Is there anywhere on earth untouched by humans?

[aha]

I mean above ground of course. Have we been everywhere? Seen everything there is to see and mapped or surveyed every square inch? It's these kinds of questions that plagued me.

(Please forgive me but there is no question intriguing enough out there to make me use the search feature on this board. I use it strictly for emergencies, my eyes glaze over when I even think about it.)

[techchick68]

aha,

Being from Colorado, this sort question always enters my mind.

Could I possibly be the first human ever to step foot on a specific part of the ground? Of course if you want to get technical with errosion and other geological factors it is highly possible.

This of course stems from when I had my 4x4 Chevy truck and would go to some pretty out of the way places and hike with my dog.

[Smeghead]

My guess would be that there are some remote places that haven't been physically visited, but airborne and space-based radar systems have mapped out pretty much every square inch of land.

[Tapioca Dextrin]

I was in Columbia a few years ago "on business". The local maps were remarkably incomplete. They just had white areas, with a sign saying that it was cloudy that day, so the aerial survey couldn't be done.

[vandal]

Untouched by human hands? Probably some places in Antarctica and some of the higher elevation areas of the Himilayas. Maybe even some areas of the Sahara too. Well, come to think of it, any place that covers a very large area that is desolate and barren, like the aforesaid, would probably qualify.

[Dr.Pinky]

Considering it's size and density, there are parts of Alaska no-one has gotten to yet.

[2nd Law]

Good question, aha. I would be surprised if there is anyplace in the continental U.S. that hasn't been seen by the naked eye, if you include being seen from airplanes. For something like that, you may have to go to either Antarctica or under the canopy of the Amazon rain forest.

On the other hand, if you mean somewhere no one has actually walked before, I'm sure you can find places in the continental U.S. to fit that description. There's an area in Canyonlands National Park known as "The Maze" that would be a possiblity....

[Dr. Lao]

I mean above ground of course.Do you mean above water, too? If the ocean floor counts, then there are huge expanses of land that have never been seen by human eyes.

[bibliophage]

As of about 10 years ago, there were mountain peaks in, among other places, California, Alaska, and Guyana, that hadn't been reached by man. I'm sure there must be plenty of other places too. These are not generally the highest or most dangerous peaks, but tend to be rather unimpressive and remote peaks that don't attract much attention.

It used to be that the first person who climbed a mountain got the honor of naming it. Since that is no longer the case, that's one less incentive to potential climbers.

[aenea]

Go to Montana, Aha.

Cruise around Yellowstone National Park, or Glacier. There are many places that have not been explored yet by human feet. I was reading an article recently about the waterfalls of Yellowstone, there were over 300 new ones discovered in the past couple of years.

Glacier is mostly glaciers. There is a couple of roads thru the park, but most of the entire park is only visible and acessable by foot. That is a lot of park to wander around in.

Alaska has to be a lot like that, as well as a large part of Canada, and hey, what about Syberia?

Come to think of it, I doubt the Himalayas have been fully explored. :D

[ellis555]

Just for the record, a spot in s.e. Yellowstone is supposed to be the most remote spot in the lower 48, as judged by distance from a paved road. I'm a little dubious about this myself, but the source is a lady who was a park ranger there for 12 years, so she might know what she's talking about.

-ellis

[Lance Turbo]

I saw the documentary "Ring of Fire" about a year and a half ago. It's about volcanos. They showed lava (in Hawaii I think) flowing into the sea. They called this, "The newest land on Earth". I don't know if there is any new land right now, but I'm sure there will be some in your lifetime. If you want to be the first to set foot on this new land, move to the Pacific rim, and buy some asbestos shoes.

[Una Persson]

I have read that the Tepuis of the Guyana Highlands in Eastern Venezuela (Tepuis are these very heavily eroded Mesa-looking mountains) are very unexplored. There are dozens of these little mountains that no one has ever set foot on. This is supposed to be because it is extremely difficult to climb the soft eroding rock, and the conditions there are jungle-like and hellishly hot and insect infested. And there is nothing of interest or value to most people when you get to the top.

I also read once that a helicopter operator was advertising rides to "virgin ground", where he would take people up and set them down on the top of a Tepui, so they could say they had been someplace no one else ever had. But IIRC, he was only going to one or two mountains that had suitable landing areas, and thus was ripping people off.

And do caves count as "virgin ground"? There are still opportunities in places for cavers to go places where no woman (or man) has ever gone before...

[schief2]

I can't say definitively, but if people are still stumbling across previously-unknown features like waterfalls as recently as last year, it seems like some of the remoter parts of China/Tibet would be a good place to start looking.

Explorers discover mythical waterfall in Tibet (AFP) (http://www.tibet.ca/wtnarchive/1999/1/7_4.html)

The waterfall, which the explorers named "The Hidden Falls," is in a previously unexplored five-mile gap in the Upper Tsangpo Gorge, the world's deepest canyon arching around the easternmost Himalayas.

Explorers have been looking for the famous falls since the 19th century. British botanist Francis Kingdon-Ward was the last person to try. He gave up in 1924, concluding the falls were nothing but a myth.

[aha]

Geez I meant "above water in my op", sorry for any confusion.

[handy]

Plenty of caves haven't been mapped. Then there are wildernesses, also unmapped. I suppose if you got an atlas of the USA or the world you could check for barren areas.

[Colibri]

Three years ago I organized an expedition in Panama to a small mountain range that had never been biologically surveyed previously, the Serrania de Jungurudo, in Darien. When we made our base camp at 850 m, my Embera Indian guides told me even they had never been to the spot before, and they had a big discussion about what they were going to name the place. They never go up there because there's not much game, there's little running water, and the going is extremely tough in the cloud forest. They just don't bother. We never actually made it to the highest point of the range because chopping a trail was too difficult. My altimeter, though, indicated that the high point was probably a good 500 m lower than the best available published maps. While I can't swear that no Indian has ever gone up there in the past 10,000 years, I think there's a fair possibility that no one has ever set foot on that peak. There are no reliable maps for much of the Darien and several other parts of Panama (although radar/satellite images are available, they are not contour maps). I imagine that there are any number of minor peaks in Panama, especially the steeper ones, that no one has ever bothered to climb, no even an Indian. And much of the tropics, e.g. the tepuis, is even more unknown.

[Chronos]

schief2, that cite looks suspisciously Eurocentric. They just now found these falls that they had heard of for over a century? Heard of from whom? It sounds like the natives have been there plenty of times, but of course, they don't count :rolleyes:

[yabob]

And do caves count as "virgin ground"? There are still opportunities in places for cavers to go places where no woman (or man) has ever gone before...

My first thought on seeing the subject, too. But the OP said "above ground". Of course, "virgin passage" is usually as suspicious a concept among cavers as the more general connotation suggested by the phrase ...

[schief2]

Originally posted by Chronos
schief2, that cite looks suspisciously Eurocentric. They just now found these falls that they had heard of for over a century? Heard of from whom? It sounds like the natives have been there plenty of times, but of course, they don't count :rolleyes:


Well, true...the link I posted implied that by "undiscovered" I meant "undiscovered by Western folks", which wasn't what I was trying to suggest. It just seems pretty likely to me that if there's some places that are only now being finally, officially charted and mapped by Westerners in that part of the world, odds are there's some places in the region that no one AT ALL has been to.

[zen101]

I'm surprised none of you stated the obvious:

According to my Twix bar it is untouched by human hands. Or, it was until I ate it.

[Phobos]

National Public Radio recently had a story about someone walking a "MegaTransect" across the most untouched parts of the jungles of Africa. It will probably be in National Geographic soon. He (and his crew) wasn't the first human there, but the area was essentially "untouched".

[Montfort]

Originally posted by Phobos
National Public Radio recently had a story about someone walking a "MegaTransect" across the most untouched parts of the jungles of Africa. It will probably be in National Geographic soon. He (and his crew) wasn't the first human there, but the area was essentially "untouched".
It's in the current (November 2000, IIRC) issue.

Very fascinating article.

[Silo]

Originally posted by aenea
Glacier is mostly glaciers. There is a couple of roads thru the park, but most of the entire park is only visible and acessable by foot. That is a lot of park to wander around in.

There are barely any glaciers left in Glacier Park anymore. A few small ones hanging around, that's about it. Beautiful place though.

I conservatively estimate 1/7th of the land surface of the earth has not been explored or set foot apon by humans (don't ask me how I got that figure ;)).

[G.B.H. Hornswoggler]

There's a corner of my backyard that's pretty untouched by humans...

[bernse]

My wife (does surveying and mapping) told me that there are several parts of northern Alberta that have never been surveyed on the ground, let alone the territories that are north of there. I would also imagine that the other provinces would be similar. I can not think of any reason other than mapping that people would ever go there. To remote for hunting, no real prospects for oil/gas. So, I would suppose that there are many areas up north (but not far enough to be in the arctic) that haven't really been "explored" by people yet.

[aenea]

There are barely any glaciers left in Glacier Park anymore. A few small ones hanging around, that's about it. Beautiful place though.

Been there often, have you Silo? Pity you didn't bring back some current information or maps.

Although Glacier NP is mostly a land preserve, it does contain over 24 glaciers (just counting the ones I see on the map) most of which are not visible from the 2 or 3 roads that run thru the park. It may not be one big glacier kiddo, but there are surely many glaciers left up there.

As mentioned previously, most are accessible only on foot or horseback, usually in arranged tours. It is a great place to go.

[Chas.E]

ISTR a story in National Geographic or some place like that, where an expedition to the Antarctic set off to remote places in search of virgin snow and ice core samples from places that were not only unvisited by man, but far from his environmental effects. To their dismay, the snow samples from even the remotest, untouched parts of Antarctica were contaminated with wind-borne soot particles.

[Collounsbury]

Hmm, folks posting here seem to take unvisited by Westerners to mean untouched by folks period. Considering how long folks have been around, I doubt anywhere outside of the Antartic and the highest elevations in the Himalayas (as Vandal said).

Just to illustrate:

Originally posted by vandal

Maybe even some areas of the Sahara too. Well, come to think of it, any place that covers a very large area that is desolate and barren, like the aforesaid, would probably qualify.

But until about 8000 years before present, the Sahara was wet. Not really wet, but wet enough to support livestock and folks who left carvings and rock paintings in its very depths. Of course there are still folks in the Sahara, but there might be places that have not seen humans in a really long time.

[Chickenhead]

Linda Tripp.

[Silo]

Originally posted by aenea
There are barely any glaciers left in Glacier Park anymore. A few small ones hanging around, that's about it. Beautiful place though.

Been there often, have you Silo? Pity you didn't bring back some current information or maps.

Although Glacier NP is mostly a land preserve, it does contain over 24 glaciers (just counting the ones I see on the map) most of which are not visible from the 2 or 3 roads that run thru the park. It may not be one big glacier kiddo, but there are surely many glaciers left up there.

As mentioned previously, most are accessible only on foot or horseback, usually in arranged tours. It is a great place to go.



Well I was living there just a few months ago... Twenty-Four glaciers wow! There's more glaciers than that on Mt. Rainier (26). It's the fact that you said "Glacier is mostly glaciers" is just plain wrong. It was mostly glaciers at one time (3 times actually--three different glacial periods), but we're talking around 100,000+ years ago. Please think more in the future, thanks.

[threemae]

Northwest Face, Nameless (Trango) Tower.

[djbdjb]

Consider an arbitrary spot on the (solid) surface of the earth and ask if human beings have ever come within x meters of that spot. The OP asked this question for a small value of x (1 meter?). Obviously, all the Earth has been covered in this fashion if we make x large enough (10,000 km). What are everyone's guesses for the minimal x to cover the whole Earth in this sense? What part of Earth would be the last point covered as x increases?

Here are my candidates for the latter:
1. Somewhere in the Amazon basin
2. Gobi Desert
3. Some strange little speck of an Island somewhere.

NO,NO,NO...
As I edit this post, the answer that I really like is:
4. Antarctica

My original guess for minimal x was 50 km., but when I think of Antarctica, I want to increase that to at least 500km, perhaps 1000km? How does this sound to Antarctica experts?

[djbdjb]

several days ago...

[Beadalin]

I find this thread really encouraging... I had just assumed that most of the world has been tramped on already (which is depressing, to me).

All this reminds me of when I climbed Mt. Baker in Washington State. We walked along a pristine glacier, when the leader suddenly stabbed his ice axe into the snow and pulled out... a Coke can. Took some of the magic of being there out of it, unfortunately. If people can get to a spot, someone is bound to spoil it.

One of the ideas in David Brin's Earth (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/055329024X/o/qid=973555707/sr=2-3/102-0643413-7625749) that really appealed to me was that of quiet zones. In the novel, Earth is so overpopulated that in counter-balance, some areas are set aside to be untouched. Planes aren't allowed to fly over them, and no sound from human civilization is allowed to enter them. Pretty cool idea.

[Beadalin]

Further plumbing of my cloudy sci-fi memories indicates that the whole quiet zone idea may have actually been in Snow Crash (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553380958/o/qid%3D973557458/sr%3D8-1/ref%3Daps%5Fsr%5Fb%5F1%5F1/104-2635218-4730328), by Neal Stephenson. Sigh. Either way, it's a cool idea.

[fixed link-- Chronos]

[Edited by Chronos on 11-06-2000 at 10:30 PM]

[Tapioca Dextrin]

I here that no-one's been to Cleveland since 1973 :D

[Colibri]

Originally posted by Collounsbury
Hmm, folks posting here seem to take unvisited by Westerners to mean untouched by folks period. Considering how long folks have been around, I doubt anywhere outside of the Antartic and the highest elevations in the Himalayas (as Vandal said).


According to botanical evidence, the most of the mountain ridges in Panama, for example, have been covered by almost impenetrable tangled cloud forest since before humans arrived. There's little game and little running water, and it's probably been like that for a long time. While it's impossible to say that any one particular site has "never" been visited by humans, I think it's very probable that many of the minor peaks have not been visited even by Indians. One might climb one of the highest local peaks for a view, or for religious reasons, but there would be no reason at all to climb one of the lower ones.

Another example is New Zealand. If a peak in the Southern Alps has never been climbed by westerners, it damn sure was never climbed by the native Maoris.

Few if any indigenous peoples had a concept of climbing something just "because it was there." Only peaks of some religious significance are likely to have been climbed other than by westernized peoples. There are plenty of places outside the Himalayas and Antarctica that are unlikely to have been trod by humans, even at fairly low elevations.

[black rabbit]

Britney Spears' honey pot, according to her press release of a few weeks ago.

[Phobos]

Originally posted by Montfort
Originally posted by Phobos
National Public Radio recently had a story about someone walking a "MegaTransect" across the most untouched parts of the jungles of Africa. It will probably be in National Geographic soon. He (and his crew) wasn't the first human there, but the area was essentially "untouched".
It's in the current (November 2000, IIRC) issue.

Very fascinating article.

It's the October 2000 issue. Here's a link to the article...
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0010/feature1/index.html