Ross Dependency, Antarctica
Ludwigsburger Meike left this comment after my last blogpost:-
Now where does one get when staying on the same invisible
line, crossing the South Pole and then heading back towards
the North Pole on the "back" of our beautiful planet?
From The South Pole, we travel over Antarctica's Ross Dependency which is icy, inhospitable territory overseen by New Zealand. Striking north across The Southern Ocean we are well east of New Zealand and we only skirt outlying islands and reefs of the Fiji Group, before passing between the French dependencies of Wallis and Futuna. In fact, the line of longitude, which is by the way, 178.5 degrees East, does not cross any land until it reaches Great Sitkin in the Aleutian Islands before heading straight over eastern Russia's Chukota Peninsula..
Uninhabited Great Sitkin Island in the Aleutian chain.
Then the line crosses the eastern most tip of Wrangel Island which is also a Russian possession. It is famed for its large polar bear population. It has the largest density of polar bear dens on this planet. The island was also the last known haunt of the woolly mammoth. These legendary beasts became extinct on Wrangel Island around four thousand years ago.
Tusk of a woolly mammoth on Wrangel Island
Though the line on the other side of this planet does not cross much land or places of note, we should remember that it traverses the vastness of The Pacific Ocean which is by far the biggest ocean in the world. It still hides many mysteries including undiscovered creatures, unplumbed depths and unpublished human stories.
If you check out your globe - if indeed you have one - it is possible to position it in a manner whereby The Pacific Ocean appears to take up almost half of the surface of The Earth. It truly is vast - 168,723,000 square kilometres which is double the size of the next largest ocean - The Atlantic.
From Wrangel, it's north to The North Pole and then back over the other side to the coast of Northumberland once again. From there, it's only ninety miles to Sheffield where I am sitting at my keyboard facing south. North of me, on the same line of longitude, Shirley and Phoebe are in the lounge reading a school book which is not titled "Wallis and Futuna". That is the subject of a future blogpost.
Basilica of St Peter, Futuna
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