Environment
Thanks to Us, Antarctica Has Lead Poisoning
Industrial pollution reached the South Pole long before the first explorers arrived there in 1911.
The first time a person crunched a frigid foot upon the South Pole was in 1911, when Norway's Roald Amundsen, the so-called "last of the Vikings," made a secret trip to that loneliest of spots with a sled-dog team.
Unbeknownst to Amundsen was that the South Pole had already been touched by humanity. The feverish industrial hustle of the 1800s—all the smelting, mining, and burning of coal—had tainted the ice with significant amounts of poisonous lead.