Antarctica and the South Pole have always been fairly close to South Africans, geographically speaking, but the folks at Google Maps have brought addition imagery from the frozen continent to the world at large, updating a project that started in September 2010.
New locations available for panoramic viewing include the Ceremonial South Pole, Shackleton’s Hut, Scott’s Hut and the South Pole Telescope, which were added with the assistance of the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota and the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust. The images were taken using a lightweight tripod camera with a fisheye lens because, according to Street View technical program manager Alex Starns (and common sense), “our Street View trikes wouldn’t be much use in the snow.”
With this technology, you can go inside places like Shackleton’s Hut and the other small wooden buildings that served as bases from which the explorers launched their expeditions. They were built to withstand the drastic weather conditions only for the few short years that the explorers inhabited them, but remarkably, after more than a century, the structures are still intact, along with well-preserved examples of the food, medicine, survival gear and equipment used during the expeditions. Now anyone can explore these huts and get insight into how these men lived for months at a time.
Below is the short Google video on Antarctica on Street View.
Source: Google Lat Long blog
