If ever anyone was going to reinvent Antarctica, it would be New Zealand scientist Simon Cox. Few New Zealanders will make the trip to the icy continent in their lifetimes. But Cox ticks off on his fingers five visits in person.
As project leader of the mind-boggling new geological database GeoMAP Antarctica, Cox, a GNS Science principal scientist and geologist, says he has been to Antarctica “at least 735 times” for GeoMAP and another 500 times for an earlier mapping project.
“That’s if you count being there as flying through the landscape on my computer. Certainly, if you were to give me a picture of a mountain, I would know it like a child and be able to say, ‘That’s Mt Huggins, and that’s Mt Rucker.’ I can pretty much always tell you which mountain range it is in, if not the actual name of the mountain. The maunga become like friends in the landscape.”
GeoMAP Antarctica is a world-first free and open-access database combining all the existing geological information on the frozen continent. It ranges from the magnificently coloured and hand-drawn maps of rock formations from the early-20th century to up-to-date imagery and data captured several times a day by polar-orbiting satellites.
The project has been described by other scientists as a paradigm shift for studying the biology of Antarctica, and a timely tool for understanding climate change in the region. It is also a catalyst for interdisciplinary sciences, which can provide vital information, based on rock types, about vegetation distribution in Antarctica, climate change and the Antarctic’s contribution to global sea level rise. “In many ways, GeoMAP is like a Wikipedia of Antarctic geology,” Cox says.
GeoMAP co-creator Belinda Smith Lyttle, a cartographer and retired GNS Science analyst, has never made it to the Antarctic. But like her colleague, she has flown virtually across plateau and glacier, mountain and icefield. The number of
