When Bartolomeu Dias left Portugal to explore the coast of Africa in 1488, and Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott set out to reach the South Pole in 1910, these great adventurers were taking almost unimaginable risks.
There’s no denying the courage of those pioneers, or of leather men since. Men like South-African-born Mike Horn, who swam the Amazon in 1997, sailed and walked the Equator in 1999, and hiked the Arctic Circle in 2002.
You might say the last of the great adventures has been ticked off by many before. But you’d be wrong. Antarctica is still one of the harshest, driest, continents, right outside our narrow human comfort zone. (Look how seasoned ice man, Ranulph Fiennes, had to be choppered out when frostbite set in on his most…