The Antarctic Mapping Challenge

Barney Swan, Martin Barnett and Kyle O’Donoghue are currently undertaking a grueling 600-mile, 60-day trek to the South Pole. You can follow their progress on an interactive map. The South Pole Energy Challenge map shows the progress made so far and also features video updates and photos taken on this epic 600-mile journey.

The interactive map of the trek features aerial imagery of Antarctica, the locations of Scott's hut & a number of geographical features such as the ice shelves. Two small buttons on the map allow you to access biographical information about Barney Swann and his father Robert Swann. The large yellow map marker shows you the current position of the three remaining explorers.

Looking at the source-code for the map it appears that the mapping company ZeroSixZero has created their own polar projection map of Antarctica using map data from a number of different sources (credited on the map). This polar projection has then been imported into Leaflet.js using the Proj4Leaflet plugin for map projections not natively supported by Leaflet.

If you want to map the other end of the Earth then you can always use the Arctic Web Map, an Arctic specific web mapping tool, consisting of an Arctic-focused tile server.