INTRODUCTION

The South Polar region is huge but sparsely populated. This will be a short tour--I circumnavigated the north pole in some detail, and these southern tundras are so similar I don't want to repeat myself. Besides, as I write, it's a cold day--my hands are numb. So I'll keep this short and emphasize warmth and life.

They do exist--there are oases in the apparent circumpolar desert. For example, quite a wide belt of cool-temperate forest stretches from the Sea of Thark to the Zodanga Sea, some 5600 km (3500 mi)--a fourth of the way around the world! A second such belt links the Anthor and Ugor Seas on the far side of the pole (bottom of the orbital photo); a third cool forest surrounds the Ghasta Sea (V shape on the right). These three woods support several million camaroos, mops, and semi-aquatic thotters. Also, two trenches thrust into the Antarctic zone. Their depths are blanketed in dense, milder air, effectively like that of the plains a thousand miles north. Here too, forests flourish, as well as fliers who can't survive up on the thin-aired plains--elegant lebbirds and the unique, seasonally breeding Chanath subspecies of trench wingbok.

Most of the great plains ringing the polar cap are tundra--well, really just cold steppes and deserts thawing only a month or two each year. True tundra means permafrost, and even near the ice cap's edge, Tharn's soil does thaw at least briefly; the deep frozen layers of Earth's polar regions are a relic of our last Ice Age. Tharn, fortunately, lacks these. Dry Ages, yes--but Tharn's immune to our particular planetary disease.

JOOM

There's one distinctive feature not present in the north. The Joom Range is a great cluster of five major and many smaller volcanoes, all heavily glaciated, rising from the cold steppes south of Thurian Rift and west of the Ghasta Sea. Central Mt Joom is the tallest, at about 12 km (40,000'); a dozen more top 20,000'. These are massive volcanoes, though steeper in slope than true shield volcanoes like Hawaii, Olympus or Tharn's own Chinchak Range. The southern slopes and heights above 2 km are quite barren and largely ice-mantled; but the long south slopes face the sun and block the harsh polar winds; such subpolar microclimates are so mild they might as well be a thousand km further from the pole, and support lichen, grass and even sparse evergreens in some valleys. While pastoral camaroos and even small mop communities could probably survive here (if not flourish), these ecological islands are deeply isolated. Mamooks are the only residents.

Tharn has other clusters of tall volcanoes like the Jooms, where a rift zone curves or forks. As the crust spreads from the rift(s), it's squeezed in two or more directions at once. If the Jooms had arisen at a warmer latitude, they'd likely have been major cultural centers, offering habitat to a wide range of species up those long slopes. That's exactly what did happen to the equatorial volcanoes called the Big Four in Tars Triangle: tectonically quite Joomian, but far warmer, these peaks each support concentric rings of villages of many species, together forming an eclectic society.

The Jooms do come alive briefly, each summer: the largest chong-ma (a mamook song-festival) in the south is held in these sheltered valleys, starting on Midsummer Day. It's a loud, raucous event, part fair, part singles bar: both sexes (indistinguishable to non-mamooks) sing "songduels" to gain status and impress potential mates. The sheer size of the participants (and their booming voices) may cause Terrans to feel as if they're lost among dinosaurs; but under the roaring is a lot of sophistication. Mamook songs are usually narrative, always from dreams (or at least pretend to be) and are judged as much on their humor and psychological insight as on beauty of music and voice.

But most of the year, the Jooms are just a lonely little slice of Old Mars, before terraforming.

ON NORTH-BIAS, CASH and BAD PHOTOS

So why is this tour so skimpy compared to the north? The reasons say something about the art of mapping. Earth cartography has historically favored the Northern Hemisphere and the poles--not only do Mercator maps exaggerate polar regions, many non-Mercator world maps, even today, don't center the equator! The far south gets clipped, the north, exaggerated. This is often interpreted as pure cultural bias, since modern cartography developed in Europe, a northerly zone; but an argument can be made that it's either land-bias (there's indisputably more land in the north) or an ecological, biomass bias; the Arctic Sea and the Gulf Stream do make the far north more fertile, populated and accessible than the far south; the climatic equator in many places really is several degrees north, and placing this in the middle makes ecological sense.

But not on Tharn. If anything, the biomass is a bit richer in the south; so much of the Northern Hemisphere is uplands. Yet I did a whole page in which you tour the Northlands, circling the pole--in far more detail than this page. So how did an Earth bias get transferred here? The immediate reason's simple: my orbital shots of the far south are terrible! I could invent a pseudo-explanation (a lone fly-by over the north pole but none over the south?), but the real reason is more interesting...

Like all my biospheres, Tharn's a second-hand globe, found in a thrift store, hacked into (ow! Those trenches! Cut my thumbs up gouging those out) and built up (acrylic goo for mountains, crumpled tissue dipped in acrylic goo for uplands) and painted. These ain't computer models! (Well, there are two exceptions: Lyr and its moon Oisin, which are purely digital so far--I can't find a second-hand globe big enough for Lyr or small enough for Oisin).

So I use thrift-shop globes. They have advantages: they're cheap, which matters to an artist with zero funding (hint hint); the stand is mighty convenient, and the pole-to-pole support-arm usually shows latitudes north and south. But, for reasons that must be obvious, the poles of old globes are awkward to sculpt and paint--especially the south pole. Normally I remove the stand to do those bits. But Tharn's globe fought back! Just couldn't get the bolts out. I worked around the north pole, but in the south, the stand was in the way. In desperation, I was forced to reach in with long-handled brushes at a low angle (just like polar sunlight!) I roughed in a big sloppy polar cap... and declared it winter. A makeshift solution, but tolerable.

Now, I could blame all this on northern bias--mapmaker's habit of putting north at the top. Or we can blame the World Book Encyclopedia company, which made this particular globe. How dare they do such a solid job! All the other companies make shoddy stands, easy to tear apart! What's with these people? Do they want the planet to last, or something?

Now imagine trying to get orbital scans and photos with a great big unremovable STAND in the way! I wasn't even going to HAVE a "south pole" page until this morning, when I finally found a big socket wrench that unfroze one bolt, freeing part of the stand, and letting me get one poor off-center scan of the south pole. Tried others, but they were garbage. This hazy shot's the best I could get, and it was badly distorted and washed-out; it took a whole morning of digital tweaking just to make it viewable.

I don't generally like to break the illusion, but I'll make an exception, here, to make the point. Here's a raw scan I saved! Yes, a scan, not a photo. I don't own a digital camera; many of the orbital photos in this series were taken with a borrowed one. Most of the close-ups are just scans. The distortion's not added. A sphere on a flat scanner comes out like this; most scanning lasers shine at a low angle and correct for this, assuming the scanned object touches the glass above; if it isn't, the echo is misplaced. Has to be corrected before any other processing--and you can see it takes a lot.

NASA scientists face analogous problems all the time, of course--mapping worlds by pasting thin strips of data together, while trying to compensate for glare and haze and equipment not built for the conditions it encounters (much like my flat-earth scanner refusing to believe the world is round). Our map of Titan still fades into haze except where a flyby's flown right overhead, and probing Europa beneath the ice still looks like it's a decade or two away, life or no life. Not all the hazards are space-based: the Feds actually tried to turn off a working Venus orbiter to save a few million--after spending a fortune to get it there! "Hey, it's just Venus--not Mars." Who cares about the girly planet? Let's get on with the thrust (ahem) to red-blooded, war-god Mars.

Anyone interested in planetology knows the story: billions for guys in tin cans, but pennies for the real space heroes: unromantic little robots that go "where no (ahem) man has gone before" (and still hasn't).

But it's curious to how my own little project's distorted by NASA-like pressures! Low budgets cause reliance on off-the-shelf components and enforces conformity to cultural biases... unless you fight. A general principle in both science and art?

OK, OK, in my case, ineptitude with tools was a big factor here, too... and I can't blame politicized bean-counters impeding dedicated techies.

Unless, of course, my wallet attacked my fingers when I wasn't looking.

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