Ever since modern humans evolved in East Africa 160,000 years ago, our species has been gripped by wanderlust. It took us only a few thousand years to discover and colonize Eurasia, and Australia and the Americas soon followed. The last true pioneers were the Polynesians, who led the final wave of human migration across the South Pacific starting about 2,000 years ago.
What may come as a surprise is that, if you know where to look, there are still places on Earth that remain beyond the reach of man and modernity.
The last place on Earth where no explorer has set foot
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One good place to look for virgin territory is in the world of mountaineering, where numerous high peaks remain untouched by humans. Topping the list is Gangkhar Puensum in the kingdom of Bhutan. Standing at 7,541 meters, it is the 40th-highest mountain in the world and the highest unclimbed one. Mountaineers have tried to reach the summit on three occasions, and failed each time. It is likely to remain out of reach for the foreseeable future, as in 1994 Bhutan banned the climbing of peaks higher than 6,000 meters out of respect for local spiritual beliefs.
This, however, still leaves thousands of virgin peaks. The hotspots are Greenland, Antarctica, and the Nyainqêntanglha East region of Tibet, where 159 out of 164 peaks above 6,000 meters have still to be climbed.
Another of Earth’s great unexplored domains is underground. New caves and passages are being discovered all the time, even in densely populated countries. Britain’s largest shaft, Titan in Derbyshire, for example, was not discovered until 1999. “Not a week goes by without something new being found,” says Chris Howes, editor of the British caving magazine Descent.
Unfortunately, caving can sometimes be even more challenging than mountaineering. Take Voronya Cave in Abkhazia, Georgia, the world’s deepest cave at 2,170 meters. An expedition in January 2007 uncovered an extra 30 meters of passage—no mean feat when you consider that much of the cave is underwater.
The last land on Earth to be ‘discovered’
Staking a claim for undiscovered land has obviously become a challenge in an era when satellite imagery covers every inch of the globe. But that hasn’t stopped explorers from trying. In 1978, a Danish survey team reckoned they had found the most northerly land off the coast of Greenland, which they named Oodaaq Island. It was undoubtedly farther north than anything else, but to define it as “land” was stretching it a bit. Oodaaq is a bank of loosely consolidated sand and gravel the size of a badminton court.
Or at least it was. In 1996, an explorer named Dennis Schmitt returned to the area and claimed he was unable to locate Oodaaq. However, he did find a similar mound nearby “emerging from the sea like a great rock whale.”
These gravel bars are temporary, says Henrik Højmark Thomsen of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Loose material is pushed ahead of advancing glaciers during winter and left exposed as the glaciers retreat. When the ice advances again, the new islands may be sheared away.
Explorers wishing to put their name to somewhere more permanent should not abandon hope, however. As the ice melts, islands are being uncovered, and people have bagged some of these as new discoveries. In 2004, a British artist, Alex Hartley, claimed to have found a recently exposed island in the Svalbard Archipelago. The piece of land, which Hartley dubbed Nymark (“new land” in Norwegian), is about the size of a football field. In 2005, Schmitt claimed to have discovered a similar island off the east coast of Greenland, which he named Uunartoq Qeqertoq (“warming island” in Inuit). At the present rate of melting there will be plenty more where that one came from.
The last discovered land to remain unmapped
Standing on the promenade at Muynak in Uzbekistan, once one of the great seaside resorts of the Soviet Union, you don’t see crashing waves, or boats sailing into the harbor that once supplied fish from Riga to Vladivostok. All you see is sand stretching to the horizon and beyond.
Welcome to what’s left of the Aral Sea. Just 40 years ago this was the fourth-largest lake in the world, covering 26,000 square miles. Now almost all of it has gone, leaving 19,000 square miles of new, uncharted desert.
From Muynak, you can drive out a couple of miles to an “offshore” gas well. Along the way you pass dead trees left over from a failed attempt to afforest a piece of the desert floor. There is also a line of telegraph poles, minus the connecting cable, and a canal carrying a dribble of farm drainage water. This is the last remnant of the ancient Amu Darya river, which once carried more water than the Nile and was the sea’s main source of water. Now it simply trickles uselessly into the sand.
Until 1991, you could blame Soviet engineers. They turned the republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan into a giant cotton farm that sucked up 90 percent of the river’s water. But nothing much changed when they went home. Today, the water is used to grow cotton for clothing sold in western shops.
Beyond where the road and the canal give out, there is nothing. On another continent there might be Bushmen, Aborigines, or pioneer farmers who know every inch. Not here. Through binoculars I spotted a fox trotting through the scrub, but my vodka-swilling driver assured me that no people ever venture this way. Between us and the final, evaporating remains of the sea there was nothing but uncharted desert for 60 miles.
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