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It is convenient, and common place, to separate the history of Antarctic exploration into a number of distinct (but overlapping) periods–first sighting and early exploration; the ‘Heroic Era’of the 1890s to 1922; the era of territorial acquisition from the 1920s to the 1940s; the science era from the late 1940s to 1958, and the ‘Treaty era’from 1959 to the present.