Magic Tree House Fact Tracker #18: Penguins and Antarctica
Age 7-10 years
Grade 2-5
Magic Tree House Research Guides are now Magic Tree House Fact Trackers! Track the facts with Jack and Annie! When Jack and Annie got back from their adventure in Magic Tree House #40: Eve of the Emperor Penguin, they had lots of questions. What do penguins eat? Why do they huddle together in groups? Who won the race to the South Pole? What happens at a research station in Antarctica?
No other continent on Earth has undergone such radical environmental changes as Antarctica. In its transition from rich biodiversity to the barren, cold land of blizzards we see today, Antarctica provides a dramatic case study of how subtle changes in continental positioning can affect living communities, and how rapidly catastrophic changes can come about.
A Passage To Antarctica won the second prize in the non-fiction category of the Competition for Writers of Children's Books held in 1985 by CBT. On one side of the horizon was the deep blue sea, on the other was complete creamy whiteness. The ship lay amidst sheets of ice, a metre thick... Penguins stood on the edge of the icy whiteness, occasionally looking in the direction of the explorers. Antarctica, one of earth's 'last frontiers', the highest, windiest, vast, is a continent awaiting, with riches yet to be tapped.
Tim Vicary - The Coldest Place on Earth
In the summer of 1910, a race began. A race to be the first man at the South Pole, in Antarctica. Robert Falcon Scott, an Englishman, left London in his ship, the Terra Nova, and began the long journey south. Five days later, another ship also began to travel south. And on this ship was Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian.
But Antarctica is the coldest place on earth, and it is a long, hard journey over the ice to the South Pole. Some of the travellers never returned to their homes again.
This is the story of Scott and Amundsen, and of one of the most famous and dangerous races in history.
