through their body fluids. Warm-blooded species acquire insulating layers, such as blubber or down, by which to retain heat. Virtually all Antarctic birds are pelagic. Some, like the albatross, live and breed outside the pack; others, like penguins, live on the pack; a few, like skuas and penguins, reside at least seasonally along the coastline. But, apart from its penguins—eleven of the eighteen species are present—Antarctica is best known for its marine mammals. There is a fur seal that inhabits subpolar islands and there are true seals—the leopard, crabeater, Weddell, Ross, and elephant—that thrive on the pack. There is a porpoise, the killer whale. And, of course, there are the famed true whales. Whales migrate to the Antarctic during the austral summer, but their abundance is (or was) astonishing. The presence of fur seals and whales first drew humans to the south polar regions.
Humans, of course, are the great anomaly in the Antarctic ecosystem. In some respects—notably their migratory and seasonal habits—they resemble typical Antarctic organisms. But in other ways they are ill-adapted aliens who find the Antarctic as disruptive as the Antarctic biota finds them. They arrived on the continent only in the twentieth century, and they have never become an integral part of the marine ecosystem. They extract from the system, removing organisms to take back to civilization, but they never contribute to the ecosystem’s productivity. Their best adaptations are simply to limit the amount they take from the system, or to substitute for the higher trophic feeders, such as whales, whose numbers they have reduced. It is not that humans cannot cope with polar environments; they have adapted famously to the Arctic. Rather, the peculiar isolation and reductionism of The Ice render its occupation problematical for humans. In coping with The Ice, humans must overcome not only the energy gradient, with its abstraction of accessible food and water, but the information gradient, which strips the region of meaning. By its nature the polar vortex repulses rather than beckons. It drains rather than contributes. By its awesome simplicity The Ice becomes exclusive.
Yet humans have one singular achievement: they have bound the marine ecosystem to those terrestrial ecosystems which humans inhabit elsewhere and, through them, have begun the biotic occupation of the Antarctic continent. No other organism systematically lives on the interior ice sheets. It is precisely because humans need not live off the ice, however, that they can live on it, that they alone have crossed the biotic boundary shielding the lifeless Ice from the living Earth. For the most part, inland from the coastline biological complexity in the Antarctic ceases. It is the peculiar burden and desire of humans—those from certain civilizations—to extend that complexity inward. It is a complexity of information, not merely of ecology. It is not what they find in Antarctica that sustains these humans but what they bring to it and surrender to The Ice.
A Kinetic Art: The Esthetics of the Pack
The pack marks an esthetic no less than a geographic border. In its light, colors, shapes, and motions, the pack defines the ragged transition from landscape to icescape, from Earth art to Ice art. Because it is a vast zone of mixing, the pack is the most active and variously populated ice terrane; the site of the most striking contrasts of sky, sea, light, shape, motion, and ice; the region richest in sensory data, information, and perspectives. Of all the terranes within the Antarctic ice field, the pack is the most complex. It is no accident that so many artists who come to Antarctica confine themselves to the pack, where access is easiest, where life is abundant and exotic, where light effects are varied and subtle, where (if near the coast) mountainous backdrops offer traditional perspective and a reassuring allusion to alpine esthetics.
Much of the variety results from seasonal changes. During midsummer, after the pack has rapidly disintegrated and the fog that normally shadows it has vanished, something resembling a modified seascape is possible. Sunlight plays with storm cloud to illuminate a silver-grey sea, dappled with ripples and swells, ice flakes and floes. The sky is colored with subdued pastels of yellow, grey, and blue, mixed with grey and white cloud. In the distance, bounded by the pack, the horizon is obliterated by a grey fogbank, flaked by white scuds of cloud. Sea and sky—roughly in equal proportion, with a minimum of ice—mirror one another.
With the progradation of the pack, with the deepening of winter, with proximity to the continent, the proportion of ice effects increases. On the seaward fringe of the pack there is not enough ice, while along the shore there is too much. Between these extremes, however, the pack is at its most attractive. There are variations in the objects that populate the scene, in the mixtures of sea, light, cloud, air, and ice, in the choice of perspective. In particular, the appearance of the pack changes dramatically with changes in the character and the distribution of incident light. For much of the year, a veil of snow drizzle, sea smoke, and ice fog envelops the terrane and blocks, distorts, and reflects incoming sunlight. But breaks in the clouds, new orientations of the object to sunlight, and movement of the ice can swiftly recompose and color the same collection of objects.
During the austral summer, sunlight is rarely blocked completely. The cloud deck is low, often consisting of sea smoke or ice fog. Yet there are breaks from time to time, and the dense haze is partially translucent. With or without openings light diffuses through the veil, reduced in intensity and sometimes scattered to bluish hues. Often light is so altered that apparent shadows replace true shadows. It is possible to look to one side of a scene, immersed in diffused sunlight, to discover a virtual whiteout, with heavy pack ice, ghostly icebergs, and finely sprayed fog merged into a single pale luminescence. To the other side, the shadow zone, objects are distinct. Ice floes and bergs gleam iridescently, as if from some inner radiance; the sea glowers in dull black; and the clouds thicken gloomily. In the same way, an iceberg may present a greyish or dull ivory color at one locale, then after passing out of the shadow zone glow a brilliant white.
The surface texture and composition of the ice masses also vary the character of the reflected light. Fresh snow on a floe or berg radiates a dazzling white; meltwater, dull yellow; exposed sea ice, a yellow grey, often lightly stained brown; and exposed glacial ice, blue and white. Just beneath the sea surface, washed free of snow, ice appears green and turquoise. At times, in vigorous sunlight, the ice gleams like whalebone; and in light more strongly filtered and scattered, it is a pale blue. Apertures of blue and turquoise sky may momentarily open in the cloud deck to immerse the surface in brilliant, if localized, lighting effects. Sunlight on ice clouds and ice surfaces induces optical spectacles—haloes, parhelia, arcs—and the surface inversion above the pack promotes mirages. Where clouds reflect open leads, a dark water-sky results. Where the pack is reflected, the yellow-white flush of iceblink brightens the cloying haze.
Seawater, too, exhibits a range of colors as a function of how much incident light is scattered and absorbed. The waters of the Southern Ocean are famously pure, adding little coloration through light scatter from contaminants. When the sun shines directly on open water, the sea appears a dull green-grey. When viewed in thin shadow, the sea seems darkly blue-grey. In deep shadow, with maximum absorption and minimum scatter, the sea is as black as tar. Thus, a composite scene of bergs, floes, and sea may be swallowed up into whitish obscurity when viewed in strong light and low fog; or reveal muted contrasts of shape and design when observed in a shadow zone; or starkly counterpoint black sea and white ice, bluish berg and turquoise streaks of open sky, when seen under a deep or fractured overcast.
The pack may be profusely populated with scenic objects. Small chunks of ice litter the sea like frozen foam. Sea ice floes endlessly change shape, color, and motions, both individually and collectively. Bergs, like prisms, may capture and refract light differently as they raft across the scene. No other ice terrane possesses so many kinds of ices or such a welter of ice masses of different dimensions. Even more, there is life. Penguins and seals adorn floes with color, shape, and movement. Sea ice biotas stain floes. The combinations are endless.
Seen from beneath, the translucent ice suffuses the interacting blue, white, and green light with a subfloe topography punctuated by spires and hummocks. The view is arresting, but too strongly filtered by the ice to hold interest for long. Viewed from above, the pack presents a wonderfully abstract geometry. Its pattern of ruptures and sutures makes an ice embroidery of floes. Their different ages, as they congeal or dissolve, make floes differentially translucent and colored. A melange of dark sea and white ice, of serpentine polynyas and rigid ice polygons, combines the genres of action painting, collage, and abstract expressionism. Where the pack is dense and snow-covered, the white of