Since 1988, Neil Shubin has been conducting scientific research in the polar regions. He went first as a student to East Greenland, where his team were deposited on the tundra by a bush pilot with a reassuring “mane of grey hair”. “There are old bush pilots and there are bold ones,” the adage goes. When the plane took off, the team were left alone for six weeks, looking for fossils in rock ledges. Seven years later, on a return visit, Shubin rediscovered his own footprints. On another occasion, his team found a wind-blasted wooden shack 300 miles from any Inuit habitation. Some weathered print on the boards suggested it was Scandinavian. It turned out to be a store left by explorers aboard Fridtjof Nansen’s ship the Fram, who’d passed through in 1902.
Little wonder the poles can seem timeless, places of desolate beauty – tundra and rock in the north, and wind and ice in the south. Though literally poles apart, they seemed united in their unchanging nature, at least in the public imagination. However, if polar science offers one clear message, it is that great change certainly does happen at the poles, and it can happen fast. As Shubin put it, the phrase “glacial pace” may apply to bureaucracy, but not to glacial ice itself. He writes: “Freezing and thawing over millennia, the Arctic and Antarctic are like vaults that hold our planet’s heirlooms. When polar regions melt, the vaults are thrown open – ancient water, carbon, and microbial life return to the surface to shape and change the world.”
Now in his mid sixties, Shubin has experienced many field seasons, north and south. (Field trips in the Antarctic, Shubin says, make the Arctic feel like “a quaint family camping trip”.) He presents the Arctic and Antarctic together rather than as opposites, and the book oscillates between them. He describes the lived experience of a field researcher, along with lively accounts of polar science from the earliest days until now. Locked within the polar ice are revelations about the deep past of the Earth and its climate, offering predictions about its future.
It’s now known that we, as human beings, live in an unusual moment. Our existence, since we first evolved as a species, has occurred at a time when there has been ice at both poles. It’s all we have ever known. But our normal is the planet’s exceptional – polar ice has been present for only around ten per cent of the planet’s history. Researchers have been able to determine that the Antarctic once had a tropical climate, and that more than once, ice has consumed the entire planet (what is known as the “Snowball Earth” phenomenon).
Shubin writes well about how such discoveries have been made: a lay reader can enjoy the thrill of discovery without enduring the harsh conditions. He acknowledges that polar science is built on Inuit knowledge in the north (Inuit were well aware of raised beaches, for example) and the heroic European explorers of old. He is sympathetic towards Captain Scott, and his “failed” expedition to the South Pole. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen triumphed by darting in and darting out, but Scott’s team left a scientific legacy. Their desperate, fatal journey back to base was hampered by many factors, not least that they were dragging 36 kilogrammes of rocks on their sledges.
Shubin’s own research, and a lot of subsequent discovery, is based on such fossil-bearing rocks. The Antarctic is also rich in meteorites. Meteorites fall to Earth equally everywhere. But because of the size of the ice-fields and the movements of ice, they are more readily found in the Antarctic, with all the latent information they contain about the solar system. (Deeper space is also studied. At the South Pole, there stands not a pole, but a telescope. Benefiting from the constant winter darkness, it is able to detect light from shortly after the Big Bang.)
There is also hidden biology. Fantasy and science-fiction writers have long imagined strange creatures beneath the Antarctic ice, even fugitive Nazis. But there is indeed life down there. In the Russian sector on the east of the continent, early radar results suggested the presence of water two miles below the surface – a huge freshwater lake that had lain undisturbed for 15 million years. An international project was launched; a further 20 years were spent on core drilling. It took trial and error, nightmare logistics and stringent anti-pollution measures, but the water was reached – and there were microbes in it, capable of subsisting by metabolising ammonium, sulphur and iron. Such discoveries on our planet have implications for the discipline of astrobiology: if there is life on other planets, it might look like this – visible down a microscope.
In the south, all the research derives from the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1957, which remains a model of global cooperation. The Arctic had long been carved up between national powers, with little regard for indigenous rights, but the Antarctic is a place of international collaboration and often altruism: 29 countries have bases there. Even nowadays life can be cramped and difficult. Fieldwork that took years to plan can fall apart when you get there, especially if equipment breaks or the weather closes in.
Shubin presents his rules for polar fieldwork, north and south, with emphasis on cooperation and mutual well-being. Go slow, he says. No heroics. For these insights he credits traditional Inuit knowledge. Despite that, both people and equipment can malfunction. Rumour has it the Russians banned chess from their base after a near-fatal altercation between two players. (Understandable, perhaps, since their base is at 12,000ft and temperatures have dropped to -88°C.) There are tales of arson, and it’s said someone somewhere had to be locked in a freezer until he came to his senses. (Yes, apparently they have freezers in the Antarctic.)
There is friendly rivalry and also cultural differences. In their black-and-green parkas, the New Zealanders are better turned out than Americans like Shubin, who are issued with the “Big Red”, a jacket that makes them look “like a five-year-old on a first sledding trip”. The Italian base, of course, has better food.
It is all very remote but also acutely near at hand. What happens at the poles matters everywhere. It has been proved that the huge West Antarctic Icefield has melted before and quickly, 120,000 years ago. It’s melting again now. The news comes from above and below: from satellites, capable of imaging to tiny degrees, and from submersibles sending data from beneath floating coastal ice-shelves. If the icefield vanishes, sea levels will rise 14ft, just as they did the last time. Billions of people would become climate refugees.
The first person to articulate this fear was glaciologist John Mercer in 1978. He was denounced as an alarmist. Since then, the thinning of the polar ice has only increased, both north and south. In fact, wealthy tourists can now experience it for themselves. In 2023, a French cruise ship deposited its passengers at the North Pole for selfies, before fetching them back onboard to enjoy mulled wine and croissants. Bully for them. “Our lifetimes are tiny moments in the multibillion year history of the meteorites inside glaciers or the rocks in valley walls,” says Shubin. The poles prove that change will come – and come again.
Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the polar regions in search of life, the cosmos and our future
Neil Shubin
Oneworld Publications, 228pp, £22
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See more: How WG Sebald found his form]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War