Description
Antarctica is the southernmost continent on Earth. It is also the coldest, driest and windiest and is noted as being the last one to be discovered, in 1820.
The first confirmed landing in Antarctica occurred in 1895. Some nations have territorial claims in Antarctica but the territory is de facto shared, primarily to conduct scientific experiments. To enable scientific work, a number of stations have been built on the continent. Depending on the season, population in Antarctica ranges from around 1,000 to 5,000 people. This is because some stations only operate in the summer, while others are active all year round.
I’ve long been fascinated by Antarctica. It’s a very isolated place with an extremely harsh environment, where, against all odds, humans have managed to dwell.
I wanted to find out more about research stations in Antarctica: how many there are, where they are located and when they opened, so I made the interactive map above.
Making the map
The map was made using Svelte (an awesome user interface framework) and D3.js.
Data sources
I scraped the list of stations from Wikipedia; the additional information shown in tooltips I also got from individual Wikipedia pages.
Geodata comes from Natural Earth. I took Cultural Vectors as a source for land data, which I then filtered to include only Antarctica and exported as TopoJSON using Mapshaper. For the ice layer I used the Ice Shelves data.