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Other histories lie in this terrain. In the three decades since that 1988 trip to Greenland, Farish, Chuck, and Bill have each passed away, and much of the snow and glacial ice we trudged through in those days is now lost to time or climate change. Back then I was a student learning to find fossils, to figure out how to live in the wild, and to discover that success needs to be measured in years rather than weeks. Veterans of polar work—pilots, research personnel, or support staff—speak of the ways the landscape becomes part of their blood, like the whalers in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Now having led my own expeditions to polar regions for several decades, the work has become a part of me too. And not only figuratively. As the saying goes, every wrinkle tells a story. Aching joints, scars, and weathered skin are records of encounters with ice, rock, and river crossings and tumbles too numerous to count. But the converse is also true: our lives become part of the landscape itself.

I departed on our 2002 expedition to Canada's Ellesmere Island a week after my infant son arrived for adoption. Our team was in the middle of what became a six-year hunt for fossil evidence of the earliest fish to walk on land and was at a critical phase. It was also one of the wettest field seasons in our experience—we sloshed through the mud around camp and geological outcrops for the entire time. The team returned home with only soiled gear and bruises that year. 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. Slow-growing tundra mosses, lichen, and wildflowers can be damaged by footsteps captured in dried mud for decades.

These fragile landscapes reveal our own vulnerabilities. Rapidly changing polar regions will increasingly affect lives across the entire globe. Seeing our connection to these places, and appreciating what we have learned from them, means coming to grips with the surprisingly complex material that makes the Arctic and Antarctica so special and important.

 

CHAPTER ONE

ICE IS HOT

Strapped to the netting inside an Air Force LC-130—a whale-shaped Cold War era propeller plane that is older than virtually all of its passengers—it is hard to escape the fact that working in Antarctica is 180 degrees different from working in the Arctic, both literally and figuratively. In 2018, our eleven-hour flight to McMurdo Station began in Christchurch, New Zealand, where we had spent two days receiving extreme-weather clothing and getting introduced to the U.S. Antarctic Program. I was one of thirty passengers, all of whom were wearing the program's iconic parka, known affectionately as Big Red. Big Red is a warm home away from home in the field, a giant blanket of a coat with enough pockets to lose small items for an entire field season. Now, Big Red was our survival gear in case the plane crash-landed on ice during the flight over the rough seas of the Southern Ocean.

Donning earplugs to deaden the propeller noise, sitting at a distance from my neighbors because of Big Red's girth, it was nearly impossible to hold a conversation. I gleaned from shouts that my colleagues on the flight included ice drillers, fire-safety personnel, and research scientists. Working in the Arctic, something that felt so extreme in the early days, now seemed like a quaint family camping trip. Antarctic fossil hunting would be more akin to a military operation.

As we deplaned the LC-130, the hatch felt like a portal to a new existence: from the dark confines of the belly of the plane we emerged into a cold, dry, and searingly bright world. Southern polar rookies like me savored our first lungfuls of Antarctic air and wandered around the ice landing strip relishing new vistas while the staff tried to herd us into the transport to the base. Slipping on the hard-packed ice, I soon realized I would need to learn new ways of walking, living, and working in this environment. I'd spent my career thus far primed to look at rocks for fossils. But in Antarctica, there was a new factor to consider in the field. The southern polar region rises thousands of feet above sea level. Antarctica is a continent and does not have relatively warm ocean waters penetrating its interior the way much of the Arctic does. Consequently, Antarctica is colder, windier, and drier—and most important, icier—than the Arctic. The U.S. Antarctic Program calls the time in Antarctica being "on the ice" when on base or in the field. Whether preparing at home, training at the station, or sleeping in a tent in the field, Antarctic work is defined by a relationship with ice.

Humanity's experience with glacial ice, both on mountaintops and at the poles, is a story of adventure, tragedy, and scientific observation. For most of us, familiarity with ice derives from encountering patches or pieces of it—skating rinks in winter and cubes in summer drinks. These experiences can hardly prepare you for the workings of ice the size of small towns or even entire continents.