Get There From Here: The Remotest Corners of the Earth in Pictures
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It's more than a crucial bottleneck in the game of Risk. Studded with craggy, steaming volcanoes that rise from the chilled Siberian plains, the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia is one of the most beautiful of Earth's remote reaches. In the photo above, a group of ecotourists raft through the cold ocean waters off the coast of the boreal mountain-land. The wilderness of Kamchatka is just one of the stunning natural landscapes hidden from most of humanity by the remoteness of its location. Check out these 30 images of Earth's most inaccessible, inhospitable and otherwise-untapped hideaways.
Image Credit: Jenny E. Ross/Corbis
This is the menacing peak of Klyuchevskaya Sopka, which some consider the tallest active volcano in Eurasia (depending on how you define "active"). Klyuchevskaya Sopka is the mightiest of Kamchatka's many volcanoes. Though magnificent images like these have tempted many to climb and explore the smoldering mountain, travels to the volcano are limited by the threat of a fatal eruption, and simply by how out of the way it is. Klyuchevskaya Sopka has experienced relatively frequent eruptions over the past several hundred years -- some of these awakenings have produced ash plumes that forced air traffic to navigate wide detours around the poisoned skies. Next, you'll see an extreme southerly terminus.
Image Credit: Buimistrov Igor/ITAR-TASS/Corbis
Tierra del Fuego is the southernmost major land mass of South America -- an archipelago that reaches off the tail of the continent, toward the frozen southern seas and Antarctica. This cave has formed inside Tierra del Fuego's Alvear Glacier -- an age-old organ of ice that feeds the river below with its melt-water. For around a decade, the glacier's mass has been receding with increased rapidity. Click ahead for more photos of Tierra del Fuego.
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Beyond the peaks of the Torres del Paine, you can see Ushuaia, Argentina -- the capital city of the Argentine district of Tierra del Fuego. With a population of about 70,000, Ushuaia is widely considered the southernmost city in the world, making this deep-latitude metropolis one of the remotest major settlements in existence. Next, get a view from the Chilean side of the water.
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Tierra del Fuego rises into view from the cloud-covered distance in this photo from across the Beagle Channel. The channel was named for the HMS Beagle -- the first European ship to survey the waters. That same ship would later carry a young Charles Darwin around the cold southern rim of South America on a naturalistic expedition in the 1830s. In the foreground of the photo above, you can see the coast of Navarino Island, Chile. Read on to see several views of another hard-to-reach human settlement.
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This is Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Perhaps best known as the kingdom of the armored bears in the alternate universe of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the real Svalbard is an arctic territory of Norway, far separated from the Norse mainland by the icy lengths of the Norwegian Sea to the south and the Barents Sea to the southeast. Longyearbyen is the largest settlement on Svalbard, though the entire archipelago hosts only about 2,500 residents in total. Click over to the next page to see what Svalbard looks like in the cold season.
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The Norwegians have known about the far-north lands of Svalbard since the 12th century, and in the many years since the first human settlements, Svalbard has served as a whaling station and a coal mining center, as well as a destination for both research and extreme tourism. Because of its extreme latitude, Svalbard experiences strange light conditions: In the summer, the midnight sun shines unrelentingly, while in the winter, a harsh polar night keeps the land frozen in darkness for months at a time. On the next page, you'll see a remote landscape in the United States.
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So after looking at the remote settlements one finds in the furthest north and the deepest south, what's left in between? It turns out the world is a vast and strange place, and even in the now-greatly-urbanized United States, there exist hidden landscapes and untraveled grounds. These are the Sandhills of Nebraska -- a great, unknown outback in the heart of North America. Check out the next page to see them from another angle.
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The Sandhills take up nearly 20,000 square miles (more than 50,000 square kilometers) in northern Nebraska. Once covered in wind-blown dunes of loose sand, now the region is somewhat grassy, and cattle ranchers have staked out territories for grazing among the sloping acres. Traditionally, the Sandhills have been prone to drought, and there are ecosystem management efforts underway to protect the area's ecology and hydrological status. Next, we'll head back to South America to see a village that scrapes the sky.
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The Peruvian Andes are home to some unbelievably high-altitude settlements, including the highest-altitude city on the planet: La Rinconada, which is designed to support the workers who labor in an adjoining gold mine. The photo above, however, shows a village of the Uros people in the Lake Titicaca region. Lake Titicaca is remarkable enough for being one of the highest navigable lakes in the world, but can you guess what's doubly odd about the land on which these people are living?
Image Credit: Bob Krist/Corbis
It's not land at all! The Uros people of Lake Titicaca build their homes on manmade "reed islands," which float in the waters of the sky-high lake.
Image Credit: Bob Krist/Corbis
Two villagers traverse a small stream in a valley of Peru's Cordillera Blanca -- the "white mountains." The Cordillera Blanca are home to Huascaran mountain, which is the tallest peak in all of Peru's cloud-piercing Andes. On the next page, you'll get to see one of the remotest islands in all of the Earth's oceans.
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This is Edinburgh of the Seven Seas -- the primary human settlement on the archipelago of Tristan da Cunha, which lies isolated in the South Atlantic, between the coasts of Africa and South America. Tristan da Cunha is considered the remotest inhabited island group in the world. In 2007, a BBC story reported that the tiny island's permanent population was a mere 271. There is no airport, no local media, and outsiders who wish to visit the secluded island group must first receive permission from the island's administrator, and then travel several days' journey by boat from South Africa. While Tristan da Cunha is almost impossible for outsiders to reach, a small island just to the southwest apparently goes beyond "almost" -- it is literally named "Inaccessible Island."
Image Credit: Michael Clarke
Back to the far north: This is Novaya Zemlya, an ice-laden archipelago sprouting from the northern coast of Russia and stretching into the Arctic Ocean. Most of this long, barren land mass is uninhabited by humans. A lone polar bear, stranded on the rocks by the receding polar ice, stalks among the gulls and guillemots of the cliff face for food in the photo above. During the Cold War, the soviets used the wilderness of Novaya Zemlya as a nuclear test site. The archipelago still holds visibly the crater left by "Tsar Bomba," which was, at 50 megatons, the largest thermonuclear weapon ever detonated.
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Rapa Nui is known to many as Easter Island, receiving the latter name from Jacob Roggeveen, who in 1722 became the first European explorer to visit the already-inhabited island in the South Pacific. Rapa Nui is famous for its impassive "guardian" statues, shown in profile above, many of which lie half-buried in the island's volcanic soil. The statues are carved from a mineral known as "tuff," which is made of consolidated ash from volcanic eruptions, and which, contrary to its name, erodes easily, making these beautiful monuments vulnerable to the elements over time. Take a look at another view of the island on the next page.
Image Credit: Micheline Pelletier/Corbis
So just how remote is Rapa Nui? It's more than 2,200 miles from the mainland coast of Chile and just a little less than 1,300 miles from Pitcairn Island -- the nearest inhabited land mass. Rapa nui home to the world's remotest international airport, despite the island's relatively low population. Of course the original inhabitants of Rapa Nui didn't have the option of air travel, so how did they travel the thousands of miles of open ocean to get there? And did they come east from other islands of the South Pacific, or west from South America? Click over to see what it's like to be on top of the world.
Image Credit: Micheline Pelletier/Corbis
The midnight sun circles mercilessly above the North Pole for more than five months at a time, from March to September. This is summer at the top of the world. In the winter, of course, comes an equally long night, when the North Pole is left in a freezing sea of darkness. The geographical North and South Poles are, in a literal sense, the two remotest places on the planet, since the majority of human civilization is centered closer to the equator, near fresh water, arable land and survivable weather.
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Remember Pitcairn Island -- the incredibly-far-away-but-still-nearest island neighbor of Rapa Nui? Well now you're looking at it. Early Polynesian settlers lived on two of the islands in the Pitcairn group for years and left many artifacts and other traces, but by the time the island was discovered by Europeans in the 18th century, the original inhabitants had disappeared. So who eventually settled on Pitcairn Island? Why, none other than the infamous mutineers of the HMS Bounty! Knowing that the British Royal Navy would be on the hunt as soon as they received news of the revolt, the mutineers were forced to seek an unknown or uninhabited island where they could hide. Along with a group of travelers from Tahiti, the mutineers traveled to the remote Pitcairn Island and established a small agrarian community.
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It's hard to imagine any part of China as remote. After all, China is the most populous country on the planet. But don't forget that China is also vast, and contains a world's worth of natural beauty within its borders alone. In a less-populated part of the Hunan Province lie the pillars of Wulingyuan -- a forest of sandstone spikes that have been whittled away by years of natural weathering. The area around Wulingyuan is one of the more recently settled parts of China; it was once thought to be an impenetrable wild. Today, it is a protected UNESCO World Heritage site. Click over to the next page to see a protected remote landscape in the United States.
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American bison eat their fill in the grassy pastures of the Teton Wilderness in Wyoming, with the Grand Teton Mountain Range in the background. Home to both Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Teton National Park, Northwestern Wyoming is one of the wildest patches of land left in America, protected from development by both the federal government and the remoteness of the natural landscape. Next, you'll see a capital in the far north.
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Don't forget to take a sweater. Nuuk, Greenland, is the northernmost capital city of any country in North America -- and, for that matter, one of the northernmost capital cities on Earth. Next, we'll see one of the most inhospitable natural climates in Africa.
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Libya is home to some of the driest, most remote and most forbidding reaches of desert in the world. The southwest quadrant of Libya is known as the Fezzan -- a largely uninhabited region of burning hot sand dunes and menacing rock-lands. The places in the region where water flows can form oases where life can survive, but the majority of the Fezzan is remote and empty. Click over to the next page to see another view of the Fezzan.
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An oil-searching expedition abandoned these useless tires in the sands of the Fezzan desert near Murzuq. The dunes of the Fezzan were built by dry winds, both eroding the mineral features of the land and piling sand upon itself in star-shaped hills. Next up: Can you think of a remote location that draws travelers from all around the world?
Image Credit: George Steinmetz/Corbis
The summit of Mount Everest is, of course, one of the most famous hard-to-reach places in the world -- some might say that the difficulty of conquering the mountain is the whole point, even more so than the rewarding vista that waits at the peak. This is Everest Base Camp, situated at an altitude of about 17,000 feet (more than 5,100 meters). Climbers must spend time at Base Camp to allow their bodies to become accustomed to the extreme altitude. If they don't, the low pressure and thin air are likely to cause altitude sickness during the later stages of the ascent. Check out the next page to see someone who made the arduous journey to this remote peak despite a powerful disadvantage.
Image Credit: Nawang Sherpa/Bogati/ZUMA/Corbis
Erik Weihenmayer (right) became the first blind person to scale Everest to its peak in 2001. The Everest summit is more than 29,000 feet (8,839 meters) above sea level, though, believe it or not, the exact height of the world's most famous mountain is still in dispute. But is Everest really the world's remotest mountain peak? Well, it's certainly the farthest from the ground, but if we want to consider subjective qualifications as much as objective measurements, there are other peaks that climbers tend to rate as even more difficult than Everest, including K2, on the border between China and Pakistan, and Nanga Parbat, also in Pakistan -- both of which have killed a greater percentage of the climbers that attempt them. On the next page, you'll see one of the oddest-looking islands in the Pacific Ocean.
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This is Tern Island, Hawaii, U.S.A. Yep -- you're looking at the whole island, which consists of an airstrip, a station house for a small crew of biological researchers and field workers for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and a perfect habitat for turtles, seabirds and Hawaiian monk seals.
Image Credit: Jonathan Blair/CORBIS
All of the impediments to reaching the North Pole exist for its counterpart -- except, perhaps, that one has less chance of falling through the ice on the way to South Pole, since it rests on solid land rather than floating ice. On the other hand, the South Pole gets a good bit colder than the North Pole during its dark months. Antarctica is generally a dangerous and inhospitable climate. Above, visitors from a Lindblad Expedition trek across the snows of the southern continent. Next, check out one of the most untraveled counties in the United States.
Image Credit: Michael Nolan/Robert Harding Specialist Stock/Corbis
This is Hinsdale County, which remains one of the most unturned stones in America. The county spans 1,123 square miles (2,909 square kilometers) in southwestern Colorado, and as of the 2000 census had only 866 residents. In the background of this photo you can see the gray slopes of the San Juan Mountains -- a range of the Rockies. What makes Hinsdale County so remote? Check out the next page to find out!
Image Credit: Blaine Harrington III/Corbis
In 2007, the U.S. Geological Survey released a report on the development of roads in America. It turns out that Hinsdale County, Colo., is one of the most undriven places in the contiguous United States -- there are places within Hinsdale where one could walk more than 10 miles without encountering a road of any kind. And furthermore, according to the county's own Web site, the vast majority of county roads are not paved, but simple dirt roads. Less than 5 percent of the land area in Hinsdale is privately owned, meaning more than 95 percent is undeveloped federal land.
Image Credit: Blaine Harrington III/Corbis
Finally, we're back to Siberia -- the empty wilds of rural Russia. This is Lake Baikal. The lake is remarkable for more than just its remote Siberian location: It is believed to be both the oldest freshwater lake on the planet, at more than 25 million years of age, and the deepest, at 5,250 feet (1,600 meters). For some perspective, the average depth of open ocean is 14,000 feet (4,267 meters) -- so this is a freshwater lake as deep as the black waters of the ocean's bathypelagic zone, the realm of giant squid and their adversaries the sperm whales, and more than one-third as deep as the unknown reaches of the ocean floor.
Image Credit: MORANDI Bruno/Hemis/Corbis
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