title: Vanishing Wilderness of Antarctica (Amazing Nature)
author:  Colin Monteath 
description: <DIV><DIV>Colin Monteath is a photographer and writer who specializes in adventuring in the world's mountainous regions. <BR></DIV></DIV>
zlib_text: **Raising Atlantis**
  
  by Thomas Greanias
  
   **Part One**
  
   **Discovery**
  
    
    
  
   **1**
  
   **Discovery Minus Six Minutes**  
  
   **East Antarctica**
  
    
  
  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER TERRANCE DRAKE of the U.S. Naval Support Force,
  Antarctica, paced behind a snow dune as he waited for the icy gale to pass. He
  badly needed to take a leak. But that would mean breaking international law.
  
  Drake shivered as a blast of polar air swept swirling sheets of snow across
  the stark, forsaken wasteland that seemed to stretch forever. Fantastic snow
  dunes called sastrugi rose into the darkness, casting shadows that looked like
  craters on an alien moonscape. Earth’s “last wilderness” was a cold and
  forbidding netherworld, he thought, a world man was never meant to inhabit.
  
  Drake moved briskly to keep himself warm. He felt the pressure building in his
  bladder.
  
  The Antarctic Treaty had stringent environmental protection protocols, summed
  up in the rule:
  
  “Nothing is put into the environment.” That included pissin