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expectations to – enfold their expert interpretations in broader stories about Antarctic climate change. How does the translation of expert knowledge fare in near real-time environmental events? In this case, the ice spoke, but slowly, relative to Larsen B's timeline – a meandering, obfuscated sign of environmental change. Nonetheless, the physical, material event of ice calving off of Antarctica has a resonant power unmatched by climate projections more removed from the tangible, earthly register. The eventization of ice happenings is an emerging
This article considers a unified polar Gothic as a way of examining texts set in Arctic and Antarctic space. Through analysis of Coleridge‘s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelleys Frankenstein, and Poe‘s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , the author creates a framework for understanding polar Gothic, which includes liminal space, the supernatural, the Gothic sublime, ghosts and apparitions, and imperial Gothic anxieties about the degradation of civilisation. Analysing Verne‘s scientific-adventure novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) with this framework, the author contextualises the continued public interest in the lost Franklin expedition and reflects on nineteenth-century polar Gothic anxieties in the present day. Polar space creates an uncanny potential for seeing ones own self and examining what lies beneath the surface of ones own rational mind.
encouraged late-capitalism to move beyond the South’s enclaves and the special economic zones established during the 1980s as part of the North’s deindustrialisation ( Amsden, 1990 ). Private finance is investing in what are called infrastructural ‘mega-corridors’ ( Hildyard and Sol, 2017 ). With China’s Belt and Road Initiative just one example, this is a huge near-global expansion. Except Antarctica, no region is excluded with continental – even transcontinental – infrastructure plans in existence that seek to reappropriate the biosphere
With no Indigenous inhabitants, since its discovery by people from elsewhere, Antarctica has been deemed a space ready to be claimed and to have history written upon it. As Elizabeth Leane argues, ‘Antarctica’s meaning for humans lies in the stories we tell about it’. 1 Antarctica is a place 10,034 kilometres away from New Zealand that few nationals
12 Treaty obligations: science and art in Antarctica Mike Pearson I have never been anywhere which is so obviously not made of words, not made out of human perceptions and understandings. It’s itself. It stands apart from human culture. It overshadows human culture and there is something transporting and rather good for us in getting to a place so different. A place which we really cannot plausibly claim is just a subdivision of our own concerns. (Spufford 2011) Antarctica It is a continent of 14 million square kilometres. It is the coldest, driest, windiest
This book offers a nuanced and detailed examination of Russia’s international activity. In broad terms, the book contributes to two of the most important current debates about contemporary Russian actions: whether Moscow is acting strategically or opportunistically, and whether this should be understood in regional or global terms. The book goes against the majority opinions on both questions, and introduces contributions in a number of under-researched themes. It argues that Moscow is not acting in a simply ad hoc, reactive way, but in a consistently strategic manner, and that this is best understood not by analysing Russia’s return to specific regions, but in a more holistic way with a global horizon, linking activity across different regions. This means that the Russian challenge is likely to continue rather than fade away.
The book addresses core themes of Russian activity – military, energy, and economic. But it offers an unusual multi-disciplinary analysis to these themes, incorporating both regional and thematic specialist expertise. Underpinned by detailed analyses of the revolution in Russian geospatial capabilities and the establishment of a strategic planning foundation, the book includes chapters on military and maritime strategies, energy security, and economic diversification and influence. This serves to highlight the connections between military and economic interests that shape and drive Russian strategy.
, careful to evade the current’s grip. The sharp temperature change awakens our skin. The river’s water is a vivid and surprising creamy blue. My co-worker says glaciers grind the land and rocks beneath them into a powder so fine the particles suspend in water instead of sinking. ‘Rock flour’, reflecting sunlight, creates bright blue water. When she tells me it’s possible to work in Antarctica, where most of the glaciers live, I know where I’m migrating next. Desert At their maximum, Pleistocene glaciers
historians of the concept of homeostasis were themselves physiologists who worked on human and animal adaptation. 1 This chapter investigates notions of balance in the ‘natural laboratories’ of extreme physiology – specifically the high Arctic, Antarctica and high altitude in South America and the Himalaya. Physiologists and other biomedical scientists celebrated these sites as spaces in which many varieties of im balance could be studied. Here I will concentrate on three different
continental shelf of Antarctica The continent of Antarctica, measuring around 5.5 million square miles, constitutes almost 10 per cent of the world’s land mass; and the question of the continental shelf around it gives rise to particular considerations. Seven States – Argentina, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom – lay claim to some part of the territory
literary works such as Ilija Trojanow's Ice Tau (2011); travel accounts and memoirs such as Jonathan Franzen's The End of the End of the Earth (2016) and Elizabeth Bradfield's poetic memoir Toward Antarctica (2019); and screen texts, including documentary films like Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the Earth (2012), feature films such as Youyin Wu's romance Till the End of the World (2018), and television series such as the recent thriller, The Head (2020). Depending on how tightly it is defined, the category could potentially comprise a huge array of