Chiara Montanari, engineer, the first woman at the head of an Antarctic mission, when she wants to summarize in a word what those 14 million square kilometers of ice spent up to 2,000 meters and mountains, is “threshold”. That is, “it is the point of passage between the well -known, among those that are our certainties, habits, awareness, and the unknown. A world that is not made for man. The Concordia base, where I lent mission, is located at the top of the polar cap, is at 4,000 meters above sea level, there are 4,000 meters of ice stratification, with a temperature of less 50 in summer and less 80 in winter. Around you have an infinite desert completely white and without reference points, only the horizon line that separates the sky from the earth, there are no smells, there are no colors, there are no stimuli, nothing moves.
It is the place where you realize the presence of the absence. All our knowledge, therefore the mental categories with which we are used to categorizing, organizing, go into crisis and no longer make sense. You are like a child who is at night in a forest. It is at that point that our brain, our being, quickly begins to question what he knows, and reorganizes the thought according to new categories, forces us to reiminate ourselves in ourselves and find a new vitality within us. Overcoming this threshold, physical and mental, is a very strong spiritual experience. Antarctica is a place of transformation. In recent years, thanks to increasingly advanced means (and a tourism industry always looking for new frontiers), exceeding this threshold is no longer only possible for researchers with decades of preparation behind, but has become an experience accessible to the Happy Few of the very high target travels that can experience the emotion of touching this non -place with its incredible landscapes, its silences, its wildlife (pages, seals, Balene, orche) and a mystery that no camera, however evolved, still manages to capture.
The most classic itinerary is the one that, aboard ships-rompigiaccio adapted to cruise vehicles, exceed 1,000 km of the Drake Strait, which separates Capo Horn (extreme tip of Chile) from the Antarctic Peninsula and its islands. Most of the cruises in Antarctica explore this peninsula, the only strip of land that is partially found further north of 66 33 ” of the Antarctic Polar Circle. In the narrow fjord of Neko Harbor are observed the huge blocks of ice that detach themselves from the coast by diving into the sea, with the huge colonies of Pinguini Papua (or Gentoo) on the background.
Another obligatory stop is Paradise Harbor, a bay famous for the crystalline blue of the icebergs that surf the placid waters of the area.
A short distance is Danco Island, with its noisy population of about 2,000 pairs of penguins and megattees that, at the end of summer, cross the Errera canal. The choice for now even less beaten is instead that of a cruise to the sea of Weddell, a real ice desert that extends east of the Antarctic peninsula and famous for the iceberg with a flat crest, on which you can see groups of emperor penguins. Just a taste, of course, compared to what is the extreme world of the solitary hinterland. But undoubtedly an opportunity to live, at least for a few days, the thrill of that threshold which, as Chiara Montanari says, “can test us with the unknown, to redesign our mental map: a not only physical outpost, but towards a new humanity, to make an evolutionary jump”.
