The Corriere della Sera has looked at our friend Andrew Nelson’s accessibility map ((Which we nibbled way back in January.)) and identified the world’s most isolated place. It’s in the Tibetan plateau and it looks bleak. Not much biodiversity around there, alas, agro- or otherwise.
Hmmm…. Beautiful map, but I note that Antarctica is excluded. I would think it qualifies as quite a bit more inaccessible than anywhere else ;-)
Thanks Mike. We’ve been asked about the exclusion of Antarctica a few times.
We decided not to stick Antarctica on there for a bunch of reasons.
1. For mapping, it would be one big black distracting blob.
2. For the purposes of our original study – to estimate population within 1 hour of a city — Antarctica has no self supporting permanent population, no cities etc.
If we had done it, I suppose it would have gotten some comments for possibly being the first terrestrial map to paint Antarctica black (ocean mappers do this all the time though).
Hope that explains it.
http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/index.htm