The Storied Ice: Exploration, Discovery, and Adventure in Antarctica's Peninsula Region - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

In mid-July 1898, seventeen men stared with hungry eyes across a frozen sea as a fiery cloud separated, disclosing a bit of the upper rim of the sun. It was their first sight of the sun in over two months. One later wrote, For several minutes my companions did not speak. Indeed, we could not . . . [find] words with which to express the buoyant feeling of relief, and the emotion of new life. . . . These were the men of Adrien de Gerlache's icebound Belgica expedition, the first human beings to live through the black months of an Antarctic night and witness an Antarctic sunrise. They had opened a new chapter in a story that had begun hundreds of years earlier, when men first began searching for a speculative continent of riches in the Southern Hemisphere.More than two thousand years before the Belgica's men saw the sun peep over the Antarctic icescape, Greek philosophers theorized that a large landmass must fill much of the southern part of the globe, to balance the known landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere. And one of those philosophers, Parmenides, extrapolating from the fact that voyagers to the far north had found ice-covered seas and land, concluded that the far south would be similarly frigid and uninhabitable. Someone among the Greeks, possibly Aristotle, named this Southern Polar Region Antarktos, in opposition to the North Polar Region, which had been christened Arktos after a prominent constellation in the far northern sky. The Greek theory of a Southern Continent survived the fall of Rome, but the original concept of a forbidding, ice-covered land did not. Instead, medieval men conjured a more enticing belief in a vast, rich, even inhabited, landmass in the Earth's high southern latitudes. This myth would inspire numerous exploratory voyages in the centuries to come.The early Antarctic story is largely one of false discovery. Beginning early in the sixteenth century, sailor after sailor explorers, naval officers, merchants, hunters, even pirates discovered austral land and declared it the northern shores of the sought-for continent.Then someone else would sail south of the putative discovery, proving that it too was just another island, and the possible shores of the theoretical Southern Continent would be pushed farther south.These early southern voyagers challenged the unknown in tiny, cramped sailing vessels, wholly dependent on the currents and winds to power their progress. Robert Falcon Scott, an early twentieth-century British explorer of Antarctica's Ross Sea region, wrote of them, In the smallest and craziest ships they plunged boldly into stormy ice-strewn seas; again and again they narrowly missed disaster; their vessels were wracked and strained and leaked badly, their crews were worn out with unceasing toil and decimated by scurvy. Yet in spite of inconceivable discomforts they struggled on. . . . Little by little, that struggle replaced myth with fact: not only is Antarctica, a land mass bigger than Australia, the most inaccessible of the seven continents, it is also the coldest, driest, windiest, and highest in average elevation?the most inhospitable place on Earth for human beings. Before the explorers arrived, no human being had even set foot on its land, let alone lived there. But visitors to the Antarctic also learned other truths about the white continent. The waters and shores of the Southern Ocean encircling the Antarctic regions teemed with wildlife that people could exploit, and the entire Antarctic offered unique opportunities for scientific study. Gradually, mankind also came to appreciate Antarctica's mystical allure, came to see that the Southern Continent is indeed a place of riches: fascinating and unique wildlife, magical light, unimaginable colors, haunting sounds, spectacular landscapes, and seemingly limitless horizons. The Storied Ice tells of how humankind learned all this about Antarctica's Peninsula region, the focus of much early exploration and the most visited part of the far south for much of its history. From north to south, the area that falls within our story includes South Georgia Island, the South Sandwich Islands, the South Orkney and South Shetland island groups, the Antarctic Peninsula, and the Weddell Sea and its ice-choked coasts. All these locations lie south of the Antarctic Convergence (or Antarctic Polar Front, the modern scientific term), the ecological boundary in the Southern Ocean where cold surface waters flowing north from the Antarctic continent meet and drop below the warmer, saltier, less-dense waters from the subtropics. The region of the Convergence, which follows a track rather like that of a drunken snake around the circumference of the South Polar Regions between roughly 48° and 62° S latitude, is typically about 20 to 30 miles wide, a narrow band over which there are abrupt changes in water and air temperatures. The climate of far southern lands depends hugely on whether they are south or north of this band. For example, Cape Horn, the island at the tip of South America at about 56° S, is north of the Convergence. Although the weather there is chilly and wet, it is far from polar. East of Cape Horn, the Convergence takes a jog north. The consequence is that South Georgia Island, although two degrees north of Cape Horn at 54° S, is south of the Convergence and has a near-polar climate. Well south of the Convergence lies the Antarctic Circle, that imaginary line on the Earth at approximately 66° 33' S where, each year, the sun does not rise for one day in midwinter or set for one day at midsummer. A significant portion of the Peninsula region lies north of this latitude, and these places typically have a milder climate than that found elsewhere in the Antarctic. Here, summer temperatures are often above freezing, and the sun rises, if only for a very few hours, in the middle of winter and correspondingly sets briefly even during the height of summer. Compared to most of the world, however, these locales are cold and desolate. They are definitely part of the Antarctic. The entire Peninsula region is a place of snow, ice, and marvelous southern fauna, and of lands and seas that have more in common with the rest of the South Polar Regions than with any other part of the globe. No native peoples have ever lived there; vegetation is scarce, and what little exists is limited primarily to mosses, lichens, and grasses; the only land animals are minute insects; and ice blankets almost all the land. At sea, floating ice is a constant companion pack ice from the winter freeze, icebergs from tidewater glaciers, and those signature ice forms of the Southern Ocean, massive tabular icebergs sometimes many miles long that calve off ice shelves and drift inexorably wherever the currents and winds take them. The Peninsula region shares one more thing with the rest of Antarctica a fascinating and colorful history. In mid-July 1898, seventeen men stared with hungry eyes across a frozen sea as a fiery cloud separated, disclosing a bit of the upper rim of the sun. It was their first sight of the sun in over two months. One later wrote, For several minutes my companions did not speak. Indeed, we could not . . . [find] words with which to express the buoyant feeling of relief, and the emotion of new life. . . . These were the men of Adrien de Gerlache's icebound Belgica expedition, the first human beings to live through the black months of an Antarctic night and witness an Antarctic sunrise. They had opened a new chapter in a story that had begun hundreds of years earlier, when men first began searching for a speculative continent of riches in the Southern Hemisphere.More than two thousand years before the Belgica's men saw the sun peep over the Antarctic icescape, Greek philosophers theorized that a large landmass must fill much of the southern part of the globe, to balance the known landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere. And one of those philosophers, Parmenides, extrapolating from the fact that voyagers to the far north had found ice-covered seas and land, concluded that the far south would be similarly frigid and uninhabitable. Someone among the Greeks, possibly Aristotle, named this Southern Polar Region Antarktos, in opposition to the North Polar Region, which had been christened Arktos after a prominent constellation in the far northern sky. The Greek theory of a Southern Continent survived the fall of Rome, but the original concept of a forbidding, ice-covered land did not. Instead, medieval men conjured a more enticing belief in a vast, rich, even inhabited, landmass in the Earth's high southern latitudes. This myth would inspire numerous exploratory voyages in the centuries to come.The early Antarctic story is largely one of false discovery. Beginning early in the sixteenth century, sailor after sailor explorers, naval officers, merchants, hunters, even pirates discovered austral land and declared it the northern shores of the sought-for continent.Then someone else would sail south of the putative discovery, proving that it too was just another island, and the possible shores of the theoretical Southern Continent would be pushed farther south.These early southern voyagers challenged the unknown in tiny, cramped sailing vessels, wholly dependent on the currents and winds to power their progress. Robert Falcon Scott, an early twentieth-century British explorer of Antarctica's Ross Sea region, wrote of them, In the smallest and craziest ships they plunged boldly into stormy ice-strewn seas; again and again they narrowly missed disaster; their vessels were wracked and strained and leaked badly, their crews were worn out with unceasing toil and decimated by scurvy. Yet in spite of inconceivable discomforts they struggled on. . . . Little by little, that struggle replaced myth with fact: not only is Antarctica, a land mass bigger than Australia, the most inaccessible of the seven continents, it is also the coldest, driest,

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