Is there any real geographic exploration of the world left?

Great Debates
1

I’m sitting here in my study/office at home admiring an old map of Africa I have on my wall (courtesy of a National Geographic from sometime in the late '50s or very early '60s), and realising that “Rhodesia”, “Portuguese East Africa” and “Belgian Congo” are now only names on an old map, reflecting an Africa that doesn’t exist anymore (Yes, I am well aware there’s no more British Empire!).

Still, it got me thinking about how things were up until the 1940s, when there were still parts of the world that hadn’t really been explored by Europeans and getting anywhere was part of the adventure itself… of course, nowadays you can simply front up at the airport with your passport and a credit card and and be watching the evening news the next day in pretty much any city in the world, from London to Alice Springs to Cairo to Saskatoon to Vladivostok.

I’ve long maintained (and my friends agree) that, had I been born a century ago, there’d probably be a river or a country in Africa named after me, and as I sit here typing all this I wonder if there’s actually anywhere on Earth left to explore that’s likely to be worth the hassle and expense of getting there. There’s nothing of note in the Australian Outback from an explorer’s point of view, it’s very hard to get to Antarctica (especially to look at ice and penguins), and as much as I’d love to explore Africa the reality is that I’m about a century late.

At the risk of sounding like people in the 19th century who declared everything had been invented- and were then resoundingly embarrassed when Alexander Graham Bell invented the Telephone- it sometimes seems that everywhere on Earth has already been explored- either by people, or by satellites.

So, is there anywhere on Earth that hasn’t been explored, not counting Volcanoes or undersea trenches etc?

2

Caves, for one (bring diving gear)

3

The bottom of the Ocean might do. I believe there is quite a bit more to discover on the bottom of the Ocean and even near some shorelines under the silt.

4

He disqualified Antarctica as being too hard to get to, so I’m guessing he’s looking for suggestions of places he could personally go explore… Kind of a disjointed OP, actually: disqualifying someplace that we know hasn’t been explored thoroughly from his list of potential exploration areas because it’s hard to get to. Dude, that’s why it hasn’t been explored…

5

Not so much hard to get to, more “Not worth the hassle”- ie, there’s nothing there of note. No ruins from Ancient Civilisations, not Undiscovered Tribes, etc.

6

I see your point, but exploration was usually a rich man’s game anyway. Therefore, a good boat, a good crew, solid diving experience and he can do a lot of exploring in shallow areas of the seas.

I would look into areas that have both submerged within the last 3000 years and where civilizations were nearby. I am assuming there must be some locations along Central America and South America that would qualify. I would additionally believe there to be likely locations in South East Asia. I suspect Europe is pretty well played out and I doubt his homeland would have much to explore on its shores.

Jim

7

Those are just guesses. You won’t know until somebody goes and looks. And, wouldn’t you look a bit foolish if somebody comes back from Antarctica next month having discovered The Lost World or Lemuria? :dubious: :smiley:

8

I’ll second the undersea exploration angle. Sure, its expensive, but we know virtually nothing about a fair percentage of the ocean depths. I was watching a show the other day where they were (again) looking for Atlantis in the Med. (Digging for the Truth was the show), and it was really interesting some of the stuff they were looking at. It wasn’t Atlantis of course, but it was still pretty cool stuff.

As others have said there is also the potential for finding some ancient flooded out civilizations or at least human habitations. Maybe look in the Black Sea area for some indications of human habitation before the area was flooded…or you could look all along the coast of Europe for some stone age ruins before the last ice age ended…could be very interesting. Bring some deep pockets though…its pretty expensive. Maybe when I retire I’ll join you…its always been a dream of mine (if I was ever fortunate to have that kind of cash laying about) to do stuff like this. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

9

There are still plenty of undiscovered ruins out there. New things pop up every year.

Does “one foot underground” count?

10

It depends on what kind of “exploration” you mean, and what you consider to be worthwhile information. Certainly every place on the surface of the Earth has been photographed from satellites, but often we know little of what is actually on the ground.

In 1997 I did the first biological survey of the Serranía de Jungurudó, in Panama’s Darién wilderness. My party included me (an ornithologist), my two assistants, a herpetologist, a journalist, and a photographer and his assistant. It took us five days to get to our final camp in the highlands from where we flew into, the Indian village of Sambú: two days up river by canoe, then three more days lugging gear up with porters. Besides my party, the expedition included 24 Emberá Indians, including guides, porters, boatmen, and a couple of bodyguards just in case we ran into Colombian guerillas. We camped up top in cloud forest for 10 days. The whole expedition took three weeks.

While we didn’t find any species new to science, we did get a lot of new records of some rare endemic species of the Darién highlands. With this expedition and a survey of another mountain range, I doubled the known world ranges of several species.

How “unknown” was this place? The Indians, including my guides from the closest village, said they had never been there. After we arrived they had a conference to decide what to call the place, since they had no name for the area. (Our campsite was determined by the place the porters mutinied and refused to go any farther.) The Emberá stick mostly to the river valleys, since there’s not much game in the cloud forest and it’s tough to get around up there. They told me they would live off the land up there, but there wasn’t enough game so they had to send runners back to the village for supplies, and also bummed canned tuna off me.

Existing published maps of the Darién are very poor, and have many errors regarding the location of rivers and villages. I realized just how poor they were when I took an altitude reading of 1000 meters, and found that the map was off by 400+ meters (it should have been 1400 m) according to my GPS. The map topography in the area was essentially fictitious.

So yeah, there are still unexplored places at that scale. Certainly there are in Central and South America, and other places as well.

11

Yes, remote places unvisited by man still exist-just 10 years ago, a botanist in Australia hiked in to a remote valley, and found the last remaining stant of Wollemi Pines in existence! i would expect there are coreners of the Amazon, Borneo, greenland, which have yet to be explored. Of course, the really big secrets are in Antarctica-the city of the “Old Ones”-but don’t awaken Cthulu!

12

I realize that Antarctica is not permitted in this thread, but I just had to mention that a geologist recently gave a talk which showed the existence of two newly-discovered, huge (Great Lakes-sized) lakes under the Antarctic ice. The speaker was from the same institution (Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory in New York State) where the recently-deceased Marie Tharp drew the first good maps of the seafloor thirty or forty years ago.

Colibri described a good example of places where even the basics (topography, land use/land cover) are not well mapped. (And, lest you think it can all be done with sattelite imagery, all that data doesn’t mean squat without good fieldwork to interpret it – ideally, with input from the nearest human inhabitants).

But any place has some variable, some aspect, some feature which could be mapped in an illuminating way. Some of these things are tangible, but require careful study – Colibri’s birds are a good example (Howell and Webb is great, but the tweaking and updating of those species range maps will never cease – especially at the microhabitat level, and especially due to both “small”-scale change like shifting land uses, and “large”-scale change like global warming). Others aren’t even tangible – things like property lines (or entire property systems), economic shifts, language… Still others aren’t even best mapped in “geographic” space, but rather in other representations: website connections, political ideas…

As for out-and-out discovery of a place on this planet, I understand completely the romantic attraction, but it reminds me a little of the pith-helmet derring-do of, say, Victorian-era British colonialists (not that some of them didn’t contribute great things to human knowledge). It seems the most exciting work of that type these days is happening in astronomy. (I know, not what the O.P. had in mind).

13

I went to the Marianas Trench. Once. In 1960. For twenty minutes.

(Oh, come on, somebody had to do it.)

14

I was told recently that there are atleast 7 square miles of uncharted swampland in “The Congos”. I am unsure as to which region this area lies. I would guess it would be surrounding the Congo river. Either way the land is riddled with folklore of giant reptiles and bats in the utterly enveloping jungles.

15

People have been wandering around Antarctica now for over a century- if any of those things were there, someone invariably would have found them by now.

Still, it looks like there might still be stuff of interest in Central/South America and Africa…

16

People have been wandering around parts of Antarctica for 60+ years, granted. But it’s an entire continent very poorly explored. (Yes, most of it is ice covered.) One of the finds that confirmed Gondwanaland, back in the days when we shifted from the stationary-continent view to plate tectonics, was the discovery of permian reptile and Glossopteris (“early fern” is a close enough misnomer for this thread) fossils in exposed rock where mountains poked through a section of icecap. There are “dry valleys” (“dry”=non-ice-covered) that have not been properly explored.

Greenland. Again a central icecap, but surrounded by open shore. What we know about the Eric the Red settlement and its history would fit on two pages of agate type in a Viking history book – in fact it does; I’ve got the book. An expedition to the Greenland coast could hardly pick a place to land without making some sort of discovery.

The biology of the austral islands (the ones in the high southern latitudes, with austral equivalent to boreal) is really poorly known. A few have been well studied; far more have not.

There are a lot of microecologies in the Amazon watershed that have never been studied, and even the Indian cultures are not well known.

Interested in documenting endangered species or speciation in progress? French Polynesia has a great deal of both, and an amazing climate.

Want something tough? It’s known there were Neolithic civilizations swallowed by the Sahara in the last few millennia BC. But we know almost nothing about them – what they were, where they were, etc. Only that they were there. If your heart is set on nothing less than discovering a lost civilization, there you go.

There’s six areas for you to find adventure and discovery in.

17

Sapo nailed it in one, except that I’d add there are many, many thousands of dry caves that have not been explored. I used to live in TAG (Tennessee/Alabama/Georgia,) and I was hearing about folks finding new caves and passages virtually every weekend.

18

This is more like it! In fact, were it not for my fiancee’s curious reluctance to go along with my plans, there’s a very real possibility I’d be at the airport tonight, wearing a Pith Helmet, and trying to buy a ticket on a flight to Tamanghasset. :wink:

19

My cousin the professional mountain climber has done, among others, an expedition to an unmapped canyon somewhere in Asia (hell it’s been about 5 years and I always lose track of when he’s in Pakistan and when in Afghanistan). The locals on the north end of the canyon don’t enter it, bad juju place. The whole area is riddled with unexplored canyons; this particular one has a river and one of the expeditionaries wanted to know whether it was the same river coming out at someothercanyon which the locals at its southern end (different ethnia and language) don’t enter: bad juju place. Yes it was.

But they spent over a week finding out and like I said, there’s still a lot of canyons there that haven’t been explored: bad juju each and every one of them. Specially if you get caught by a rainstorm.

One of the questions he got from the audience in a presentation about that expedition was: oh, but what about satellite pictures? A: between tree cover and rock overhangs, not so good, plus they won’t reveal what layers of rock are there or whether there’s caves on the sides of the canyons.

20

Can someone explain this joke to me?