History Main / MysteriousAntarctica

* In David Weber's ''The Apocalypse Troll'', the titular Troll (an alien-created, human-derived time-traveling cyborg killing machine) first lands in Antarctica. It starts a second Falklands War en route to its more permanent hiding place in the Southern USA.

[[AC: {{Western Animation}}]]
* Subverted in ''AvatarTheLastAirbender'', where the South Pole is actually a pretty nice place. It's got the Southern [[strike:[[EskimoLand Eskimos]]]] Water Tribe, [[EverythingsBetterWithPenguins penguin sledding]], and--what else?--a friendly little Avatar frozen as a HumanPopsicle.
** Played straight with the creepy, booby-trapped Fire Nation ship that alerts the villains to Aang's presence.
** Arguably Aang himself--a powerful PhysicalGod slumbering for a hundred years in an iceberg.

* Subverted in ''AvatarTheLastAirbender'', where the South Pole is actually a pretty nice place. It's got the Southern [[strike:[[EskimoLand Eskimos]]]] [[EskimoLand Water Tribe]], [[EverythingsBetterWithPenguins penguin sledding]], and--what else?--a friendly little Avatar frozen as a HumanPopsicle.

* Subverted in ''AvatarTheLastAirbender'', where the South Pole is actually a pretty nice place. It's got the Southern [[strike:[[EskimoLand Eskimos]]]] [[EskimoLand Water Tribe]], [[EverythingsBetterWithPenguins penguin sledding]], and--what else?--a friendly little Avatar [[HumanPopsicles frozen in ice]].

* The main entry in the Shin Megami Tensei series, [[ShinMegamiTenseiStrangeJourney Strange Journey]], is set in another dimension access from Antarctica. It's slowly growing and will consume the world if not solved.
* Halo: the expanded universe novel "ghosts of onyx" briefly mentions [[ScaryDogmaticAliens The Covenant]] digging in Antarctica, and there's [[NeglectfulPrecursors only one reason]] The Covenant dig.
* TombRaider 3's ExcusePlot revolves around four mysterious artifacts made out of a meteor that crashed into Antarctica, presumably the work of an ancient civilization.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cleves_Symmes,_Jr. Symmes Holes]] leading to a HollowEarth were supposed to exit at the North and South Poles.

* Symes Holes leading to a HollowEarth were supposed to exit at the North and South Poles.

* The main entry in the Shin Megami Tensei series, [[ShinMegamiTenseiStrangeJourney Strange Journey]], is set in another dimension access from Antartic.

* ''Apartness'' (1964), by VernorVinge (his first sale!). [[AfterTheEnd Centuries after a nuclear war]], an exploratory mission from the [[SpaceFillingEmpire Sudamérican Empire]] discover a mysterious tribe living in squalor on the Antarctic coast. It turns out [[spoiler:they are all that remained of two boatloads of Afrikaners that fled their country when [[TheApartheidEra the war killed off their patrons in the northern hemisphere]] and the rebelling black majority [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge literally drove them into the sea]]]].

* ''{{Batman}}: The Doom That Came To Gotham'', an {{Elseworld}} mixing the Dark Knight with HPLovecraft opens with Bruce Wayne and his wards arriving in Antarctica to find out what happened to "the Cobblepot Expedition". Almost all of them died in the Mountains of Madness, Cobblepot himself joined the albino penguins, and one member of the expedition becomes an undead being that needs the Antarctic cold to survive (a mashup between Mr Freeze and Dr Muñoz from ''Cool Air'').

* A common conspiracy theory is that many of the remaining Nazis ran to a base in Antarctica after the [[WorldWarII Second World War]], where they built UFO's [[IronSky and escaped to the Moon]]/discovered a hollow earth/did something else.

* In [=~H.P. Lovecraft~=]'s ''{{At the Mountains of Madness}}'', the titular undiscovered Antarctica mountain range (which dwarfs the Himalayas) is the location of the last city of the Elder Things, a race of StarfishAliens who fought against against [[EldritchAbomination Cthulhu and His spawn]].

* ''The Monster From Earth?s End'' by Murray Leinster. Made into a movie ''The Navy vs. The Night Monsters'' (1966). An airplane returns from Antarctica with plant samples, the pilot killing himself as soon as he lands. The plants soon grow into killer monsters.

* ''Retrograde'' (2004) (South Korea). The action is based on a ship trapped in Antarctic sea ice. A team of genetically-altered time travellers come back to the present to try to prevent a future biological disaster. Two opposing time travellers fight it out amongst the ship?s crew of polar scientists and researchers.

* ''Antarctica'' by sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson. In this TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture world, secret communities in Antarctica are carrying out piracy and environmental terrorism in order to discourage mining and oil exploitation.

[[WhatDoYouMeanItsNotAwesome http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/antarctica.jpg]]

* The {{Transformers}} BigBad Megatron crash landed there in his search for [[MacGuffin The Cube]].
** Pretty sure that was in the Arctic, but its still the same idea.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident The Vela Incident]]. In 1979 a satellite detected a double-flash of light which some speculated was an unauthorised nuclear test on Bouvetoya Island, inspiring a couple of novels, and perhaps the choice of location for ''AlienVsPredator''.

* The alien site in ''AlienVsPredator'' is buried under the ice of Bouvet<strike>øya</strike> Island.

* The alien site in ''AlienVsPredator'' is buried under the ice of Bouvetoya Island.