Antarctica
ANTARCTICA
I first went to Antarctica in the late 1990s and I visited there again in 2010 and 2011. As you look from the deck of a large ship it is hard to imagine the mammoth icebergs melting away in the next few decades. Looking out at the Southern Ocean you see immense, drifting pillars of ice projecting above the waterline in surreal shapes. What struck me more than anything was the nearly complete silence other than the occasional caw of a skua, or the cracking of an iceberg calving into the sea. It is an alien, eerie space in which to contemplate who we are and our diminutive place in the universe; and yet Antarctica is the one place where the grandeur of Nature defines any discussion of climate change. It is a forbidding place of mist and cold and fog and light, and it is the one place in our world where you truly feel you are on a another planet.