Waking to Antarctica

Long ago, I saw an old man sail to the end of the world and wished that I would one day see the bottom of the world with my own eyes. The old man wished that for me too and shared his stories. One day, our wishes came true and I found I was totally unprepared. on top of one wave another wave passes by and then another

It’s Extreme / Wonders

A place of extraordinary extremes, Antarctica is the highest, driest, windiest, coldest, most isolated continent. The 5th largest of the 7 continents (larger than Australia and Europe, 50% larger in area than the United States of America), measuring 5.4 million square miles, it lies 600 miles from Argentina, 1600 miles from Australia, and 2500 miles from South Africa, making it the only continent that is circled by an unimpeded current and so ringed by the roughest seas in the world. From the geographic south pole (one of at least eight poles), you can point in any direction and call it north. It experiences a six-month period of daylight in summer and a sixmonth period of night in winter, during which temperatures may plunge below -130°F while wind speeds may exceed 200 miles per hour. Inland, it’s a white wasteland, containing the lowest biotic diversity on the planet; surrounding it, the oceans that feed it, as it feeds them, teem with an abundance of life. Its ways seem so alien that it challenges our ways of thinking about our planet and ourselves.

The world is different than I had imagined. I can travel to another planet without having to leave my own. I’ve made pictures to prove it. Yet, so much is left out of the images: sound, smell, touch, taste, time, breath, dreams, possibly more. The pictures are incomplete without my stories. I returned at a loss for words and began finding ways to find them. As I began to gather the pieces of this puzzle, I realised its borders were much wider than any map I had seen before. There was much more left to discover, not only about the world, also about myself. There was a question I could not escape. What’s the difference really?

Torn Paper Mountains Words Images Not Enough Oceans Of First Drafts

It’s Water - It’s All States Of Water

The crystal desert is mostly water in all its states: solid, liquid, and gas. It receives less precipitation than the Sahara, and its dry Valleys have not had precipitation in over 2 million years. Paradoxically, what Antarctica is best known for, is its ice cap, the largest body of freshwater containing 68% of the world’s reserves. Buried under 11,000 feet of ice, Lake Vostok is the size of North America’s Lake Huron, and it is just one of many. There are active volcanoes too. Containing 90% of the world’s ice up to 15,700 feet thick, the weight of the Antarctica ice sheet depresses the continental crust by more than half a mile. The largest recorded iceberg, B15 (11,000 square miles, larger than Jamaica) broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000 – and more than a decade later, parts of it had still not melted. If all of Antarctica’s ice melted, the highest continent (6,000 feet on average) would rebound higher and global sea levels would rise 200 feet. Antarctica’s sea ice is