Only in recent years, after the rest of the planet was mapped, claimed, and polluted, has the shadowy form of Antarctica begun to coalesce out of the freezing mist. "It's really the last frontier," says 36-year-old California resident and full-time explorer Doug Stoup, who made a string of first ski and snowboard descents in the South Shetland Islands and Graham Land in February and who has two similar jaunts scheduled for the coming season. "There's still so much to explore, so much untouched and unseen." Adventure Travel Society president Jerry Mallett is more blunt about Antarctica's unique allure: "We're filling up every corner of the world."
But then, adventurers have been feeling that way since about the time of Alexander the Great. Antarctica is the highest continent, as well as the driest, the coldest, and the windiest. But it isn't just superlatives that have appealed to the current generation of Shackleton's spiritual kin. It's the fact that nobody owns it. Unscarred by wars and largely unfettered by governmental red tape, something about this supra-national character seems to click with 21st-century Western consciousness; like it or not, we're all in this together.And there's only one enemy: the cold.

There is also one common hero: Shackleton. Now that Shackletonmania has passed through the publishing world, leaving a slew of biographies and coffee-table tomes in its wake, film and television productions are getting in on the act. In February 2001, IMAX filmgoers will watch Reinhold Messner, Conrad Anker, and Stephen Venables make a three-and-a-half-day traverse of the Triton range in South Georgia, retracing Shackleton's 1916 trek in which he and two companions bored screws through their shoes for makeshift crampons. Later next year, the PBS series NOVA will feature a documentary on the same trip. And, of course, there's a Hollywood film in development, slated to be directed by Wolfgang Peterson, who just did The Perfect Storm.

In many respects, Shackleton is the perfect icon for our times. "The Boss," as Shackleton's men called him, was bad-tempered in the morning, smoked and drank too much, and wasn't altogether faithful to his long-suffering wife, Emily. But for all this, and more, his leadership skills make him a very modern hero. He watched over his subordinates like a broody hen—when he noticed someone weakening, he would order extra hot milk all around, without revealing who needed it the most. He led by intuition, a practice recently rehabilitated by business-management programs that until quite recently dismissed any methodology that harbored a tinge of emotion. "The kinds of things that Shackleton was able to do are extremely appropriate lessons for the new economy, as businesses move into unexplored territory and have to deal with a level of ambiguity," says Dennis Perkins, the author of the just-published Leading at the Edge: Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition.

Despite the sudden rush of polar conquistadors, Antarctica isn't just another testosterone zone for big guys to figure out how dead they can get. In an increasingly grubby world, it fulfills a human need for sanctuary. It is the only continent we haven't yet wrecked, a pristine land left untouched by the frigid armies of disillusion, and a fit setting for playing out high—if harsh—ideals and aspirations. Shackleton understood this mysterious appeal to the human psyche, and for him the continent was as much a metaphor as an explorer's dream. Some believe that before the ice came, Antarctica was the site of Atlantis. But we are beginning to see that Antarctica is within us. As the Boss himself once wrote, "We all have our own White South."  

Sara Wheeler is the author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (Random House, 1998).