YOU could be forgiven for thinking that there are few places on Earth yet to be conquered by humans, but you鈥檇 be wrong. Countless areas, from polar islands to tracts of remote desert, remain virgin territory.
For most of these places there is a good reason why nobody has ever set foot there: nobody wants to. What counts in the world of exploration is conquering places that others wish they had been to first. Even so, there are desirable destinations that remain unvisited by even the hardiest explorer.
One good place to look is in the world of mountaineering, where numerous high peaks remain unclimbed. Top of the list is Gangkhar Puensum in the kingdom of Bhutan. Standing at 7541 metres, it is the 40th-highest mountain in the world and the highest unclimbed one. Mountaineers have tried to reach the summit on three occasions, and failed each time. It is likely to remain out of reach for the foreseeable future, as in 1994 Bhutan banned the climbing of peaks higher than 6000 metres out of respect for local spiritual beliefs.
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This, however, still leaves thousands of virgin peaks. 鈥淚 am amazed that each year climbers still find new ones,鈥� says Bill Ruthven of the Mount Everest Foundation, a UK charity that supports mountain exploration. The hotspots are Greenland, Antarctica and the Nyainq锚ntanglha East region of Tibet, where 159 out of 164 peaks above 6000 metres have still to be climbed.
Another of the Earth鈥檚 great unexplored domains is underground. New caves and passages are being discovered all the time, even in densely populated countries. The UK鈥檚 largest shaft, Titan in Derbyshire, for example, was not discovered until 1999. 鈥淣ot a week goes by without something new being found,鈥� says Chris Howes, editor of the caving magazine Descent.
Caves offer the best chance for an ordinary person to discover a new place. 鈥淰irgin caves count as perhaps the only places on Earth that are not only unexplored but unknown,鈥� says Bill Mixon of the Association for Mexican Cave Studies. 鈥淭hey can鈥檛 be photographed or mapped from the air or space.鈥� However, caving can sometimes be even more challenging than mountaineering.
Take Voronya cave in Abkhazia, Georgia, the world鈥檚 deepest cave at 2170 metres. An expedition in January 2007 uncovered an extra 30 metres of passage 鈥� no mean feat when you consider that much of the cave is underwater. Another Mecca for cave exploration is the vast network of caves in Yucat谩n, Mexico. Some 500 kilometres of passageways have already been explored, but there are countless more still to be discovered 鈥� many of them also underwater.
Then there鈥檚 the ocean. In August, an expedition run by the P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow plans a unique visit to the North Pole 鈥� approaching it from below the Arctic ice. What do they expect to find there? 鈥淨uite honestly, mud,鈥� says Mike McDowell of Deep Ocean Expeditions, who is helping to organise the venture.
This should be a reminder to those hankering to conquer virgin territory: the most extreme places are often the most desolate too.
