they could see a different portion of the world represented on the concave interior face of the globe. The platform scaffolding was built up from the conveniently desolate Southern Ocean; Antarctica was largely unknown at the time – Wyld dismissed stories of the existence of a great Southern continent: The platforms were separated by about and those closer to the Globe's equator were wider so there was always a gap of about between the platform and the surface of the globe. Although the staircase and platforms allowed closer examination of individual sections, the structure prevented an appreciation of the globe as a single unit, and later there were plans for its removal. Some ventilation was provided by a system housed at the North Pole, which had the advantage of being quite featureless and located at the top of the globe, but the heat generated from the gas lighting and the mass of visitors meant the attraction was still uncomfortably hot; Henry Morley remarked that "the heat reflected on all sides from the concave surfaces rises to make a little Sahara of the North Pole Station", and Punch commented that the temperature was "equal to that of any baker's oven." The representation of the Earth's surface was to a scale of 10 miles to the inch (about 6.4 kilometres to the centimetre) in the horizontal plane, but to allow the details of mountain ranges and great craters to be easily observed the altitude scale was ten times that of the surface plane (at one mile to the inch). As the British Quarterly Review remarked in an article on the problems of accurately representing the Earth's features, Wyld would have had to construct a globe with three times the diameter to unify the scales. The depiction of the earth concentrated on physical geography; there were no country names or borders shown. Fertile land was picked out in green and deserts shown in a sandy yellow. The minute detail was less than carefully observed; Wyld aimed for a broad stroke to capture the imagination rather than the accuracy of the Ordnance Survey. Active volcanoes were picked out with a fiery red with cotton wool smoke, and snowy mountains with white crystal that sparkled in the gas light. The Almanack of the Fine Arts for 1852 felt that the globe could "scarcely be deemed a work of art", but praised some of the fine