The Ragged Edge of the World: Encounters at the Frontier Where Modernity, Wildlands and Indigenous Peoples Meet by Eugene Linden

Author:Eugene Linden [Linden, Eugene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Social Science, Travel, Special Interest, Developing & Emerging Countries
ISBN: 9781101476130
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2011-03-17T06:26:10+00:00

PART V

THE ANTIPODES: THE LONG REACH OF HUMANITY

CHAPTER 11

Unfreezing Time

Humans cannot really live in Antarctica except for a few brief months during its summer, and then only with precautions similar to those one might take in preparing to live on the moon. That said, humanity is having a profound impact on the vast continent. Thanks to our meddling with the chemistry of the atmosphere, we have pulled off a necromancer’s trick: We have unfrozen time.

On the great ice sheets at the southern end of the earth, the far past and the present meet daily. The past rises from the depths of the sheets in the form of temperature changes in the ice that are ghosts of climates long past. In other parts of Antarctica, time doesn’t stop, but rather walks in place. Antarctica is an illusionist itself, and its conundrums are but one aspect of the continent’s personality. It also presents a face of haphazard ferocity, where nature is in charge. The ocean surrounding Antarctica is the stormiest on earth; its storms are the strongest. Antarctica is earth’s highest continent, with an average elevation of roughly 7,000 feet, but also the lowest, since the actual land surface is about 1,600 feet below sea level. The enormous weight of two miles of ice compresses the very crust of the earth. In some places Antarctica’s beauty derives from its immense scale and extremes, in others from its purity, and in others from its colors.

Antarctica is an alien icebox, isolated from the habitable world by ramparts of ocean and air currents. Those who make the trek to this antipode venture into a redoubt where the normal rules don’t seem to apply. In fact, much of the strangeness one encounters there results from the simplicity with which the workings of geophysics play out in the slow-motion world of extreme cold without the interference of biology. The consequences can be magical. Scientists report seeing icebergs and islands hovering upside down on the horizon. Through the mechanics of physics, Antarctica can confer on a dead seal the splendor of Arthurian burial rites.

Let’s say, for instance, that a seal dies in shallow waters. The corpse will quickly freeze to the bottom of the ice at low tide, and rise slowly to the top as ice forms below it and evaporates above. Once it has made its way to the surface, the seal’s body rises onto a pedestal as it insulates the underlying ice from the sun. Eventually the ice breaks up, and the seal, now mummified by the sun and dry air, drifts out to sea. If cold air is flowing down from the ice sheets, the refraction of the sun’s rays will create a mirage and it will appear as if the seal is standing as it sails off toward its icy Avalon.

In other parts of Antarctica, dead seals experience perpetual resurrection as a result of the interplay of sun and ice in an environment that never changes. For instance, a short helicopter ride from McMurdo, the main American base on the continent, lie the Dry Valleys, so named because they are free of ice.

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