sea-waters. Fast ice, in turn, helps shield the bergs from erosion.
But fast ice also erodes, and the resulting terrane represents a new outcome between the addition of new snows and ices and their subtraction. Open water seasonally erodes the sides and bottoms of the ice, winds and tides contribute to its mechanical disintegration, and winds ablate some surface snows. Solar heating melts other snows, particularly when they are contaminated with dark organic and abiotic debris. The uneven topography of the resulting ice surface leads to differential filling and emptying, an alternating relief of scourings and deposits. This asymmetric erosion is even more intense in the presence of dirty ice. By absorbing more radiation than pure ice does, dirty ice surfaces can erode into fantastic sculpturings, the most exotic shapes in Antarctica. Shore ice that is only seasonally fast breaks out in sudden surges.
In general more ice is formed than removed, and the special circumstances that favor the formation of fast ice also favor its preservation. Protected from ocean swells and chilled by a matrix of land ice—glaciers and bergs both—fast ice persists. It experiences some disintegration, some ablation and breakage. But new ice replaces the old; ices of different composition, origins, and structure combine into a unique amalgamation. Snow cover and frozen sea-slush are underlain by strata of congelation ice and veins of infiltration ice, which are in turn underlain by loosely consolidated frazil ice, congelation ice, anchor ice, and ice stalactites. In place of the annual ontogeny of growth and decay that characterizes individual floes in the open sea or the seasonal waxing and waning that accompany the life cycle of the pack, fast ice acquires an internal structure and a history.
This fragment of sea ice, now firmly fastened to the coast, is all that remains of the mighty pack. Part of an inner, less mobile perimeter, the spotty terrane of fast ice traces a new zone of cold mixing, one that mingles solids rather than fluids. The particle of fast ice thus has symbolic as well as geographic importance. It marks a ragged cryospheric boundary, the first one that is internal to The Ice. Elsewhere land ice is sloughed off into sea ice, to join the phylogeny of the pack. But here land ice replaces or metamorphoses sea ice, and sea ice is transformed into an approximation of land ice. Land replaces sea, land ice displaces sea ice, Ice supersedes Earth.
| 2 | No Middle WayThe Exploration of Antarctica |
Come, my friends,
Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1842)
The Pole lay in the center of a limitless
plain.… One gets there, and that is about
all there is for the telling. It is the effort to
get there that counts.
—Richard E. Byrd, Little America (1930)
This simplest of the world’s environments harbors the simplest of the world’s civilizations, one based almost exclusively on exploration. The pack ice and the veil of fog that perpetually shrouds the pack warded off human inquiry until renewed speculation about a tropical terra australis situated near the South Pole, a concept whose ancestry traces back to Greek geographers, inspired Great Britain to send Capt. James Cook to discover the facts. Antarctica thus began as an idea, and its discovery would be intimately connected to intellectuals and intellectual history. Its extraordinary isolation was not merely geophysical but metaphysical. The transition to Antarctic exploration demanded more than the power to overcome the energy gradients that surrounded The Ice: it demanded the capacity and the desire to overcome Antarctica’s information gradient. The penetration of Antarctica thus required not only the development of special ships and steam power or aircraft, but suitable syndromes of thought. Antarctic exploration would be deliberate, not accidental. “No one comes here casually,” observed J. Tuzo Wilson, presiding over the International Geophysical Year. “It is a continent of extremes and of contrasts where there is no middle way.”1
The Ice stripped civilization (and exploration) to its most elemental forms. Exploration often became a matter of simple survival. Antarctic outposts evolved into information colonies, importing energy and ideas and exporting raw data. Discovery proceeded inland without the alliances and associations of former epochs—without trade, conquest, missionizing, pilgrimage, travel; without a community of life from which explorers could derive sustenance and inspiration; without indigenous human societies which could supply guides, native technologies, companionship, and alternate moral universes. Discovery had a remote, abstract, surficial quality. Expeditions traveled to such intangible geographic sites as the pole of rotation, the geomagnetic pole, and the pole of inaccessibility, or sought against the stark Antarctic icescape to recapitulate such traditional exploration gestures as a circumnavigation of the seas or a cross-continental traverse. In some respects, Antarctica is best understood by what it is not, and Antarctic discovery is perhaps best revealed by the things it lacked. It is appropriate that Captain Cook—the exponent of negative discovery, as Daniel Boorstin describes him—should inaugurate the exploration of Antarctica by setting out to disprove its existence.2 In the end, explorers and the civilization that sent them did not discover The Ice so much as The Ice allowed them to discover themselves. The ineffable whiteness of the polar plateau became a vast, imperfect mirror that reflected back the character of the person and civilization that gazed upon it.
Not even the Arctic offered a comparable degree of alienness. During the great explosion of Renaissance exploration, the search for a Northwest Passage around the Americas and a Northeast Passage around the top of Europe led to a quick assessment of the Arctic. The density of its pack ice made maritime exploration impossible for any distance. But the circumpolar Arctic was occupied by native peoples, the technology existed by which to travel over the pack at least seasonally, and the lands themselves provided a ready point of access. Eventually European and American explorers learned to live off the pack and its shores, to exploit the drift of the pack—the Arctic gyre—to advantage. Although the Arctic pack decayed annually along its perimeter and its summer surface was almost impenetrable because of meltponds and pressure ridges, the pack retained its identity throughout the year. Arctic sea ice was a surrogate land surface. Antarctic sea ice was not. The Antarctic pack was a formidable barrier, and it defined the rhythms of Antarctic discovery.
Unlike the Arctic, too, there were no ecosystems or permanent human societies on the Antarctic ice terranes. Humans confronted an entirely physical universe one-to-one—without intervening biological communities or indigenous cultures. Much of what passed for discovery prior to Antarctica was in reality a process of translation from one culture to another. Native guides and native collectors, interpreters, and scholars who immersed themselves in the lore of other peoples were fundamental to the acquisition of geographic knowledge by Western civilization. Europe reworked these assorted systems of learning into a grand synthesis, much as it connected disparate maritime (and later land-based) civilizations into a world network. The success of Arctic explorers, for example, was predicated on adapting native technology to new purposes. Robert Peary, Fritjof Nansen, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson—these great Arctic explorers became in effect white Eskimos. None of this was possible on The Ice. Wally Herbert recorded the astonishment of a group of Greenland Eskimos who were shown a film about Antarctica:
What my audience in Greenland had seen of the Antarctic projected on the screen was as strange to them as the expression I had seen on their eyes…. They had seen only a cold desert, beautiful but barren. There was no vegetation there; no gnats, mosquitoes, mice or hares; no musk-oxen, reindeer, caribou or polar bears. It was a weird world they had seen in these pictures, desolate and pure—quite unlike their living, breathing, hunting territory.3
The isolation of Antarctica was almost total. The Ice was sui generis; it was solipsistic, self-reflexive. The other continents had been information sources; the