Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future

by Neil Shubin

Six years later, after finding that fossil fish with arms (known as Tiktaalik roseae), we returned to the 2002 site for another look in better weather. During one traverse, I happened upon my old footsteps locked in the dried mud. With my son now in first grade, I stood before those six-year-old prints made by the earlier me, the one who walked here cold, wet, and questioning his judgment. By capturing that fleeting moment in time, the prints embody the frailty of the place.

Polar ice can take almost infinite shapes as it crystallizes, moves, and melts. The area around McMurdo Station exhibits this diverse world of ice in microcosm. The mountain ranges near McMurdo look like a dessert that would have pleased Rendu; the ice covers the mountains like a pure white syrup, filling canyons and valleys as it flows. Elsewhere ice looks like glass that has shattered into shards, strips, or chunks ranging in size from a small car to an entire skyscraper. The nearby sea is covered by ice that looks like a layer of foam at one time of year, a quilt of polygons at another, and a folded blanket at still another. Part of the awe of seeing a polar vista comes from imagining how a chemical formula as simple as H2O can underlie worlds of shape and movement that are almost magical in their variety.

Each year the woolly bear stores ever more energy, until the summer it has accumulated enough resources to transform into a moth. The moth flies for two weeks, finds a mate, expends its accumulated energy stores, and dies. Nearly a decade of freezing and thawing, feeding, and basking, all the while avoiding predators, is all in the service of two weeks of flying and mating.

Musk oxen look, as the name implies, like large bovine creatures with a coat of hair that extends almost to the ground. In reality, their closest relatives are not oxen, but goats. Shave a musk ox and you see a naked goat with shorter legs and broader horns.

Expeditions working both in Antarctica and the Arctic have had to deal with crews who became unhinged. One Argentine crew member burned down his Antarctic base after learning he had to overwinter there. And one Russian stabbed his Antarctic colleague for spoiling the endings of books.

Polar ice caps have only been a feature of our planet for roughly 10 percent of its existence. Our perception of what is geographically “normal” is skewed by the fact that the entire history of our species happened during a special time on planet Earth—one with ice at both poles. For most of Earth’s history, despite relatively short and occasionally dramatic episodes of freezing, Earth had Open Polar Seas.

He seemed more of a lone wolf than an expedition member or leader. He shot and killed a colleague on one of his early expeditions over a disagreement about working with Inuit. From that tragedy he went on to lead one of the greatest expeditionary debacles of all time. Funded by the U.S. Congress in 1871 to attain the North Pole, his trip devolved into misadventure and ultimately near warfare among different factions of his crew.