Antarctic Quotes

Giordino...simply sighed in resignation. "Who else," he asked no one in particular, "but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?

I was beyond Ice Princess. I was Sorceress of the Antarctic and a bitchy one at that.

You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.

There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make fotr the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas... The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the blink of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea.

...and that bastard Breckinridge Scott, yes, the Phalanx king, still hiding like a rat in his Antarctic Fortress of Scumditude. --Arthur Sinclair

When people die they are sometimes put into coffins, which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots. But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the creamatorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or snow somewhere.

Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

Loneliness is the penalty of leadership, but the man who has to make the decisions is assisted greatly if he feels that there is no uncertainty in the minds of those who follow him, and that his orders will be carried out confidently and in expectation of success.

Nature always claims what she's owed.

We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.

Need to put footstep of courage into stirrup of patience.

And from th’ Antarctic Pole eastward behold As much more land, which never was descried, Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright As all the lamps that beautify the sky; And shall I die, and this unconquerèd?

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

The Arctic tern has the longest migration of any animal. It flies from the Arctic all the way to the Antarctic, and then back again within a year. This is an extraordinarily long flight for a bird its size. And because the terns live to be thirty or so, the distance they will travel over the course of their lives is the equivalent of flying to the moon and back three times.

If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last - even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable;

Do you know what I love most about the ocean? The way the water’s all connected. The bits and pieces have different names, but really it’s all one vast body of salt water, all the way around the earth. It’s as if we’re touching Europe, or Africa, or the Antarctic. If you close your eyes, you can feel it, like it’s right there.” Pepper

But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.

When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.

There was the sheer Antarctic landscape, and the mind moving across it like a brush on canvas, until the brush was laid aside, and the snow buried it.

Shearwater chicks have to head out on their own the first time they jump but then their parents meet them after replenishing themselves on Antarctic krill and they all migrate together.

I felt as lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably.

The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast—above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill—has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.

We are a nation of shop keepers.

But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn’t ask at the crematorium because I didn’t go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.

Are today's fears more or less founded than the fears of that time? When it comes to the future, we are just as blind as our fathers. Swiss and Swedes have their anti-nuclear shelters, but what will they find when they come out into the open? There are Polynesia, New Zealand, Tierra del Fuego, the Antarctic: perhaps they will remain unharmed. Obtaining a passport and entry visa is much easier than it was then, so why aren't we going? Why aren't 'we leaving our country? Why aren't we leaving "before"?

But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.

This concept is intuitive, and yet when we watch extremophiles, from emperor penguins braving the Antarctic chill to camels trekking over scorching sands, it’s easy to think that they are suffering throughout their lives. We admire them not just for their physiological resilience but also for their psychological fortitude. We project our senses onto theirs and assume that they’d be in discomfort because we’d be in discomfort. But their senses are tuned to the temperatures in which they live. A camel likely isn’t distressed by the baking sun, and penguins probably don’t mind huddling through an Antarctic storm. Let the storm rage on. The cold doesn’t bother them, anyway.

In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon.

Rule One: Make friends with death Tailgating in the Antarctic is no joke. We are trying to do nothing less ambitious than reverse the course of history. We want Team Krill to defeat Team Whale. Look, if you want to tailgate in comfort, don't get on the boat. You can buy some quail eggs or snails or whatever you people eat and you can watch the Food Chain Games on your flat TV. Stay in Los Angeles. Hug your wife on your plush banquette. Cheer for the Antarctic minke whales, like every other asshole. No, wait a second, here comes the real Rule One: if you are a supporter of Team Whale, you can go fuck yourself, my fine sir. This list is for the fans of Team Krill.

The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; a truly horrific experience is ‘well, not exactly what I would have chosen’; a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pretty’; an outstanding performance or achievement is ‘not bad’; an act of abominable cruelty is ‘not very friendly’, and an unforgivably stupid misjudgement is ‘not very clever’; the Antarctic is ‘rather cold’ and the Sahara ‘a bit too hot for my taste’; and any exceptionally delightful object, person or event, which in other cultures would warrant streams of superlatives, is pretty much covered by ‘nice’, or, if we wish to express more ardent approval, ‘very nice’.

We have sailed heedlessly into a trap of our own making

It’s an old story, amigo mío. Be careful of those closest to you because they can do the most damage.

The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.

and the northernmost part of the Antarctic Peninsula.

live there. As if it’s an Antarctic research facility a thousand miles from anywhere.

Men, as Amundsen liked to say, are the unknown factor in the Antarctic.

Now I know how to make it as a pedophile. Forget lollypops. Antarctic wildlife is the ticket.

martyrs of the Antarctic.

A war is like the Antarctic in one respect. There is no getting out of it with honour as long as you can put one foot before the other.

The only place tourists go is the Antarctic Peninsula, which is like the Florida Keys of Antarctica.

However, Antarctica is the one place on the planet that isn’t considered international waters, because it’s governed by something called the Antarctic Treaty.

The autumn sky was as clear as if it had been made that very morning. Perfect Duke Ellington weather. Though, of course, Duke Ellington would be right even for New Year’s Eve at an Antarctic base.

The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.

Edgar Poe has said, always “to reckon with the unforeseen, the unexpected, the inconceivable, which have a very large share (in those affairs), and chance ought always to be a matter of strict calculation.

It's ironic that we can imagine the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves more readily than we can the collapse of the banking system-and despite this, amazingly, as this book was written, the banking system did collapse.

Giordino, on the other hand, simply sighed in resignation. “Who else,” he asked no one in particular, “but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?

An entire subgenre of self-help literature devoted to analyzing his methods emerged, books with titles like Leading at the Edge: Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition. Another example, Shackleton: Leadership Lessons from Antarctica, included such chapters as “Be My Tent Mate: Keep Dissidents Close,” “Camaraderie at 20 Below Zero: Creating an Optimal Work Environment,” and “Sailing Uncharted Waters: Adapt and Innovate.

On the ice, in the Antarctic cold, in the middle of freaking nowhere, his tongue showed her how dirty sex could be, his body made her take it, and that dark, raspy husk of a voice broke in to turn the whole thing up a million degrees.

Even though we now have a decent picture of the planet's climatological past, never in the earth's entire recorded history has there been warming at anything like this speed- by one estimate, around ten times faster than at any point in the last 66 million years. Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets- enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean. Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.

It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT’s. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among “uhs” and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; “dt,” God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him.

But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.

Among the greatest threats future travelers to Mars are likely to face is an interplanetary version of winter over-syndrome. The unknown icescapes around the earth poles, particularly Antarctica, seemed as remote and forbidding as 19th century explorers as Mars does to us now.

From boiling thermal hot springs to deep beneath the Antarctic ice, microorganisms can be found almost everywhere on earth in great quantities. Microorganisms (or microbes, as they are also called) are small organisms. Most are so small that they cannot be seen without a microscope.

They were for all practical purposes alone in the frozen Antarctic seas. It had been very nearly a year since they had last been in contact with civilization. Nobody in the outside world knew they were in trouble, much less where they were. They had no radio transmitter with which to notify any would-be rescuers, and it is doubtful that any rescuers could have reached them even if they had been able to broadcast an SOS. It was 1915, and there were no helicopters, no Weasels, no Sno-Cats, no suitable planes. Thus their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity. If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out.

Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.

Scientists believe physiological factors tell only part of the story. Stress, due to confinement, isolation, boredom, unvaried food, and the psychosocial pressures that inevitably arise in small groups of people contributes in no small part to the psychological and cognitive symptoms experienced by Antarctic personnel.

Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons. Some are actuated simply by a love of adventure, some have the keen thirst for scientific knowledge, and others again are drawn away from the trodden paths by the “lure of little voices,” the mysterious fascination of the unknown. —Ernest Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic

It was the mystery that biologists from Darwin onwards had been longing to solve. How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect’s wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture?

The amount of work required of so few men in such a little time would rival the greatest construction projects in human history.

All the facts are united by a mysterious chain.

the luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which they themselves create.

The mutual conquest of difficulties is the cement of friendship, as it is the only lasting cement of matrimony.

Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.

If you're anything like me, you don't make up your mind about important issues by doing original research, pounding over primary sources and coming to your own conclusions; you listen to people who claim to know what they're talking about - "experts" - and try to determine which of them is more credible. You do your best to gauge who's authentically well-informed and unbiased, who has an agenda and what it is - who's a corporate flack, a partisan hack, or a wacko. I believe that global warming is real and anthropogenic not because I've personally studied Antarctic ice core samples or run my own computer climate models, but because all the people who support the theory are climatologists with no evident investment in the issue, and all the people who dismiss it as alarmist claptrap are shills of the petro-chemical industry or just seem to like debunking things, from the Holocaust to the moon landing. We put our trust - our votes, our money, sometimes our lives - in someone else's authority. In other words, most of us decide not what to believe but whom to believe. And I say believe because for most people, such decisions are matters of faith rather than reason.

In a plane again, Ashley thought sourly, her nose pressed to the window. Down below, glacier fought granite from horizon to horizon. This was the final leg of the two-day journey. Yesterday, they had flown the eight hundred miles from Buenos Aires to Esperanza, the Argentine army base on the tip on an Antarctic Peninsula. There, Ashley had her first taste of Antarctic air - like ice water poured into her lungs.

The most important evidence for the age of the maps [...] is to be found in those showing the Antarctic, especially in the maps of Mercator, Piri Re'is, and Oronteus Finaeus. All of these maps appear to show the continent at a time when there was a temperate climate there. Some geological evidence, in the form of three sedimentary cores from the bottom of the Ross Sea, has been presented to suggest that such a warm period may indeed have existed there down to about 6,000 years ago.

But alas! Firemen [stoking a ship] are not what they were. The gor-blimey firemen of the coal-burning days must, I think, be a diminishing species and in these degenerate times, when ships burn oil, the firemen is rapidly becoming a perfect gentleman, which is a pity …. Yet all was not quite lost in 1932, since one of them, … finding an altercation with the cook becoming beyond his powers of argument, upheld tradition and ‘drew him off a Burton.’ In other words, he knocked him out for the count.

The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any of the known cultures, of a true civilization, of a comparatively advanced sort, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, may well have been more advanced than the civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome. In astronomy, nautical science, mapmaking and possibly ship-building, it was perhaps more advanced than any state of culture before the 18th Century of the Christian Era. It was in the 18th Century that we first developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th Century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th Century did we begin to send out ships for purposes of whaling or exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas. The maps indicate that some ancient people may have done all these things.

NEUTRINOS | The neutrino (meaning “little neutral one”) has no electrical charge and almost no mass. A fundamental particle, neutrinos are copiously produced in nuclear reactions and hardly ever interact with matter. As you read this, one hundred billion of them pass through every square centimeter of your body every second, but only a few will ever jostle even one of your atoms in your lifetime. The only way to detect neutrinos, then, is to force-feed them lots of atoms with which to interact. This is the idea behind IceCube, a giant neutrino detector located at the South Pole. Hot water bores holes in the ice, into which cables carrying light detectors are lowered. Then the water freezes around them. When neutrinos jostle an atom in the ice, these detectors see a characteristic flash of light. By this clever technique, IceCube transforms an entire cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a dedicated neutrino detector. Even more amazing, some of the neutrinos IceCube detected will have hit Earth at the North Pole and traveled all the way through the planet without interacting with a single atom before they enter the cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole.

They ask to touch her hair and she asks to touch theirs back. This makes them all realize how strange and silly a request that is, and they giggle and become instant friends without a head petted between them. Then there is Paido, another Somidlatter, who looks like he’s got more than a little Antarctic in him because his hair is bright yellow and his skin is so white that it nearly glows. The others tease him about it, but Nassun tells him that sometimes she burns in the sun, too—though she carefully doesn’t mention that this takes the better part of a day rather than minutes—and his face alights.

What actually happens when you die is your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now. When people die they are sometimes put into coffins, which mean that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots. But Mother was cremated. This means she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.

a brief summary of perhaps the most famous Third Man account: that of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. With their boat frozen in the ice, Shackleton and two other men trekked for thirty-six hours across a mountain and glacier-filled South Georgia to a whaling station. The three men barely survived the harrowing trip, spending weeks convalescing in a hospital afterward. Shackleton and his crewmates reported that a mysterious fourth man had joined them and had walked silently alongside during the latter stages of the trek. The mysterious man never spoke, but his presence was a comfort and helped to keep them moving forward.

Most of these maps were of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But maps of other areas survived. These included maps of the Americas and maps of the Arctic and Antarctic seas. It becomes clear that the ancient voyagers traveled from pole to pole. Unbelievable as it may appear, the evidence nevertheless indicates that some ancient people explored the coasts of Antatica when its coasts were free of ice. It is clear, too, that they had an instrument of navigation for accurately finding the longitudes of places that was far superior to anything posessed by the peoples of ancient, medieval, or modern times until the second half of the 18th Century.

Just think," she said, "the Antarctic is a world away, but the ocean here in front of us reaches all the way down there. We could board a ship and sail across this very sea to reach it. Perhaps the water in front of us now was lapping up against the shores of the Antarctic at this time last year." He looked at her without speaking. "What I am trying to say is, it makes the world seem so small." She didn't know how to say it to him, or even to herself, but what she meant was that it was all so vast, and yet even the smallest bits of matter, even invisible atoms, could cover the vastness, could claim both here and the place that was a world away. "It makes me feel small and yet eternal at the same time.

Shackleton faced many of the same problems encountered by managers today: bringing a diverse group together to work toward a common goal; handling the constant naysayer; bucking up the perpetual worrier; keeping the disgruntled from poisoning the atmosphere; battling boredom and fatigue; bringing order and success to a chaotic environment; working with limited resources.

Cook referred to the symptoms collectively as polar anemia. Researchers today use the term winter over-syndrome. But it's essentially the same thing. A prevailing theory suggests it's a form of hypothyroidism , which is associated with depression and atrial fibrillation and could thus account for the cerebral symptoms and the cardiac symptoms that most concerned Cook before scurvy took hold.

Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish. With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

During the brief summer (in Antarctica), it is warm enough for a few days or weeks to create meltwater; a few, inconsequential streams tumble down from the glaciers above the valleys. The sparking surface of the water is aberrant, a false promise, the land’s irony. The only really animate force here is the wind. It blows, always, from the interior, from the west- often, in the spring, at well over sixty knots. It wallops and scours the mountains, eroding and fracturing, sweeping clear the debris… the wind, a katabatic or gravity-driven wind, enters the valleys after falling vertically nearing two miles from the summit of the East Antarctic ice sheet; it comes into the valleys with a discernible hunger, and its effect on the land, which it abrades an lacerates with bits of sand and ice are often peculiar

Nor did the Antarctic represent to Shackleton merely the grubby means to a financial end. In a very real sense he needed it—something so enormous, so demanding, that it provided a touchstone for his monstrous ego and implacable drive. In ordinary situations, Shackleton's tremendous capacity for boldness and daring found almost nothing worthy of its pulling power; he was a Percheron draft horse harnessed to a child's wagon cart. But in the Antarctic—here was a burden which challenged every atom of his strength. Thus, while Shackleton was undeniably out of place, even inept, in a great many everyday situations, he had a talent—a genius, even—that he shared with only a handful of men throughout history—genuine leadership. He was, as one of his men put it, "the greatest leader that ever came on God's earth, bar none.

Never mind that travelling by kayak from Victoria Land to Australia was assured suicide, or that camping on an iceberg was at best ill-advised. Scrawling furiously in his cabin by candlelight, Amundsen was more focused than ever on writing his own legend. When, a few weeks later, an iceberg in a nearby clearing suddenly flipped on its side with a tremendous roar, Amundsen wrote, "I will not allow my plan to spend the winter on an iceberg to be influenced by this.

. . . the Thunderhead screamed. It began with alarms everywhere in the world. Just a few at first, but more joined in the cacophony. Fire alarms, tornado sirens, buzzers, whistles, and millions upon millions of horns, all blaring a singular, anguished wail—and still it was not enough. Now every speaker on every electronic device in the world came to life, letting off a shrill feedback shriek, and around the world people fell to their knees, hands over their ears to shield themselves from the deafening din, but nothing could assuage the Thunderhead’s fury and despair. For ten minutes, the Thunderhead’s ear-rending squall filled the world. Echoing in the Grand Canyon; resounding in Antarctic ice shelves, causing glaciers to calve. It bellowed up the slopes of Mount Everest, and scattered herds on the Serengeti. There was not a being on Earth that did not hear it. And when it was done, and silence returned, everyone knew that something had changed.

For an hour or so we were furiously angry, and were possessed with an insane sense that we must go straight to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen and his men in some undefined fashion or other there and then. Such a mood could not and did not bear a moment's reflection; but it was natural enough. We had just paid the first instalment of the heart-breaking labour of making a path to the Pole; and we felt, however unreasonably, that we had earned the first right of way.

…I set out for water so I can get closer to the essence of the place, how its life is encompassed by what goes on offshore. When the swells begin to rise in the deep channel, the water feels like a living body, our vessel a mote adrift in its cytoplasm. The rhythmic sway of tides measures the pull of planet and moon. I can’t feel these forces in my body, though they must be there, made as I am from so much cellbound water. The human body is a poor instrument for sensing patterns of movement that guide the migration of whales, terns, butterflies, and geese. I cannot read with my body the earth’s magnetic forces, the tracks of sun, stars, and ocean currents. What pushes or pulls the arctic tern forward when it migrates from its summer home in Iceland to its winter home in the Antarctic Ocean? Ways of knowing that a human body will never know. But the human body is a good instrument for making language, and that tool is the best means we’ve got for finding our way.

The tranquillity of the water heightened the superb effects of this glacial world. Majestic tabular bergs whose crevices exhaled a vaporous azure; lofty spires, radiant turrets and splendid castles; honeycombed masses illumined by pale green light within whose fairy labyrinths the water washed and gurgled. Seals and penguins on magic gondolas were the silent denizens of this dreamy Venice. In the soft glamour of the midsummer midnight sun, we were possessed by a rapturous wonder—the rare thrill of unreality.

Some came for sheer love of adventure and wanted no reward beyond that; some wanted fame or its counterfeit, publicity; some were mercenary and thought primarily in terms of what they were going to get out of it; and lastly there was that small group, the like of which gives character to any expedition of merit -- not necessarily scientists at all, but men who could understand the lure, if not the love, of knowledge for its own sake; men who came not for position or money but who found full reward for their effort in the pursuit of an ideal.

In 2014, we learned that the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were even more vulnerable to melting than scientists anticipated—in fact, the West Antarctic sheet had already passed a tipping point of collapse, more than doubling its rate of ice loss in just five years. The same had happened in Greenland, where the ice sheet is now losing almost a billion tons of ice every single day. The two sheets contain enough ice to raise global sea levels ten to twenty feet—each. In 2017, it was revealed that two glaciers in the East Antarctic sheet were also losing ice at an alarming rate—eighteen billion tons of ice each year, enough to cover New Jersey in three feet of ice. If both glaciers go, scientists expect, ultimately, an additional 16 feet of water. In total, the two Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea level by 200 feet; in many parts of the world, the shoreline would move by many miles. The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. There were palm trees in the Arctic. Better not to think what that means for life at the equator.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbours up. Richard Byrd, the US admiral and explorer, gave a similar explanation in the opening of his book Alone, in which he described his adventure alone through seven months in the Antarctic: I wanted to go for experience's sake: one man's desire to know that kind of experience to the full... to taste... solitude long enough to find out how good it really was... I wanted something more than just privacy... I would be able to live exactly as I chose, obedient to no necessities but those imposed by wind and night and cold, and to no man's laws but my own.

that night she dreamed of employing an army of women cleaners who would set forth across the planet on a mission to clean up all the damage done to the environment they came from all over Africa and from North and South and South America, they came from India and China and all over Asia, they came from Europe and the Middle East, from Oceania, and from the Antarctic, too she imagined them all descending in their millions on the Niger Delta and driving out the oil companies with their mop and broom handles transformed into spears and poison-tipped swords and machine guns she imagined them demolishing al the equipment used for oil production, including the flare stacks that rose into the skies to burn the natural gas, her cleaners setting charges underneath each one, detonating from a safe distance and watching them being blown up she imagined the local people cheering and celebrating with dancing, drumming and roasted fish she imagined the international media filming it- CNN, BBC, NBC she imagined the government unable to mobilize the poorly paid local militia because they were terrified by the sheer numbers of her Worldwide Army of Women Cleaners who could vaporize them with their superhuman powers afterwards, she imagined legions of singing women sifting the rivers and creeks to remove the thick slicks of grease that had polluted them and digging up the land until they'd removed the toxic sublayers of soil she imagined the skies opening when the job was fone and the pouring of pure water from the now hygienic clouds for as long as it took for the region to be thoroughly cleansed and replenished

committing suicide, both for your own sake and that of your companions. Both sexually and socially the polar explorer must make up his mind to be starved. To what extent can hard work, or what may be called dramatic imagination, provide a substitute? Compare our thoughts on the march; our food dreams at night; the primitive way in which the loss of a crumb of biscuit may give a lasting sense of grievance. Night after night I bought big buns and chocolate at a stall on the island platform at Hatfield station, but always woke before I got a mouthful to my lips; some companions who were not so highly strung were more fortunate, and ate their phantom meals. And the darkness, accompanied it may be almost continually by howling blizzards which prevent you seeing your hand before your face. Life in such surroundings is both mentally and physically cramped; open-air exercise is restricted and in blizzards quite impossible, and you realize how much you lose by your inability to see the world about you when you are out-of-doors. I am told that when confronted by a lunatic or one who under the influence of some great grief or shock contemplates suicide, you should take that man out-of-doors and walk him about: Nature will do the rest. To normal people like ourselves living under abnormal circumstances Nature could do much to lift our thoughts out of the rut of everyday affairs, but she loses much of her healing power when she cannot be seen, but only felt, and when that feeling is intensely uncomfortable. Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging life which

If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

The Antarctic gives the impression of being white, but really it's blue. Almost entirely constructed of that pale, powder blue that at times can darken to rich, cobalt haze, as it did now around me. (96)

No one has ever encountered the full burning ecstatic beauty of a seabird quite in the way the twenty-two-year-old Herman Melville, crewing as a green hand on board a New Bedford whaler deep in the South Pacific at some time in 1841, first met an albatross. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage

This perpetual rise and fall now got measured to an obsessive-compulsive degree, understandable given the traumas of the last century and the distinct possibility of future traumas. Sea level had for the most part stabilized after the Second Pulse, but there was still a lot of Antarctic ice teetering on the brink, so past performance was no guarantee of future anything.

The distances over which sound can travel underwater are amazing. It is believed that before the proliferation of engine-powered vessels, Antarctic whales could be heard by their Arctic cousins. Such vast ranges are possible partly because sound waves are absorbed far less in water than in air. At 1 kHz, absorption is about 5 dB/km in air (at 30 per cent humidity) but only 0.06 dB/km in seawater. Also, underwater sound waves are much more confined; a noise made in mid-air spreads in all directions, but in the sea the bed and the surface limit vertical spreading.

As it was he had moods and depressions which might last for weeks. And of these there is ample evidence in diary. The man with the nerves gets things done but sometimes he has a terrible time in doing them. " Written about Scott in Chapter 6

The only thing impossible in this world was the concept that there was an impossible.

Instead of looking like a large group of pandas, however, the big mass of black and white really looked more like an Antarctic penguin colony.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a Heaven for? R. Browning, Andrea del Sarto.

But we wasted our man-power in one way which could have been avoided. I have described how every emergency was met by calling for volunteers, and how the volunteers were always forthcoming. Unfortunately volunteering was relied on not only for emergencies, but for a good deal of everyday work that should have been organised as routine; and the inevitable result was that the willing horses were overworked. It was a point of honour not to ca' canny. Men were allowed to do too much, and were told afterwards that they had done too much; and that is not discipline. They should not have been allowed to do too much. Until our last year we never insisted on a regular routine.