A World Without Ice

A clear-eyed explanation of the impact of ice on Earth, its climate, and its residents.  

Much has been written about global warming, but the crucial relationship between people and ice has received little focus, until now – and there is a fierce urgency as the problem accelerates. With clarity and insight, geophysicist and a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, Henry Pollack, paints a compelling portrait of the delicate geological balance between Earth and its ice, and shows why the current rapid loss of ice portends serious consequences in our not-so-distant future.
 
Whether sculpting mountains, regulating temperatures, influencing ocean currents, or defining the limits of human settlement, ice has shaped – and continues to shape – the world we live in. This important and increasingly relevant book traces the effect of mountain glaciers on supplies of drinking water and agricultural irrigation, as well as the current results of melting permafrost and shrinking Arctic sea ice – a situation that has degraded the habitat of numerous animals and sparked an international race for seabed oil and minerals. Catastrophic possibilities loom, including rising sea levels and subsequent flooding of low-lying regions worldwide.
 
A World Without Ice explains why ice matters, and lays out the urgent actions we can take to restore Earth’s delicate climate balance."In a world where everything frozen is now melting, we should barely need a book to get our attention. But clearly we do, and this is the book-a thorough reminder of what it means to live in a planet with poles and glaciers, and what it will be like without them."
-Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and author of the national bestseller Deep Economy

"Skiers rejoice when snow falls and Inuit hunters welcome sea ice, while commuters find winter storms an inconvenience. Henry Pollack has a much broader view. Speaking eloquently, forcefully, yet lyrically, he explains how snow and ice are the clockworks of our planet. A World Without Ice is a fascinating, scary, but informative portrait of Earth's delicate climate balance and the thresholds we are staring across."
-Jon Turk, author of The Raven's Gift

"The work of Dr. Pollack and the IPCC in bringing attention to the very serious dangers posed by climate change has been justly praised. This book shows how essential ice-caps and glaciers are. It is a welcome contribution to planetary conservation."
-Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and author of The Challenge For Africa

"A World Without Ice is part a history of ice on Earth, part a scientist's love song to his subject, and part an unsentimental eulogy to ice...The book offers a great opportunity for the novice to dip into climate science first-hand."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"Seldom has a scientist written so well and so clearly for the lay reader. Pollack's explanations of how researchers can tell that the climate is warming faster than normal are free of the usual scientific jargon and understandable."
-Betty Galbraith, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman; Library Journal, starred review

"Pollack, a geophysicist with the admirable ability to communicate in a language other than math, presents the stark facts of today's [climate] situation and offers careful descriptions of the likelihood of a frightening future, should earth's climate continue to change. . . . But he also offers some realistic hope that catastrophes may be mitigated, if not avoided."
-Patricia Monaghan, Booklist, starred reviewHenry Pollack, PhD, and his colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Core. Pollack has been a professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan for more than forty years and now serves as a science adviser to Al Gore's Climate Project training programs. Also the author of Uncertain Science…Uncertain World, he lives in Ann Arbor.CHAPTER 1
DISCOVERING ICE

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

In late May of 1768, Lieutenant James Cook, a young officer in theRoyal Navy of King George III of England, received an unusual assignmentfrom the British Admiralty. He was to sail to the South Pacific onHMS Endeavour to make astronomical observations of the planet Venusas it passed directly between the Sun and Earth, an orbital event thatwould take place in early June of the following year. Such a passage,known as a transit of Venus, eclipses a very small circular area on theface of the Sun that appears like a shadow moving across the solar disk.This astronomical phenomenon offered a method of estimating the distancebetween the Sun and Earth, by simultaneous observations of themoving dark spot from different points on Earth. Cook was to make his observations on the island of Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean, on the oppositeside of the globe from England. The ostensible motivation for thisundertaking lay in the suggestion that an accurate determination of theEarth- Sun distance was important for reliable navigation at sea.The complexities of the motions of Earth and Venus about the Sunmake transits relatively rare events, coming in pairs separated by eightyears, but with more than a century separating one pair from the next.After the 1761/1769 pair, the next chances to observe a transit would comein 1874/1882 and 2004/2012. Cook had been selected for this scientificundertaking because of his skills in surveying and charting, honed a decadeearlier on the St. Lawrence River, during the Seven Years’ War betweenBritain and France for control of the territory that would become Canada.Endeavour was a small ship, just a little longer than a modern railwaycoach, but home to eighty- five seamen and another dozen officers andaccompanying naturalists, plus their equipment, water, provisions, andgrog. The voyage from England to Tahiti followed a route south throughthe Atlantic, around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, and thencewest into the Pacific to Tahiti. The full journey totaled roughly twelvethousand miles, equivalent to about half the distance around the globe.Under sail it took almost exactly eight months to reach Tahiti, includingprovisioning stops in Madeira and Rio de Janeiro, and some specimencollecting in Tierra del Fuego.

Cook was meticulous about the health of his crew, as the scourge ofscurvy was already well known on long voyages. He knew that diet wasimportant to health, and he carried an ample supply of sauerkraut to wardoff scurvy. The crew, had they known of it, would have lobbied hard forthe anti- scorbutant that Dutch sailors preferred: white wine. It is not clearwhether Cook was aware of the prophylactic powers of wine, but he clearlyknew the perils of having alcohol- incapacitated seamen. Christmas Dayof 1768, celebrated off the coast of Patagonia, was marked not by religiousservices, but by a crew pursuing total inebriation. One of the naturalistsremarked that they were lucky the Christmas winds were light.

Endeavour arrived in Tahiti in mid- April of 1769, in ample time toprepare for the astronomical observations. Cook selected a place to conductthe measurements— on a sandy beach not far from the present- daycity of Papeete. He called the place Point Venus. When I visited Papeetea few years ago I was keen to see this famous scientific spot, but I worriedthat in the more than two centuries since Cook was there, the placemight have lapsed into nothingness. I asked a taxi driver if he had everheard of Point Venus. Yes, he replied, he knew it well. Skeptical that itwould be so easy to find this historic place, I queried him further. Yes,yes, he knew the spot. So I asked him to take me there, and fifteen minuteslater we arrived. It was Point Venus all right— but today well knownas a popular nudist beach! Incidentally, there is also a small monumentto Captain Cook’s 1769 visit.

WHILE THE TRANSIT of Venus was the announced scientificrationale for this voyage, Cook’s sailing orders from the Admiraltyhad another component, designated as secret and not to beopened by Cook until he was at sea. These orders addressed Endeavour’sassignment after the astronomical observations had been completed.They revealed that Cook was to search for Terra Australis Incognita, ahypothetical southern continent that had supposedly been dimly sightedin high southern latitudes by earlier mariners.The notion of a southern continent had been promoted through philosophicaland aesthetic arguments by Aristotle and later Ptolemy twomillennia before the Age of Exploration. They believed that symmetryand balance were inherent characteristics of the natural world, and thatEarth, as a natural object, must surely display these qualities. Such beliefsrequired the existence of landmasses in the Southern Hemisphere to balancethe extensive landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere.Not long after the transit was over— only six hours after it began—Cook took Endeavour southward in search of a southern continent.

Sailing south in the peak of the Southern Hemisphere winter quicklyled to cold encounters with widespread sea ice, and it did not take longfor Cook to realize that it was not the right season for a course into highlatitudes. In September he headed west and encountered today’s NewZealand. He proceeded to circumnavigate and chart the coastlines ofboth the North and South Islands, demonstrating that they were not alarge southern continent, as had been surmised by earlier explorers. Thereturn to England was by way of Australia, where Endeavour narrowlyavoided disaster on the Great Barrier Reef, then onward to the EastIndies, where several crew contracted malaria, and around Africa to theAtlantic, before heading north on the last long leg home. In the Atlantiche encountered some American whalers, and stopped to get news of thelast three years— he learned that Europe was, for a change, at peace.Cook arrived in England in the summer of 1771, with no sighting ofTerra Australis Incognita to report.

The return of Endeavour was celebrated and acclaimed widely, butthe focus was not on Cook, the modest master of the vessel. In thelimelight was the young patrician naturalist Joseph Banks, well versed inmanipulating the press to his advantage. Within just a few weeks, Bankshad worked up a frenzy of public adulation in the press that culminatedin his announcement that there would soon be a second voyage of explorationand scientific discovery, under his leadership. Incidentally, Bankswould insist that Cook undertake the maritime duties, and there waslittle Cook could do to decline. Within a month of his returning homeafter an absence of three years, Cook was already planning the next sailing.His wife, Elizabeth, was not too pleased.

In 1772, by then promoted to captain, the rank by which he is bestremembered, Cook sailed again for the Southern Ocean aboard a newship, HMS Resolution, once again in search of Terra Australis Incognita.On this voyage he headed toward the Pacific by turning east aroundAfrica into the Indian Ocean, and pushing to ever higher southern latitudesas ice conditions would permit. In 1773 he crossed the Antarctic Circle1 three times, at longitudes 40º east, 140º west, and 105º west;each time he encountered impenetrable ice, and came away withoutsighting a southern continent.

His eastward course across the South Pacific, never far from the ice,brought him to the southern tip of South America just as 1774 ended.Early in the new year, he sailed eastward into the South Atlantic, anddiscovered South Georgia Island, a banana- shaped glacier- striped islandthat, at first sighting, he thought might be the long- sought southern continent.But when the distal tip of the banana came into view, he knew itwas just an island. He named it Isle of Georgia, in honor of King GeorgeIII. Continuing eastward, Cook reached the cape of southern Africa,intersecting his path around Africa three years earlier. He had now circumnavigatedthe globe in the southern high latitudes, seldom very farfrom the edge of the ice. Cook noted in his journal2:

I had now made the circuit of the Southern Ocean in a high latitudeand traversed in such manner as to leave not the least room for thepossibility of there being a continent, unless near the pole and out ofreach of navigation. . . . The greatest part of this Southern Continent(supposing there is one) must lie within the Polar Circle where the seais so pestered with ice that the land is thereby inaccessible. . . . I can bebold to say that no man will ever venture farther than I have done, andthat the lands which may lie to the south will never be explored. Thickfogs, snowstorms, intense cold and every other thing that can rendernavigation dangerous one has to encounter, and these difficulties are greatly heightened by the inexpressible horrid aspect of . . . a countrydoomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays, butto lie for ever buried under everlasting snow and ice.

Cook had clearly disproved the hemispheric “balance” of landmassespostulated by Aristotle, but he demonstrated symmetry of a different type,symmetry not of land but of ice. He had shown that there was a dauntingice barrier in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, similar to thatencountered in the Arctic. His predictions about the inaccessibility of thepolar latitudes in the South, however, did not stand. In the early nineteenthcentury several sailing ships did indeed sight the Antarctic continent.In 1838, just a little more than a half century after the founding of thenation, the United States sent an expedition to the South Pacific and Antarctic,formally called the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–43,but colloquially known as the “U.S. Ex Ex.” The expedition was commandedby Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, a naval officer, but was well staffed with scientists,the best known of which was the noted biologist and geologist JamesDwight Dana. In early 1840 the expedition reached the icy barrier along thecoast of Antarctica just at the Antarctic Circle, two thousand miles south ofAustralia. Wilkes traced the coastline for more than fifteen hundred miles,equivalent to the distance from Boston to Miami. Proof that this extensiveterrain was indeed a continent would come later, but clearly the U.S. Ex Exhad encountered a big and continuous landmass.

THE SEVENTH CONTINENT

The symmetry of ice in both the northern and southern high latitudessometimes conveys a false impression that Earth’s polar regions arereally quite similar. The presence of ice, however, actually masks morefundamental differences between the north and south polar regions.The Arctic and Antarctic have been described as being “poles apart,” of course geographically, but also in many other characteristics. The SouthPole lies well within the continent of Antarctica, some 850 miles inlandfrom, and 10,000 feet above, the nearest coastline. The North Pole, bycontrast, is located in the Arctic Ocean, with the seafloor 14,000 feetbelow and the closest coast some 450 miles away. Both poles are set inice, but the thickness of the ice is very different. Beneath the South Polelies more than 10,000 feet of ice, whereas the North Pole sits on a thin10- to 20- foot sheet of frozen ocean water, give or take a few feet. Theice in both settings is on the move, but at very different speeds— at theSouth Pole the ice slips slowly over the pole at a glacial pace of about 30to 40 feet per year, whereas the sea ice of the Arctic is swept along bywind and currents at an average speed of about 3 to 4 miles per day.

Size- wise, Antarctica is a typical continent— smaller than Asia,Africa, North America, and South America, but larger than Europe andAustralia. And it shares many geological characteristics with the othercontinents. The large- scale architecture of all continents is similar tothat of icebergs— continents are composed of rocks, such as granite,that are less dense than the rocks that make up the floors of the surroundingocean basins. Just as ice floats in water, with some ice abovebut most below the water’s surface, continental rocks “float” in rocksof greater density, and stand a bit higher than the rocks in which theyare immersed. The average elevation of the continental surface is somethree miles above the ocean floor, but the low- density rocks of the continentsextend more than twenty miles into the Earth, a continental “root”not unlike the submerged portion of an iceberg in the ocean.

As in the other continents, the Antarctic rocks show the telltale characteristicsof a long and complex geologic history— a wide range of ages,from ancient Precambrian crystalline rocks to very young unconsolidatedglacial deposits. The rock types include the common rock categories—igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic— and in typical proportions.The Antarctic continent has mountain ranges such as the Antarctic Peninsula,which is really just an extension of the Andes of South America, and the Transantarctic Mountains, which snake across the continentfrom the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. Antarctica almost certainly has itsshare of mineral deposits, although none is exploitable, at least for now,because of the extreme environment. Antarctica is, however, unique inone important characteristic— its location astride the South Pole. Virtuallyall of Antarctica lies within the Antarctic Circle, and more than threequarters of its area lies at latitudes greater than 70º south.

How and when did Antarctica come to the South Pole? One mightbe tempted to ask, “Hasn’t it always been there?” but there is ample geologicevidence to indicate that it has not. Sedimentary rocks of Mesozoicage along the Antarctic Peninsula show beautiful fossilized tropicalferns, and Paleozoic- age coal seams in the Transantarctic Mountainsreveal well- preserved low- latitude vegetation. No, Antarctica was notalways at the South Pole— it came there from somewhere else, and fairlyrecently, geologically speaking.

At the beginning of the Jurassic period, some two hundred millionyears ago, the terrain that was to become Antarctica was part of asuper- continental assemblage called Gondwanaland, an enormous landmassthat also comprised the eventual continents of South America,Africa, and Australia, as well as smaller fragments including Madagascar,New Zealand, and India. Gondwanaland itself had been assembledonly one hundred million years earlier, during the closing stages of thePaleozoic era. Following its assembly from predecessor continental terrainsfrom around the globe, this composite landmass received depositsof a unique and remarkably widespread sequence of rock formations,and saw the evolution of a cosmopolitan fauna and flora. Geologists andpaleontologists eventually recognized this rock sequence with its containedfossils as the Gondwanaland signature— the key to recognizingthe full extent of Gondwanaland.

About 170 million years ago, the forces of plate tectonics began todismember Gondwanaland and disperse the pieces. Just as sea ice glidesslowly over the surface of the high- latitude oceans, so also do large segments of Earth’s rocky outer shell drift slowly over the globe, mobilizedby forces from within the planetary interior.

The continental dispersal created a new geography in the SouthernHemisphere. Within Gondwanaland, Antarctica was originally situated atabout 40º south, and governed by a temperate climate very similar to thatcharacteristic of the continental United States today— neither polar nortropical. Widespread forests and marshes of the time were eventually compressedinto the coal beds found today in the Transantarctic Mountains.

The separation of Antarctica, Madagascar, India, and Australia fromAfrica, and from one another, created a gap that became the modern IndianOcean. A little later, the departure of South America from Africa createdthe South Atlantic Ocean. India went its separate way northward acrossthe equator, eventually to collide with southern Asia to create the Himalayamountain range. Australia and Antarctica were carried southward.The defining tectonic events for Antarctica, the events that make itunique, came around thirty to forty million years ago. Australia parted companywith Antarctica and headed north, leaving Antarctica to enjoy the polealone. And as Antarctica slipped farther south, the Andean link betweenSouth America and the Antarctic Peninsula was stretched and then broken,opening a six- hundred- mile- wide oceanic chute known today as theDrake Passage. Antarctica was then totally surrounded by the SouthernOcean, a ring of water around the globe at 60º south. The prevailing windat that latitude blows from west to east, and it sets up an ocean current, theAntarctic Circumpolar Current, that circles Antarctica relentlessly.

THE ISOLATION OF ANTARCTICA

The climatological impact of the west- to- east circumpolar current hasbeen profound. With virtually no flow in a north–south direction, the currentinhibits mixing of the cold Southern Ocean with warmer waters ofthe Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. Unlike the Arctic region, which receives tropical warmth via the northward- flowing Gulf Stream of theAtlantic Ocean, the Antarctic is climatologically isolated by this circulatorygirdle. In the Arctic, the port of Murmansk, in Russia, remainsice- free throughout the year, even though it is located well north of theArctic Circle. By contrast, in the Antarctic there is not a single placesouth of the Antarctic Circle that is free of winter sea ice.

There are many definitions for the boundary of Antarctica. The continentalcoast defines the geographic boundary, the margin of the Antarctictectonic plate delimits the geological boundary, and the 60º parallelof south latitude marks the political boundary governed by the AntarcticTreaty. But the climatological boundary, the boundary that makes Antarcticaunique, is defined by the abrupt north- to- south transition fromwarmer temperate- zone water to frigid polar water within the AntarcticCircumpolar Current. It is not unlike the “marriage of the waters” inBrazil, at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon. There thedark water of the Rio Negro flows side by side with the tan, muddywaters of the Amazon, but after a few miles of getting acquainted, theymix together and become one. In the Antarctic, however, the windsand currents maintain the large temperature differences, and preventa mixing of the waters. They flow side by side in a courtship neverconsummated— a marriage (surely not the first) thwarted by frigidity.This climatologic boundary is known as the Antarctic Convergence.

The crossing of the Convergence is marked by a drop in the temperatureof the seawater of nearly ten Fahrenheit degrees, and the air temperaturechills accordingly. Fog is an occasional visible marker, and theappearance of icebergs, first a few and later many, raises the navigationalante as ships penetrate farther south. The radar on a ship’s bridge slowlybecomes speckled with reflections from the bits and pieces of ice. Soonthereafter, large floating “islands” of ice appear. The continent is not yetvisible, but it is very clear that you have arrived in the Antarctic.

When you finally reach the continent, your feelings are overtaken bythe pristineness and simplicity of the landscape. Mountains rise from the sea, draped entirely in white. Large serpentine glaciers a mile acrosswind through the landscape, apparently static, but in reality slitheringslowly downward from the heights— giant conveyor belts delivering hugeblocks of ice to the sea. The seas surrounding the continent are cloggedwith titanic icebergs, of extraordinary size and architecture. The vistais powerful, yet quietly serene. Aboard Nimrod in early 1908, ErnestShackleton described his arrival:

As far as the eye could see . . . the great white wall- sided bergsstretched east, west, and south, making a striking contrast with lanesof blue- black water between them. A stillness, weird and uncanny,seemed to have fallen upon everything when we entered the silentwater streets of this vast unpeopled white city.3

The landscape is vast but also deceptive— it is without most of thevisual cues that attach scale, distance, and dimension to the naturalworld elsewhere. Indeed, the simplicity emerges from what the landscapeis free of. There are no people; no buildings or constructioncranes; no telephone poles or microwave towers; no roads, cars, trucks,or snowplows; no cultivated fields or irrigation circles; no airplanes overhead;no billboards, junkyards, or trash mounds. And the natural worldis also limited— no bushes, hedges, trees, or forests; no tulips, sunflowers,lupines, or forsythia; and no wolves, deer, moose, or caribou.

The aural “landscape” is also very different. There are no industrialsounds; no deep rumble of diesel engines; no hissing, humming, whining,or thumping; no blaring music; no honking horns or sirens. The ubiquitoussounds of the Antarctic are those of wind, water, and ice. Winds whistleat fifty, sixty miles an hour, and waves crash with great thuds on beachesof volcanic rock, or against rocky or icy cliffs. Glaciers creak and crack asthey inch their way through rocky valleys. And superposed on the inanimate sounds are those of the wildlife— whales spouting, seals belching, penguinscalling. Petrels, gulls, and albatross ride the wind in almost total silence.This is truly “the world without us,”4 a frozen part of the Garden of Edenthat has been off limits to us for most of human history.

The colors of the Antarctic are unlike colors elsewhere. Whereas greenis the signature color of well- watered vegetation everywhere, and reds,yellows, and tans paint Earth’s deserts, Antarctica specializes in black,white, and blue. The rock is mostly black and the snow white. Glacial iceis white at the surface, but deep brilliant blue where crevasses and fissuresreveal the interior. On a cloudy day, the deep sea is dark, and whenthe Sun shines brightly, the ocean appears a very deep blue. In brilliantsunshine the sky is a perfect sky blue, and when clouded over, it is a blanksheet of low- hanging gray. In deep fog a three- dimensional gray shroudsettles in, completely disrupting one’s sense of orientation and distance.

The Sun in the Antarctic summer is never far above or far below thehorizon— it simply rides around the horizon, offering an ever- changingazimuth of illumination that casts pink hues and slowly changing longshadows that sweep across the landscape. The polar circle cuts throughthe Antarctic Peninsula about halfway through its lineal extent. Southof the circle are long stretches of summer, when the Sun never sets, andnorth of that line the Sun dips just below the horizon for an hour or two,creating a very long “sunset” of delicate pinks, before returning to viewand offering direct illumination once again.

Wind is erratic. A transition from total calm to gale- force winds can occurunexpectedly, the result of very cold and dense air suddenly spilling off highlandsand roaring through valleys. These winds, called katabatic winds, arethe atmospheric equivalent of a flash flood. They come without announcement,bluster through with abandon, and are gone within minutes. Theycan drive inattentive ships into rocks and flatten humans caught unaware.

But nothing quite matches the special experience of getting up closeand personal with big icebergs. Conveying the scale of bergs requiresreference to something you can envision, so let’s start with a ship of thetype that has brought me to the Antarctic several times— an ocean goingvessel more than four hundred feet long and almost one hundred feethigh. When such a ship positions itself in the lee of a middling iceberg,the vessel is dwarfed, silhouetted against a floating ice island that easilyexceeds the ship in both length and height. The ship becomes a miniature,not in a bottle, but in a vast field of icebergs. A ship that would filla football stadium does not quite measure up.

Icebergs generally come either from a glacier discharging great chunksof ice into the sea, or from the margins of a floating ice shelf. The distinctionis artificial, however, because the ice shelves themselves are fedby glaciers. But the shelves tend to lose the irregularity of the glacial icethat feeds them, eventually to exhibit a flat upper surface like a tabletop.When a shelf launches an iceberg through breakup or break- off, the bergretains the flat top (at least for a while), and accordingly is identified as atabular berg. The chunks that calve from the snout of a valley glacier aremuch more irregular, depending on the extent of crevassing that developsin the glacier as it creeps through its valley toward the sea.

Once an iceberg is in the sea, wind and water take over its destiny.Afloat, a berg will bob up and down like a giant cork, rising, falling,swaying, and tilting in slow motion. Sometimes a floating berg will breakin two, and for a few minutes each offspring berg will slowly rock androll in the sea, seeking a new equilibrium that places its center of gravityin a stable position below the surface. Sometimes this process leads toa complete overturning that brings the formerly submerged portion ofthe berg to the surface. If a berg is blown into shallower water, it mayrun aground and await a high tide for relaunching. Or it may sit there foryears, slowly being diminished by the pounding of waves. Wave erosioncreates a “waterline,” where the ice and the sea surface meet; some bergsdisplay many waterlines at different elevations and intersecting angles, telling a history of grounding and refloating, and of re- equilibration followinga breakup.

The sculpting of icebergs by the elements has always fascinatedobservers, and opened their imaginations to interpreting the myriadshapes. Icebergs are to the polar imagination what cloud forms are topeople elsewhere. Frank Worsley, the captain of Sir Ernest Shackleton’sship Endurance, offered this description of a field of Antarctic icebergs:

Great fragments and hummocks of very old floes, worn, brokendown, and melted into all sorts of grotesque and wondrous shapes,were heaving, bowing, curtseying, and jostling on the long westerlyswell. . . . Castles, towers, and churches swayed unsteadily aroundus. Small pieces gathered and rattled against the boat. Swans ofweird shape pecked at our planks, a gondola steered by a giraffe ranfoul of us, which amused a duck sitting on a crocodile’s head. Justthen a bear, leaning over the top of a mosque, nearly clawed our sail.An elephant, about to spring from a Swiss chalet on to a battleship’sdeck, took no notice at all; but a hyena, pulling a lion’s teeth, laughedso much that he fell into the sea, whereupon a sea boot and threereal penguins sailed lazily through a lovely archway to see what wasto do, by the shores of a floe littered with the ruins of a beautifulwhite city and surrounded by huge mushrooms with thick stalks. Allthe strange, fantastic shapes rose and fell in stately cadence, with arustling, whispering sound and hollow echoes to the thudding seas,clear green at the water line, shading to a deep dark blue far below,all snowy purity and cool blue shadows above.5

WHAT LURED PEOPLE into the polar ice? Fame, glory, adventure, andcareer advancement were important motivations for explorers and naval officers, but fortune, territory, and geopolitical power were what thecommercial and national sponsors of exploring expeditions generallyhoped for. By early in the twentieth century all the land surroundingthe Arctic Ocean was politically attached to either Russia, the UnitedStates,