Category:

PROLOGUE

Hunched inside a small propeller plane with my knees pressed against a pallet of tents, food, and fossil-collecting gear, I felt I could almost touch the icebergs below as the coast of Greenland emerged in the distance. It was July of 1988, and I was the lone student—a novice in camping and fieldwork—teamed up with three veteran field paleontologists on a hunt for early dinosaurs in East Greenland. Our plane began the flight at a massive airstrip at a naval air station outside of Reykjavík, where it was dwarfed by aircraft taking off to monitor Soviet submarine activity in the area. Designed to land on unpaved landing strips or patches of tundra in remote Arctic valleys, the plane flew so slowly that I feared it might fall out of the sky.

Once over our Greenlandic target, the pilot was hard at work looking for a safe landing spot amid tundra and rock. He banked the plane in a valley bordered by ice-capped red and green mesas and buttes, hunting for a 1,500-foot-long area free of rocks where he could set down. As the plane made steep turns, the cliffs ahead filled the windshield. Seeing our pilot's mane of gray hair brought a strange sense of comfort as I clung to both my seat and the adage "There are old bush pilots and there are bold ones." After three or four passes, he performed mock landings by touching tires to tundra to test the stability of the ground. Mud, large hummocks of tundra, and boulders are the bane of bush landings in the Arctic. Eventually satisfied with his choice, he brought us to the ground, with bumps and shimmies that shook items loose around the cabin.

The pilot had to depart quickly because of the threat of bad weather on his return, so we unloaded our gear in an impromptu bucket brigade. I was already covered with mud while our pilot, who did more than his fair share of lugging, stood pressed and clean. The roar of the plane on his departure marked the beginning of our new life for the next six weeks. Rocks, ice, and polar wildlife—along with the research we were there to do—were now our entire world.

Science in the polar regions means confronting emotional, physical, and logistic challenges in order to ask fundamental questions about the past, present, and future of life and our planet. Since I've proceeded from that rookie experience in Greenland to lead my own expeditions in the Arctic and Antarctica over the past three decades, my original trepidation has been replaced with gratitude for the privilege of working in some of the most extraordinary landscapes on Earth. How many times can you work in places that few, if any, humans have ever encountered before? And to do that exploration in the service of understanding the fundamentals of our world and the ways it came to be?

For European cultures, polar science began as a nationalistic enterprise, driven by attempts to achieve or exploit the points farthest north or south. The race for the poles, or for the discovery of a Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, pitted nations against one another in often tragic attempts to be the first to arrive at a certain destination on the globe. Scientific discoveries emerged as teams mapped these regions and studied the natural history, peoples, and climate of the new terrain. Despite competition, much of our current scientific understanding of polar regions ultimately arose from international collaborations that were unique in their breadth and altruism.

Starting in 1870, scientists declared occasional "International Polar Years," when researchers from different countries would form collaborations on geological and meteorological studies at the poles. During the International Polar Year of 1957-1958, scientists used modified rock-drilling equipment to core into the ice of Greenland and Antarctica. This effort brought the leaders of many different countries to the bargaining table, where they went on to craft an extraordinarily broad and forward-thinking international agreement. Stating that the sole purpose of any nation's use of Antarctica is for scientific discovery alone, the Antarctic Treaty was signed by twelve nations in 1959. The entire continent became a domain for scientific research rather than a reserve for individual countries or their militaries. Such an agreement was impossible for the Arctic, because unlike Antarctica, much of its territory was already claimed by different nations. While nations and private entities inevitably jockey with one another over Antarctic resources and territory—and try to game the treaty for their own interests—nobody could have predicted the impact of the scientific discoveries that would ultimately emerge.

In this book, polar science will be our lens to see the natural world and the extraordinary ways we have come to know it. We will see how work in the Arctic and Antarctica reveals profound connections among oceans, climate, and all living beings—a delicate network that will shape the coming centuries on our planet. Ice has come and gone for billions of years and, in the process, has sculpted our world and paved the way for the origin of our species. Changes to the poles reveal how topography, climate, and life can change dramatically, often in the blink of an eye in geological time. AnchorHere, the astonishing adaptations of living creatures to extreme conditions reveal how life may have arisen and how it responds to extreme climates. And inside the ice, meteorites that fell millennia ago reveal glimmers of the earliest moments of our solar system.