TIL that in "aurora australis" both words come from the same PIE root meaning "dawn" [1]. After an hour down this rabbit hole I now also know that English "east" is related to the latin "auster" ("south") [2] through the same root. Then the words "aurum" [3] and "air" [4][5] seem to fall into the same bucket too, as long as you can trust the linguistics and the quality of wiktionary texts. These two lists of derived terms are fascinating: [6][7].
So many Antarctica expeditions were carried out by various countries but when you read English language dominated internet, you get the impression that only Anglo world had explorers. Shackleton tried and failed to reach south pole but there are more books and articles on his failed expedition than the guy who actually succeeded―Norwegian Amundsen.
The Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the loss of Endurance and the subsequent 800 mile journey in an open boat (in Antarctic waters!) to rescue his crew is the stuff of legend. A true hero and an inspiration.
Plenty of books have written in Norwegian. Why would you expect a culture to be celebrating other culture's victory when they are competing instead of their own? Would we end care about the south pole genre without Shackleton? There are so many things that Norwegians do that don't make headlines here. A story that transcends culture and interests the entire world is rare.
Another piece was a science-fiction story about exploring an undiscovered tropical region of Antarctica. It imagines the Nimrod’s party making their way into the strange land of Bathybia, 22,000 feet below sea level. They used rafts made of giant, man-sized mushrooms to travel down rivers into a red jungle, encountering giant ticks, alcoholic algae, and huge carnivorous versions of microscopic Antarctic rotifers.
A few years earlier, the German science-fiction author Kurd Lasswitz published the novel "Two Planets", about a Martian colony at the North Pole. It would influence a young Werner von Braun, who would later guide the US space program, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571588
More recently, J. Michael Straczynski, creator of "Babylon 5", participated in the writers room for the 2021 movie "Godzilla vs Kong",
> Apex CEO Walter Simmons recruits former Monarch scientist and Hollow Earth theorist Nathan Lind to guide a search for a power source into the Hollow Earth, the Titans' homeworld. Lind is hesitant as his brother died in an expedition to the Hollow Earth due to a strong reverse-gravitational effect. He agrees when Walter reveals that Apex has developed HEAVs, specialized craft able to withstand the gravity field. Lind convinces Andrews to let Kong guide them via an outpost in Antarctica. Lind, Andrews, and an Apex team led by Walter's daughter Maia board a barge escorted by the US Navy, carrying a sedated and restrained Kong.
"specialized craft able to withstand the gravity field"
I've been noticing an uptick in this in the past few years, where a "gravity field" is treated as just another scifi technobabble word that the authors don't understand at all. Which is weird, because gravity is a plain English word, not particularly hoity-toity or "fancy", so it is really becoming another touchstone to me of bad writing.
"Oh no! We're experiencing high amounts of gravitometric interference!"
You mean you're currently pinned to the floor because you now weigh thousands of pounds and you're struggling to draw breath, if not simply turned to jelly by all the forces?
"No, I mean our screens are flickering on and off and there's some flashy sparks shooting out of the walls! We're totally fine, though. It's just our mission at stake!"
My dear sir, are you sure you don't perhaps have electromagnetic interference there? Can I interest you in perhaps some technobabble word with no real world referent, like "high degree of subspace inelasticity" or "the ansible field is experiencing a random stellar burst" or "the baryons are inebriated again"?
"Oh no! It's definitely a gravity field! Says so right here in the script."
Well, then, scrape your fellow adventure's jellified remains off of the floor and carry on, I guess.
My friend, if you've studied the literature you'd know that gravimetric interference affects the structural integrity of the ship's hull by warping spacetime and thereby applying sheering forces that can only be sufficiently mitigated by activating external shielding. If you encounter a Class Y phenomenon without being fully prepared, it could definitely cause enough lateral sheering force to damage equipment and even cause coupling relays to come out of alignment and emit sparks.
I just assume they've discovered some things we don't know yet. I mean, they usually have gravity-creating and gravity-neutralizing devices, so they must have learned some stuff about it that we don't know. Maybe we haven't even figured out how to "see" the sort of field they're talking about. How would it, perhaps, interact with equipment that may include gravity-manipulating components for all sorts of purposes?
> electromagnetic interference
"Electromagnetic? LOL. You mean you're being struck by lightning? Or some little bits of rock are doing kinda funny things? Because that's what electricity and magnetism are, and only those things, and they're separate."
> Now for divine begettings there is a period comprehended by a perfect number, and for mortal by the first in which augmentations dominating and dominated when they have attained to three distances and four limits of the assimilating and the dissimilating, the waxing and the waning, render all things conversable and commensurable with one another, whereof a basal four-thirds wedded to the pempad yields two harmonies at the third augmentation, the one the product of equal factors taken one hundred times, the other of equal length one way but oblong,—one dimension of a hundred numbers determined by the rational diameters of the pempad lacking one in each case, or of the irrational lacking two; the other dimension of a hundred cubes of the triad. And this entire geometrical number is determinative of this thing, of better and inferior births.
What you're describing is someone who is unable to prevent change in the gravity 'field'. It seems ridiculous because we are unable to do so, but imagine a hypothetical case where we had not figured out how electric fields propagate or are attenuated and then imagine a equally hypothetical jerf scoffing at the wildly implausible idea of not being saturated by radio waves in an energetic field.
[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/aurora_australis#Latin
[2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/auster#Latin
[3] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/aurum#Latin
[4] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/air
[5] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CE%AE%CF%81#Ancie...
[6] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...
[7] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...