Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays by Barry Lopez

Author:Barry Lopez [Lopez, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593242827
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

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Walking around South Pole Station, a visitor is struck by the cosmic reach, the planetary perspective, of the inquiries here. The focus, in fact, of much of the research now conducted in Antarctica is global or planetary, rather than local. In an era of large, coordinated global geoscience projects and space probes, and concern over global climate, the continent has come into its own. (We tend, I think, to imagine Antarctica as an island the size of perhaps Texas, sheathed in snow and ice and surrounded by a frozen ocean. It is nearly twice the size of Australia—the East Antarctic ice sheet alone is about the size of the United States. Antarctica is the planet’s heat sink; because of its size and its position at the end of the Earth’s axis—there is no comparable landmass in the Arctic—Antarctica drives both the circulation of the world’s oceans and the circulation of the atmosphere.)

Greenhouse gases and ozone depletion have brought Antarctic research into high public profile and created, rather suddenly, a transnational perspective on human fate. (Greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide, by trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, can trigger a dramatic shift in the pattern of global climate. The ozone layer protects biological organisms against ultraviolet radiation, which causes cancer in humans and can be lethal in its effect on certain plants and smaller creatures, especially in the upper layers of ocean water.) Interest in Antarctic research in these areas is apt to grow rapidly for one reason: Adverse effects on global climate are likely to appear in Antarctica first, because of the central role the continent plays in the Earth’s weather and because of the pristine nature of its physical environment. Antarctica serves, then, as an early-warning station and, with the information in its ice cores, as a sort of archive for the atmosphere.

The accumulation of environmental and climatic records, and the rather recent realization of the pivotal role Antarctica plays in global research programs, are direct results of its having been dedicated to scientific research in 1956, in preparation for the International Geophysical Year. This arrangement was formalized in 1959 with the drafting of the Antarctic Treaty. (When the treaty was signed it set a precedent in disarmament negotiations; for mutual, on-site inspections; and for devising a legal framework for international management of the seafloor and space. Today no one need show a passport to visit the continent. Military maneuvers, weapons siting, and the disposal of nuclear waste are all prohibited. And the scientific work of any signatory nation is open to the inspection of any other signatory.)

Antarctica draws several hundred scientists each year from about twenty-five nations to pose questions about cosmology and climate, about the lives of penguins and seals and the behavior of ice, questions oddly eminent in this modernist landscape without a national politics.

To get a sense of direction at the pole, a visitor faces a Gordian knot. From the pole itself there is only one direction—north. East and west are unfetchable.

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