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Interesting article, but running out of wilderness? Antarctica is 5.5 million square miles (14.2 million square kilometers) or about twice the size of Australi
by docdeek 6y ago
Interesting article, but running out of wilderness?
Antarctica is 5.5 million square miles (14.2 million square kilometers) or about twice the size of Australia. Australia has an estimated 15-23 million buildings [1] (let alone other structures) and there’s PLENTY of wilderness left.
According to the article, “littered across the continent are as many as 5,000 permanent structures”. So Antarctica is nearly twice as big and has not even 1% of the structures that Australia has. I’d suggest that there is plenty of empty space down there still.
1: https://www.spatialsource.com.au/gis-data/many-buildings-australia-geoscape-counting https://www.spatialsource.com.au/gis-data/many-buildings-aus...
- gumby 6y agoI have a friend at uni melb who until recently spent more than half each year in Antarctica cleaning up old sites (diesel plumes and the like). There is a lot to do. I agree on an absolute scale it’s utterly empty but the parts of interest to humans are not.