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.
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.
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 ;)).
There’s a corner of my backyard that’s pretty untouched by humans…
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Linda Tripp.
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.
Northwest Face, Nameless (Trango) Tower.
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:
- Somewhere in the Amazon basin
- Gobi Desert
- 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?
several days ago…
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 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.
Further plumbing of my cloudy sci-fi memories indicates that the whole quiet zone idea may have actually been in Snow Crash, 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]
I here that no-one’s been to Cleveland since 1973 
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.
Britney Spears’ honey pot, according to her press release of a few weeks ago.
It’s the October 2000 issue. Here’s a link to the article…
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0010/feature1/index.html