A continent with a treaty nobody voted for and a ceiling under the ice at 2,140 metres. This newspaper bought the flight lines and the fuel returns, and lets the arithmetic say where the aircraft went.
Start at the top. This is the order the desk would hand these to someone who has never read the paper — not the order they ran.
A plain guide to how a restricted area gets designated and how a prohibition is worded. Then the polygon's 61 vertices against a 1998 magnetic contour, and what happened when we applied to drill on both sides.
Forty-one flight lines, bought raw and reprocessed twice by teams who never spoke. Both resolve a flat roof 2,140 metres down, three shafts rising from it, and a gravity low that water cannot make.
Twelve winterers, 1.4 million litres of fuel a year and a 2,900-metre skiway. We asked four treaty parties to send an observer. All four declined; one of them had an aircraft 180 kilometres away.
A private expedition permit for a coordinate in Queen Maud Land took nine weeks, £780 in fees and £6,100 for an environmental evaluation. It was approved with four conditions. Then eleven transport operators refused us, in writing.
Article VII lets any Consultative Party walk into any Antarctic station without notice. This newspaper coded 419 station visits out of all 63 inspections ever filed: no refusals in 67 years, median notice four hours, nineteen stations never visited.
One sheet of gazelle hide, 90 by 63 centimetres. Fitted to Antarctic bedrock the famous coast misses by 340 kilometres; fitted to Brazil, rotated and squeezed, by 61. The squeeze begins 2.1 centimetres from the trim.
Operation Highjump put 4,700 men and an aircraft carrier into Antarctic waters in the summer of 1946. It was the largest expedition ever sent there and it packed up ahead of schedule. The operational records say why, and the answer is ice.
A contract support pilot, 11,300 hours, most of them dull. Her personal logbook gives the heading, the fuel and four sentences about an ice-walled shaft. The operator's own fuel sheet cannot account for 71 minutes. She died in June.
Eleven consecutive Article VII notifications carry one latitude and longitude. Two satellite passes and the programme's own approach plate put the buildings 84 kilometres away. The treaty prescribes no way to correct a coordinate, and nobody has asked for one.
Operation Highjump flew 70,000 photographs over 1.5 million square miles, and almost none of them could be made into a map. A computer in a Wellington survey office supplied the ground control by hand. Her initials are on 71 fix sheets.
Two geophysicists, paid separately by this newspaper and kept apart, rebuilt the raw flight-line data at five-kilometre spacing instead of twenty-two. Where newer data are dense, the closed circle separates into three anomalies with nothing joining them.
Two researchers, working separately from the same photostats, reconciled sailing and returning rolls against the disbursing officer's final settlements. They agree on eighteen names, differ on one, and add thirty-two wounded. The published summary lists four.
I obtained them separately, from three laboratories on three continents, each of which believes it is the only one that ever measured this band. Their ages agree within eighty-six years. All three are stratigraphically impossible.
We test what you believe and print the result either way. These are the claims on this beat that did not survive the test — printed on the same page as the ones that did.
Ninety-four of the 3,507 distinguishable sequences in the accretion ice also occur in a swab from a Rotterdam fuel tank, at 99.4 per cent identity or better. The organism nobody could classify is one of them.