And yet they do walk upside down...

INTRODUCTION: THE CONTINENT AND ITS HISTORY

A bucket of icy water down the neck checks the fiercest vomiter. – Frank Arthur Worsley, Shackleton’s captain, on his cure for Antarctic seasickness.
Sometimes we are given our opportunities, and we take them and make something fine, and the story will live forever; and so we have our bodhisattva moment.
– Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica.

Antarctica is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace continent, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. The Antarctic continent is the fifth largest of the seven – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, and North America. If you want to fix its size, imagine the U.S. and Mexico combined. Antarctica is ranked number-eight by geographic size of all the Earth’s features.
Most of us have trouble calling to mind an overall image of Antarctica. This is because Antarctica gets edited off most world maps. The familiar mapped views of the world are Mercator projections, which maximize the area of mid-latitude countries, thus making them appear larger than their geographic reality. Antarctica presents a pesky problem for mapmakers – as a circle it doesn’t lend itself to being cut into one long, wide strip. The solution has been to leave it off maps entirely. So it was that the fifth-largest continent became a lacey fringe.
Lurking mysteriously off the map, Antarctic events invite geographic context by scientists and news agencies. When an enormous iceberg broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula in 2002, its official name became B-22, a code describing location and time frame. The U.S. National Ice Center assigns these coded names, then monitors the bergs’ journey northward. The agency is located outside of Washington, DC, and most trackers have never seen an actual iceberg.
The gargantuan B-22 made news across the world – and caused editors and scientists to fish around for the words to describe its heft. The BBC described B-22 as nine times the size of Singapore, which presumably draws a picture for UK residents, all clear on their former colony’s actual size. The Associated Press noted the berg rivalled the State of Delaware. In Canada, they offered Prince Edward Island as comparison. Reuters decided not to play that game, simply referring to the berg as “large.” The game of scale is infectious for most, however. Want to imagine B-22 at its birth? Think of two Hawaiis or the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
B-22 had a short reign as a headline grabber. Within days, the British Antarctic Survey announced that satellites had captured the break up of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. The images of its demise, recorded by a passing camera miles above the Earth, made The New York Times’s front page, albeit below the fold. The Larsen B Ice Shelf weighed in at 500 billion tons, and filled Antarctica’s Weddell Sea with miles of floes. What was the biggest floe, you ask? According to the New Scientist, it was about the size of Greater London.