovering new caves.
Archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre, who discovered a network of escape tunnels in Israel built to harbour and conduit refugees in an uprising against Rome some 2000 years ago, is the closest “official” tunnel explorer. A four-year exploration (by scientists from the South Australian Museum) of micro-caverns, some less than 1cm wide, in Australia’s outback yielded a new type of subterranean snail.
TS Eliot wrote that “we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and to know the place for the first time.” This possibly rings more true now than ever before. Continuing globalisation and access to online services mean we know more stories of exploration than ever before; and modern media – and sponsors – can make us feel intimately involved in every achievement. Yet, we coexist with ecosystems we can barely comprehend, and every day our civilisation creates its own convoluted trails for future adventurers to follow.
Source Qantas The Australian Way February 2011