ABSTRACT
Mapping backward in time – into a fourth dimension, so to speak – has been made feasible by advances in sciences such as dendrochronology, paleobotany, and, most germane to the polar realms, deep ice-core sampling – used to especially good effect in the Greenland ice sheet. During the 1800s and early 1900s century – widely remembered as the "heroic" age of polar exploration – that Arctic and Antarctic adventuring became a public craze, stirred by nationalist obsessions and driven by an increasingly modern mass-media complex. Arctic exploration during the 1500s and 1600s was impelled by the same economic and religious motivations that had driven it in centuries, and increasingly by state-building and colonization. Prior to Columbus, European exploration of the Arctic was by necessity confined to the North Atlantic islands, the Fennoscandian far north, and the high latitudes of northwest Russia.
