Gallery: Antarctica recreated in Minecraft Gallery Gallery: Antarctica recreated in Minecraft + 5

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Martin O'Leary, a glaciologist from Swansea University, has <a style="background-color: transparent;" href="http://www.martinoleary.com/minecraft/">recreated the frozen continent of Antarctica in Minecraft</a>.

The map, which is at 1:1000 scale and contains more than three billion blocks, was inspired by recent recreations of Denmark , the


UK and 19th-century Manhattan in the wildly popular sandbox game. "I wanted to transpose [that idea] to somewhere a bit less accessible -- somewhere that's outside most people's experience," said O'Leary in an email to WIRED.co.uk.

He wrote a script in Python, using a Minecraft map editing library called pymclevel , and some geodata processing tools from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, then fed in data from a British Antarctic Survey project called Bedmap2, which scanned Antarctica's topography at 1km resolution. Each datapoint became a block.

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Sunset Martin O'Leary

"Most of my professional work is in numerical models of ice sheets, which often operate on square grids that look a lot like a Minecraft world," O'Leary said. "It's very easy for that kind of work to get quite abstract and detached from reality, so I'm always looking for ways to make things more concrete -- to relate things back to the real place." As such, the blocks are fairly representative of reality. "Ice represents ice, water represents water, stone represents stone," said O'Leary. "There's one block of lava, at the top of Mount Erebus, which represents the lava lake there."


Players start at the place many real explorers start in Antarctica -- Rothera Point on Adelaide Island, home to Rothera Station, the main British research base on the continent. It consists of a runway, a port, and a smattering of huts, but is staffed year-round. Unfortunately, as with all other research bases or any of Antarctica's more than 1,200 animal species, it's too small to appear in the Minecraft version "The main issue I had was dealing with the size,"

O'Leary said. "My first attempt tried to hold the whole map in memory at once, which turned out to be too much for my little MacBook. Once I fixed that, it was plain sailing." He left it running and went to bed. In the morning, it was complete and he was able to begin exploring the continent.

His favourite places in the map are some of the most impressive. "I really like the Beardmore Glacier," he said, "It's one of the world's largest valley glaciers, and it was the route that Shackleton and Scott took to pass through the Transantarctic Mountains on their way to the South Pole. When you stand at the bottom you can really appreciate the scale of the journey they undertook."


He added: "I also really like Mount Erebus, on Ross Island. It's an active volcano, complete with lava lake, and it towers nearly 4,000 metres over the Ross Ice Shelf, which is an almost completely flat floating ice shelf, roughly the size of France. You can stand on there and see nothing but flat ice all the way to the horizon."

You can download the map and take a look around O'Leary's recreation of Antarctica yourself by heading over to his website and downloading the world save. Full installation instructions are included for Windows and OS X, as well as some notable locations you might want to check out.

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