Antarctica's Biggest Mysteries: Secrets of a Frozen World

One hundred years ago this week, on a fine summer afternoon, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and four travel-weary companions plunged a bright flag atop a spindly pole into the Antarctic ice, marking their claim as the first humans to set foot at the bottom of the world. The South Pole was theirs.
"That moment will certainly be remembered by all of us who stood there," Amundsen wrote in his account of the arduous trek. On Dec. 14, 1911, two months after they set out from the continent's coast, the men had reached their goal — a frozen plain of endless white in the middle of the highest, windiest, coldest, driest and loneliest continent on Earth.
A century after Amundsen planted the flag — beating out Englishman Robert Falcon Scott's doomed expedition by a full month — an explosion of technological progress has transformed the scope of human knowledge of Antarctica.