At least they don’t sell whale bones, or sealskin sweaters. Using the money generated by tourism for conservation, in this case, of the Antarctic cultural heritage.īut having seen so much these days of wonderful landscapes and Antarctic wildlife, it seems incredible that what attracts tourist most is the trade in Antarctic products. Perhaps the most interesting thing is the management by the United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust ( a foundation that uses the profits from the shop for the upkeep of five refuges and historic Antarctic sites. It was rebuilt in 1996 and declared Antarctica historic site number 61. It later became a research station for the British Antarctic Survey until 1962 when it was abandoned.
The war that never existed”, which tells of how Hitler used this continent to build a huge submarine base to act as a trampoline for dominating the Southern Hemisphere. This would appear to have been taken from Felipe Boyano’s strange novel “Antarctica 1947. The site was a whaling station at the beginning of the last century, but perhaps more importantly it became a British naval base during the Second World War as part of Operation Tabarin to control the movements of the German fleet. On the Hesperides there has also been pushing and shoving to disembark, but as the chef, who has given up his place, says “there are only two old houses without much charm”. Logically, the prices are those of a luxury liner. Incredible but true: the most visited place in Antarctica is a shop selling T-shirts at 25 dollars each, sweatshirts at 40, or badges and pins at 10 dollars. But no, it looks like the southernmost museum in the world, although it is really Antarctica’s most important souvenir supermarket. You expect this enclave to be special and unique: a super-Nirvana of a landscape or the biggest gathering of whales or emperor penguins or other surprising Antarctic creatures. Nowhere else in the whole of Antarctica do queues of boats build up requesting their slot to disembark, in rigorous turns, 50 people.
Around 20,000 tourists arrive every year to visit this unique enclave. It is this compression created by the rotating blocks which led to the deformation of the sediments north of the eastern end of the north branch of the South Scotia Ridge and within the central depression itself.After 10 days of intensive research at different enclaves of the peninsula, we reach our last stop, Antarctica’s most visited spot: Port Locroy. As the blocks were transported laterally along the transtensional sinistral plate boundary they experienced some degree of counterclockwise rotation along the right lateral transverse structures creating local zones of compression and extension at their corners. This suggests that continuity of the listric faults parallel to the plate boundary is disrupted by transverse structures, structures which may have been produced by bends along the plate boundary. Differences in morphology along the north branch suggest that this block tilting varies along strike being the least on its eastern and western ends and maximum in the center. Motion along these faults caused the block above the detachment surface (upper block-north branch of the South Scotia Ridge) to undergo some degree of tilting. Extension during this phase is characterized by listric faults dipping both north and south which root into a northerly dipping basal detachment surface. Transtensional tectonics along the sinistral transform fault plate boundary during this phase led to the creation of the present tectonic geomorphology of the South Scotia Ridge. The second tectonic episode during which the present plate boundary was established in its current location along the central depression may have begun about 4 Ma. Concurrent with this transtension episode an extensive sediment prism was deposited north of the ridge. During an early phase of transtension, which probably took place in the Oligocene, a half graben fronted by a high along its northern edge was formed along the southern flank of the ridge.
This fragmentation of the ridge appears to have been in two phases. Fragmentation of the ridge during and since its transport to its present position is due to transtensional sinistral motion along the Scotia-Antarctic plate boundary. It is made up of two highs (north and south branches of the South Scotia Ridge) separated by a central depression that contains four narrow deeps. The ridge is composed of continental crustal fragments transported eastward from the South America-Antarctic isthmus 28 to 6 Ma during the opening of Drake Passage.
Multichannel seismic reflection profiles recorded aboard B/O Hespérides during the austral summer of 1991–1992 were used to identify the tectonic style of the South Scotia Ridge along the Scotia/Antarctica plate boundary.
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