was the second option: assemble a collection of continental-scale books that would survey the major themes of planetary fire history, yet bring a deeper scholarship than a single book could muster. This seemed to me both the more responsible and more interesting option. And as I pondered how to partition the Earth’s fire geography, Antarctica loomed. I was already exploiting it vis-à-vis Australia as the contrasting twins of ancient Gondwana, the fire continent and the ice continent. Could the land without fire have a place in a suite of fire histories?
It could, if fire was considered a kind of culture hero, and if a Cycle of Fire was conceived in mythic terms. Antarctica could conclude the grand narrative: here fire died. The Cycle might continue to expand with further volumes, but its conceptual circle could close. With that realization, the Cycle became plausible, and I elected to the pursue the second option. Thus I would have two books of the set already published and a third well under way. Without The Ice the task would have seemed too daunting, and the intellectual force of the suite too diffuse. The Ice’s negation had again produced a paradoxical affirmation. The Cycle, in turn, would grant to The Ice what, as a book, it most needed: a context. It would not melt away in the vast sea of print like a berg floated to the deep oceans.
I’m grateful to William Cronon, editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Series, Julidta Tarver of the University of Washington Press, and the others associated with the Cycle project for recognizing this prospect and allowing the Cycle to come full circle.
STEPHEN PYNE
Glendale, Arizona
… there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught….
Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? … and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects … with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Prologue. The Berg
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
—Samuel T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
… the Southern half of the horizon was enlightened by the reflected rays of the Ice to considerable height. The Clouds near the horizon were of a perfect Snow whiteness and were difficult to be distinguished from the Ice hills whose lofty summits reached the Clouds. The Northern edge of this immense Ice field was composed of loose or broken ice so close packed together that nothing could enter it … we counted Ninety Seven Ice Hills or Mountains, many of them vastly large…. It was indeed my opinion as well as the opinion of most on board, that this Ice extended quite to the Pole or perhaps joins some land, to which it had been fixed from the creation….
—Capt. James Cook, Journals, Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure (1774)
SPECTER
It appears out of the fog and low clouds, like a white comet in the twilight.
To enter Greater Antarctica is to be drawn into a slow maelstrom of ice. Ice is the beginning of Antarctica and ice is its end. As one moves from perimeter to interior, the proportion of ice relentlessly increases. Ice creates more ice, and ice defines ice. Everything else is suppressed. This is a world derived from a single substance, water, in a single crystalline state, snow, transformed into a lithosphere composed of a single mineral, ice. This is earthscape transfigured into icescape. Here is a world informed by ice: ice that welds together a continent: ice on such a scale that it shapes and defines itself: ice that is both substance and style: ice that is both landscape and allegory. The berg is a microcosm of this world. It is the first and, paradoxically, the most complex materialization of The Ice. It is a fragment torn loose from the bottom of the globe, the icy underworld of the Earth; from the ends of the world, its past and future; from the Earth’s polar source, the end that makes possible the means. The berg is both substance and symbol. “Everything is in it,” as Conrad wrote of the human mind, “all the past as well as all the future.” The journey of the ice from core to margin, from polar plateau to open sea, narrates an allegory of mind and matter.
The great berg spins in a slow, counterclockwise gyre.
It is only another of a series of rotations that have characterized the berg’s fantastic journey. The continental plates that comprise the land form a lithospheric mosaic and spin with the infinitesimal patience of geologic time; the Southern Ocean courses around them, the gyre of the circumpolar current; storm cells swirl over the ocean, epicycles of the polar vortex; sea ice floes, like a belt of asteroids, circle endlessly, a life cycle of freezing and melting; icebergs, large and small, circle like comets around their peculiar icy sun. Superimposed over all these motions, the Earth itself rotates around its pole and revolves around the Sun. The ice terranes ring the core like concentric crystalline spheres. The ice mass that became the berg has passed from ice dome to sheet ice to glacier ice to shelf ice to pack ice to the diminutions of the bergs, cycle by cycle, like the gears of an ice orrery. The large bergs fragment into smaller bergs, the small bergs into bergy bits, the bits into growlers, the growlers into brash ice, the brash into chips and meltwater. With each outward frontier the pace of activity quickens.
Ice informs the geophysics and geography of Antarctica. It connects land to land, land to sea, sea to air, air to land, ice to ice. The Antarctic atmosphere consists of ice clouds and ice vapor. The hydrosphere exists as ice rivers and ice seas. The lithosphere is composed of ice plateaus and ice mountains. Even those features not completely saturated with ice are vastly reduced. The atmosphere is much thinner at the poles than elsewhere, in part because of the great height of the polar ice sheet. The hydrosphere is charged with bergs and coated with ice floes; during the polar night, its cover of sea ice effectively doubles the total ice field of Antarctica. The lithosphere is little more than a matrix for ice. Less than 3 percent of Antarctica consists of exposed rock, and the rock is profoundly influenced by periglacial processes, an indirect manifestation of ice.
Out
