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    Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent

    Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent

    4.5 6

    by Gabrielle Walker


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      ISBN-13: 9780547536972
    • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
    • Publication date: 01/15/2013
    • Sold by: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
    • Format: eBook
    • Pages: 288
    • Sales rank: 27,144
    • File size: 3 MB

    GABRIELLE WALKER has a PhD in chemistry from Cambridge University and has taught at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. She is a consultant to New Scientist, contributes frequently to BBC Radio, and writes for many newspapers and magazines. She is also the author of four books, including An Ocean of Air and Antarctica. She lives in London.

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    Introduction

    Antarctica is like nowhere else on Earth. While there are other wild places or ones that seem extreme, this is the only continent in the world where people have never permanently lived. In the interior of the continent there is nothing to make a living from – no food, no shelter, no clothing, no fuel, no liquid water. Nothing but ice.
       People have long suspected there may be some kind of land at the bottom of the world. The Greeks believed in Antarctica saying, with the peculiar logic of philosophy, that there must be a far southern continent to balance out the land in the north. Poets and novelists dreamed up new races of humans inhabiting tropical southern lands, or a hole at the South Pole that gave access to a hollow Earth beneath.
       They were free to dream. The great sailing expeditions of discovery, which showed European powers the new worlds of the west and the ancient ones of the east, were always forced to turn back if they travelled too far south; they were blocked by the great ring of impenetrable pack ice that circles the southern seas.
       The first sighting of the continent’s outermost islands in 1819 did little to stop the speculation of what might lie beyond, and the first serious attempts to penetrate its interior took place barely a hundred years ago, in the heroic age of exploration by Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton and the rest.
       Even now, although this land is bigger than Europe or the continental US, it has only forty-nine temporary bases, most of them on the relatively accessible coast.1 In summers there are perhaps three thousand scientists on the ice, plus another 30,000 tourists who come in on short visits, usually by ship to the western Peninsula. In winters, there can be just a thousand people on the entire continent.
       The scale of the place is hard to grasp. You see a mountain or an island that seems a few hours’ walk away and decide to wander over and explore; five days later you’re still walking. The early explorers did this a lot. The problem is not just the size of the features – glaciers that make Alaska look small, mountains that dwarf the Alps – but also the absence of anything against which to judge them. There are no trees, or indeed plants of any kind; no land animals; nothing but glaciers, snowfields and sepia-toned rocks.
       In spite of its size, Antarctica officially belongs to nobody. An international treaty, signed now by the forty-nine countries with a declared interest, forbids commercial exploitation and dedicates the entire place to ‘peace and science’. Thus, the continent is a science playground. Dozens of countries have gained themselves a placeholder for any future exploitation by building bases whose presence is justified by the noble pursuit of science. But whatever the true reasons that governments pump money into Antarctic science, the results extend far beyond the continent itself. Discoveries made there have dramatically changed the way we see our world.
       For these reasons and many more I have been fascinated by Antarctica for more than two decades. I have visited five times, mainly as a guest of the huge American programme, run by the US Government’s National Science Foundation, through whom I spent several stints at the South Pole, stayed for four months at McMurdo – the main American base on the coast and the unofficial capital of Antarctica – and visited many of the US field camps scattered around the continent. I’ve also been a guest of the Italian, French, British and New Zealand governments. I’ve sailed to Antarctica at various times on a tourist ship, a British Royal Navy icebreaker and a science research vessel. I’ve driven on the ice in tractors, snow dozers, skidoos and strange tracked vehicles with triangular wheels, and flown over it in helicopters, Hercules transport planes and small ski-equipped Twin Otters.
       And in all these experiences I have encountered some astonishing stories. Antarctica has much, much more than just ice and penguins. It is like walking on Mars; it is a unique window into space; it has valleys that time has forgotten; mysterious hidden lakes; under-ice waterfalls that flow uphill; and archives of our planet’s history that are unrivalled anywhere else on Earth. It is also a place of romance, adventure, humour and terrible cost. Since there is no prior culture or indigenous population, modern humans can write themselves afresh. For the people who go there, Antarctica is a carte blanche.
       Even its apparent barrenness is a large part of its power. People are drawn to Antarctica precisely because so much has been stripped away. The support staff I met there told me that they had come not to find themselves so much as to lose the outside world. The continent lacks most of the normal ways that we interact in human societies. There is no need for money; everyone wears the same clothes and has the same kind of lodging – whether a tent, a hut, a dorm room or, in the bigger bases, an ensuite room that wouldn’t be out of place in a Travelodge; you eat the same food as everyone else; you forget about the existence of mobile phones, bank accounts, driving licences, keys, even children. (Almost none of the bases will allow anyone under the age of eighteen.) And with this simplicity of life comes a clarity that’s intoxicating.
       That doesn’t just apply to your time on the ice. A sojourn in Antarctica brings with it a new way of seeing back in the real world. Christchurch, in New Zealand, is the main point of return for the American mega-base, McMurdo. The locals are used to the oddities of Antarcticans arriving after long months on the ice. Nobody is surprised if, while checking into your hotel, you ask for a glass of fresh milk along with your room key (there are no cows on the continent), or if you wander out of a restaurant forgetting to pay. And in the botanical gardens at the end of the season you can often find people sitting for hours, staring in wonder, as if they were seeing flowers for the first time.
       With this book I have attempted to weave together all the different aspects of Antarctica in a way that has never been done before: what it feels like to be there; why people of all kinds are drawn to it; Antarctica as place of science, political football, holder of secrets about the Earth’s past, and ice crystal ball that will ultimately predict all of our futures. It is only when you see all those different aspects and how they interconnect that you can begin to understand this extraordinary place.
       I have tried, in short, to write a natural history of the only continent on Earth that has virtually no human history.
       Antarctica is made up of two giant ice sheets. Part One of the book is based around coastal stations on the East Antarctic ice sheet, the larger of the two. This is home to a bleakly beautiful frozen lake district, which is so like the Red Planet that it has been dubbed ‘Mars on Earth’. It’s also here that you can meet the ‘aliens’ of Antarctica, creatures that live on the coast there year round and have been forced into bizarre adaptations to cope with the extremes. There are fish with antifreeze in their blood, seals that live out the winter swimming non-stop beneath the sea ice, snow petrels that look angelic on the wing but are spitting maniacs close up, and penguins that put themselves through extremes of starvation and privation to rear each new generation.
       For Part Two we move to the high plateau in the interior of the eastern ice sheet. This is where the astronomy happens, giant telescopes high on the summit of the ice sheet that see through windows in the cold, dry sky to parts of the Universe that other telescopes can’t reach. This is also where we see how humans pass winters trapped on their bases, as isolated as if they were on a space station.
       The fulcrum of the book comes as I describe another treasure found in the east: the extraordinary archive of the Earth’s climate history, buried as bubbles of ancient air under three kilometres of ice. While scientists working on the rest of the world were quibbling, Antarctica told us beyond any doubt that our burning of oil, coal and gas has significantly changed our atmosphere, taking it into unnatural and potentially very dangerous territory.
       Part Three then focuses on the west of the continent: the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the peninsula tail pointing to South America. The Peninsula is warming up more rapidly than almost anywhere else on Earth. And the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is the vulnerable one, based on slippery wet rocks that could send it sliding into the sea. Though it is the smaller of the two ice sheets it still contains enough ice to raise sea levels around the world by three and a half metres.2 If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted completely, or even in part, Antarctica would no longer be a remote curiosity. Its ice would fill the oceans, rearing up to flood London, Florida, Shanghai and the hundreds of millions of people who make their livings in places that now seem perilously close to the sea.
       The underlying theme of the book is the classic ‘hero’ story, in which the narrator travels to the end of the Earth, to the strangest, most distant lands, only to find a mirror, the girl next door, the key to life back home. But there is also a deeper message, for which Antarctica is the living metaphor. The most experienced Antarcticans talk not about conquering the continent but about surrendering to it. No matter how powerful you believe yourself to be – how good your technology, how rich your invention – Antarctica is always bigger. And if we humans look honestly into this ice mirror, and see how small we are, we may learn a humility that is the first step towards wisdom.

    Table of Contents

    Map of Antarctica x
    Introduction xiii
    Prologue xix

    PART 1: EAST ANTARCTIC COAST – ALIEN WORLD
    1. Welcome to Mactown 3
    2. The March of the Penguins 33
    3. Mars on Earth 89

    PART 2: THE HIGH PLATEAU – TURNING POINT
    4. The South Pole 141
    5. Concordia 213

    PART 3: WEST ANTARCTICA – HOME TRUTHS
    6. A Human Touch 259
    7. Into the West 309

    Timeline 351
    Glossary 357
    Notes 361
    Suggestions for Further Reading 363
    Acknowledgements 375
    Index 379

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    The acclaimed science writer presents a wide-ranging exploration of Antarctica’s history, nature, and global significance in this “rollicking good read” (Kirkus).
     
    From the early expeditions of Ernest Shackleton to David Attenborough’s documentary series Frozen Planet, the continent of Antarctica has captured the world’s imagination. After the Antarctic Treaty of 1961, decades of scientific research revealed the true extent of its many mysteries. Now former Nature magazine staff writer Gabrielle Walker tells the full story of Antarctica—from its fascinating history to its uncertain future and the international teams of researchers who brave its forbidding climate.
     
    Drawing on her broad travels across the continent, Walker weaves all the significant threads of life on the vast ice sheet into a multifaceted narrative, illuminating what it really feels like to be there and why it draws so many different kinds of people. She chronicles cutting-edge science experiments, visits to the South Pole, and unsettling portents about our future in an age of global warming.
     
    “We are all anxious Antarctic watchers now, and Walker's book is the essential primer.”—The Guardian, UK

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    Publishers Weekly
    Science writer Walker (Snowball Earth) offers a cross-disciplinary tour of Antarctica—its geology, biology, climate, and history—along with an illuminating picture of the lives of the scientists who temporarily live on the forbidding continent. Writing in a fluid style, Walker surveys the fascinating sea life in the frigid waters, such as spiders one thousand times bigger than their land-bound cousins, and fish that literally have antifreeze in their veins. In addition to the biologists, Antarctica’s scientific community includes meteor-hunting geologists, climatologists studying the ancient ice to trace the oscillations in Earth’s climate, and astronomers who brave the winter to benefit from the clarity of the Antarctic skies. A highlight is Walker’s chronicle of the rhythms of an Antarctic winter and the coping strategies the winter crews employ to survive the harsh otherworldly environment. For example, the tone for the new winter is set when the crew sits down to watch the science-fiction classic The Thing, set at the South Pole, and in the dead of winter the brave attempt to join the 300 Club, which requires that they sit in a sauna until the temperature is 200F and then run, naked no less, into the -100F air, however briefly. This all-in-one survey successfully captures the frozen continent. 2 maps. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Jan.)
    From the Publisher
    "Gabrielle Walker describes very well current activities on the vast ice sheet, from the constant discovery of new undersea life to the ongoing hunt for meteorites, which are relatively easy to track down on the white ice. For anyone who has ever wondered what it’s like to winter at 70 degrees below zero, her account will be telling...Absorbing."—Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books

    "A dazzling array of narratives throngs Antarctica...Antarctica is still the 'world’s most mysterious continent,' as it remains the only one on which humans have never lived permanently. Walker captures that mystique through interviews with people who have made Antarctica part of their lives." —Nature

    "Walker's a clear explainer and engaging guide, her descriptions evocative...The true protagonist here is Antarctica itself, and in Walker's rendering it easily carries that leading role."
    Tampa Bay Times

    "Walker tells in rich detail what it’s like to survive and do science on the only continent never inhabited by human beings. She spends time with dozens of investigators, revealing both their work and the inner workings of their minds...Walker offers a diverse sampling of the seventh continent and the science done there." American Scientist

    "A vivid portrait...We are all anxious Antarctic watchers now, and Walker's book is the essential primer." —The Guardian

    "Walker gained access to a variety of fascinating places and projects. There are fresh and informative sections on the fauna and microflora of this harshest of all habitats, on the use of Antarctica as a terrestrial and cosmic observatory...Walker is also good at sketching the oddly beguiling world of the scientists and support workers who return year after year to Antarctic research stations." —The Telegraph

    "Hugely informative...Walker uses direct speech to render the material digestible, allowing her protagonists to speak for themselves. She has a gift for lay analogy, as a popular science writer must." —The Spectator

    "The fascinating story of Antarctica, from the hardships of exploration to its future survival." —The Ecologist

    "Walker’s account affords a vibrant vicarious experience of traveling around the place on earth most like an alien planet." —Booklist
     
    Library Journal
    Having taken multiple trips to Antarctica and stayed there for up to four months at a time, Walker (An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere) has not only the skill to make her writing approachable but the experience to back it up. Her book weaves history, exploration, and science and introduces many researchers and their specialties, from penguins to microscopic life, ice cores, mud, and changes in ice movement and melting speed. This book is similar to Leslie Carol Roberts's The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica in its appreciation of the continent, though Walker's book places more emphasis on science. While it lacks the photographs that enhance Antarctica: Secrets of the Southern Continent, edited by David McGonigal, Walker's on-the-ground experience enables her to offer a mental picture of the place, and a map included with each chapter helps readers trace her travels. VERDICT Recommended for those interested in Antarctica, its role in the global climate, and its effect on us all. [See Prepub Alert, 4/9/12.]—Jean E. Crampon, Univ. of Southern California Libs., Los Angeles
    Kirkus Reviews
    Scientist Walker (An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, 2007, etc.) pens a riveting "natural history of the only continent on Earth that has virtually no human history." The author's fascination with Antarctica began more than two decades ago, and it has inspired five visits. Larger than the continental United States, yet home to only 49 temporary bases, the continent is composed of two giant ice sheets. During the summer, 3,000 scientists conduct experiments, and 30,000 tourists drop in for short visits. Only 1,000 intrepid souls spend the winter on the continent. Due to an international treaty, the entire continent is dedicated to "peace and science," and officially, the land "belongs to nobody." Walker divides the narrative into three sections, delving into the historical and scientific sagas of the different areas of the continent. She begins with the coastal stations on the East Antarctic ice sheet, an area containing a zone so like outer space, it sports the nickname "Mars on Earth." Walker then chronicles her journey to the interior of the continent, visiting astronomers deciphering data gathered from giant high-altitude telescopes. The author also helped scientists wrestling with the mystery of ice cores and what they can tell us about our ancient climate. In "the most conventionally beautiful place in Antarctica," the far West, Walker chronicles the effects of contemporary and historical human activity on this strange and wonderful environment. The author adeptly clarifies the technical aspects of the science, decodes the intimate stories of reticent interviewees and weaves in the astounding and heartbreaking stories of the great explorers Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton. A rollicking good read for science buffs, armchair adventurers and readers curious about the natural world at its most extreme.

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