The common view of indigenous Arctic cultures, even among scholarly observers, has long been one of communities continually in ecological harmony with their natural environment. In Arctic Adaptations, Igor Krupnik dismisses the textbook notion of traditional societies as static. Using information from years of field research, interviews with native Siberians, and archaeological site visits, Krupnik demonstrates that these societies are characterized not by stability but by dynamism and significant evolutionary breaks. Their apparent state of ecological harmony is, in fact, a conscious survival strategy resulting from "a prolonged and therefore successful process of human adaptation in one of the most extreme inhabited environments in the world." As their physical and cultural environment has changed—fluctuating reindeer and caribou herds, unpredictable weather patterns, introduction of firearms and better seacraft—Arctic communities have adapted by developing distinctive subsistence practices, social structures, and ethics regarding utilization of natural resources. Krupnik's pioneering work represents a dynamic marriage of ethnography and ecology, and makes accessible to Western scholars crucial findings and archival data previously unavailable because of political and language barriers.

Long recognized by naturalists and adventurers as a dramatically unique region, the Arctic has recently emerged as an area of increasing political, strategic, and economic importance. The Arctic is both one of the world’s largest and smallest regions, encompassing 15% of the earth’s land mass, yet inhabited by fewer than 1% of the world’s population. Its physical vastness is coupled with a wealth of natural resources; in oil alone, the Far North contributes that majority of Russia’s production and 25% of US output. At the same time, the Circumpolar North is home to diverse indigenous peoples and cultures, thus setting the stage for conflicts of international scope. In this collection of essays, Oran Young provides a foundation for studying the politics of the Arctic as a distinctive international region. Expanding the traditional approach to area studies, he examines the Far North not only for its unique features, but also as an arena within which to develop new approaches to various issues of worldwide interest. Young challenges persistent stereotypes that marginalize the region, moving beyond the romanticism of many observers to arrive at an understanding of the complex social and ecological systems of the Far North. In doing so, Young thoughtfully establishes the Arctic as an area of international importance both in its own right and in relation to other geopolitical regions.

Arctic Wars, Animal Rights, Endangered Peoples

In the late 1800s, “Arctic Fever” swept across the nation as dozens of American expeditions sailed north to the Arctic to find a sea route to Asia and, ultimately, to stand at the North Pole. Few of these missions were successful, and many men lost their lives en route. Yet failure did little to dampen the enthusiasm of new explorers or the crowds at home that cheered them on. Arctic exploration, Michael F. Robinson argues, was an activity that unfolded in America as much as it did in the wintry hinterland. Paying particular attention to the perils facing explorers at home, The Coldest Crucible examines their struggles to build support for the expeditions before departure, defend their claims upon their return, and cast themselves as men worthy of the nation’s full attention. In so doing, this book paints a new portrait of polar voyagers, one that removes them from the icy backdrop of the Arctic and sets them within the tempests of American cultural life. 

With chronological chapters featuring emblematic Arctic explorers—including Elisha Kent Kane, Charles Hall, and Robert Peary—The Coldest Crucible reveals why the North Pole, a region so geographically removed from Americans, became an iconic destination for discovery.

In Deep Freeze, Dian Olson Belanger tells the story of the pioneers who built viable communities, made vital scientific discoveries, and established Antarctica as a continent dedicated to peace and the pursuit of science, decades after the first explorers planted flags in the ice.

In the tense 1950s, even as the world was locked in the Cold War, U.S. scientists, maintained by the Navy's Operation Deep Freeze, came together in Antarctica with counterparts from eleven other countries to participate in the International Geophysical Year (IGY). On July 1, 1957, they began systematic, simultaneous scientific observations of the south-polar ice and atmosphere. Their collaborative success over eighteen months inspired the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which formalized their peaceful pursuit of scientific knowledge. Still building on the achievements of the individuals and distrustful nations thrown together by the IGY from mutually wary military, scientific, and political cultures, science prospers today and peace endures.

The year 2007 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the IGY and the commencement of a new International Polar Year - a compelling moment to review what a singular enterprise accomplished in a troubled time. Belanger draws from interviews, diaries, memoirs, and official records to weave together the first thorough study of the dawn of Antarctica's scientific age. Deep Freeze offers absorbing reading for those who have ventured onto Antarctic ice and those who dream of it, as well as historians, scientists, and policy makers.

Exploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet

 

Climate scientists point to permafrost as a “ticking time bomb” for the planet, and from the Arctic, apocalyptic narratives proliferate on the devastating effects permafrost thaw poses to human survival. In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity, both material and social, and something that affects not only life on earth but nonlife, too.

Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood approaches the topic of thawing permafrost and the wild new economies and mitigation strategies forming in the far north through a study of the Sakha Republic, Russia’s largest region, and its capital city Yakutsk, which is the coldest city in the world and built on permafrost. Wrigley examines people who are creating commerce out of thawing permafrost, including scientists wishing to recreate the prehistoric “Mammoth steppe” ecosystem by eventually rewilding resurrected woolly mammoths, Indigenous people who forage the tundra for exposed mammoth bodies to sell their tusks, and government officials hoping to keep their city standing as the ground collapses under it. Warming begets thawing begets economic activity— and as a result, permafrost becomes discontinuous, both as land and as a social category, in ways that have implications for the entire planet. Discontinuity, Wrigley shows, eventually evolves into extinction.

Offering a new way of defining extinction through the concept of “discontinuity,” Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood presents a meditative and story-focused engagement with permafrost as more than just frozen ground.

In 1933 Antarctica was essentially unexplored. Admiral Richard Byrd launched his Second Expedition to chart the southernmost continent, primarily relying on the muscle power of dog teams and their drivers who skied or ran beside the loaded sledges as they traveled. The life-threatening challenges of moving glaciers, invisible crevasses, and horrific storms compounded the difficulties of isolation, darkness, and the unimaginable cold that defined the men’s lives.

Stuart Paine was a dog driver, radio operator, and navigator on the fifty-six-man expedition, the bold and complex venture that is now famous for Byrd’s dramatic rescue from Bolling Advance Weather Base located 115 miles inland. Paine’s diaries represent the only published contemporary account written by a member of the Second Expedition. They reveal a behind-the-scenes look at the contentiousness surrounding the planned winter rescue of Byrd and offer unprecedented insights into the expedition’s internal dynamics.

Equally riveting is Paine’s breathtaking narrative of the fall and summer field operations as the field parties depended on their own resources in the face of interminable uncertainty and peril. Undertaking the longest and most hazardous sledging journey of the expedition, Paine guided the first American party from the edge of the Ross Sea more than seven hundred miles up the Ross Ice Shelf and the massive Thorne (Scott) Glacier to approach the South Pole. He and two other men skied more than fourteen hundred miles in eighty-eight days to explore and map part of Antarctica for the first time.

Footsteps on the Ice reveals the daily struggles, extreme personalities, and the matter-of-fact bravery of early explorers who are now fading into history. Detailing the men’s frustrations, annoyances, and questioning of their leader, Paine’s entries provide rare insight into how Byrd conducted his expeditions. Paine exposes the stresses of living under the snow in Little America during the four-month-long winter night, trapped in dim, crowded huts and black tunnels, while the men uneasily mulled over their leader’s isolation at Advance Base. The fates of Paine’s dogs, which provided some of his most difficult and rewarding experiences, are also described—his relationship with Jack, his lead dog, is an entrancing story in itself.

Featuring previously unpublished photographs and illustrations, Footsteps on the Ice documents the period in Antarctic exploration that bridged the “heroic era” and the modern age of mechanized travel. Depicting almost incomprehensible mental and physical duress and unhesitating courage, Paine’s tale is one of the most compelling stories in polar history, surpassing other accounts with its immediacy and adventure as it captures the majesty and mystery of the untouched Antarctic.

Whaling has been central to the life of Greenland's Inuit peoples for at least 4000 years, but political, economic, technological, and regulatory changes have altered this ancient practice. Richard A. Caulfield reveals these impacts first by analyzing Home Rule and its success in Greenland, and then by looking at whaling's place in the contemporary Greenlandic economy and its evolving co-management regime. What emerges from his investigation is an intricate web connecting traditions of indigenous peoples, the promises and pitfalls of co-management, the influence of international whaling policies, the complexities of sustainability, and the power of culturally determined views shaping relationships between humans and their environment. Caulfield finds that controversy over whaling often arises from conflicting idea systems, rather than disagreement over biological resource management. Understanding the ways Greenlanders and outside interests have defined and negotiated these conflicts "gives us more than just an insight into how indigenous peoples are coping with a changing world," he writes. "It also provides us with a sense of the challenges we face as well."

In the golden age of polar exploration (from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s), many an expedition set out to answer the big question—was the Arctic a continent, an open ocean beyond a barrier of ice, or an ocean covered with ice? No one knew, for the ice had kept its secret well; ships trying to penetrate it all failed, often catastrophically. Norway’s charismatic scientist-explorer Fridtjof Nansen, convinced that it was a frozen ocean, intended to prove it in a novel if risky way: by building a ship capable of withstanding the ice, joining others on an expedition, then drifting wherever it took them, on a relentless one-way journey into discovery and fame . . . or oblivion. Ice Ship is the story of that extraordinary ship, the Fram, from conception to construction, through twenty years of three epic expeditions, to its final resting place as a museum. It is also the story of the extraordinary men who steered the Fram over the course of 84,000 miles: on a three-year, ice-bound drift, finding out what the Arctic really was; in a remarkable four-year exploration of unmapped lands in the vast Canadian Arctic; and on a two–year voyage to Antarctica, where another famous Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, claimed the South Pole. Ice Ship will appeal to all those fascinated with polar exploration, maritime adventure, and wooden ships, and will captivate readers of such books as The Endurance, In the Heart of the Sea, and The Last Place on Earth. With more than 100 original photographs, the book brings the Fram to life and light.

"Adventures in the Antarctic only happen when someone makes a mistake.”
—From the Preface

 

Nearly all emperor penguin colonies are extremely remote; of the sixty-six known, fewer than thirty have been visited by humans, and even fewer have been the subject of successful research programs. One of the largest known emperor penguin colonies is found on a narrow band of sea ice attached to the Antarctic continent. In Journeys with Emperors, Gerald L. Kooyman and Jim Mastro take us to this far-flung colony in the Ross Sea, showing us how scientists gained access to it, and what they learned while living among the penguins as they raised their chicks.
 
The primary mission was to record the birds’ activities at sea, and the data revealed important aspects of emperor penguin behavior and physiology: for instance, that in the course of hunting for food, some of the penguins dive to depths of greater than five hundred meters (a third of a mile, which is deeper than for any other diving bird). The researchers also discovered that, crucially, most of the emperor’s life is actually spent at sea, with fledged chicks and adults making separate, perilous journeys through icy water. When chick nurturing is complete, the fledglings abandon the colony in large groups, heading north to the Southern Ocean. The adults leave at the same time, traveling one thousand kilometers eastward across the Ross Sea to a sea-ice sanctuary for molting. During this journey, they must gain enough weight to survive the month-long molt, when every feather is replaced and the birds cannot enter the water to feed. After the molt, many if not most return to the colony to breed once again. For the males, this means another fast—this time for 120 days as they incubate their eggs. The nearness of the colony to the ice edge spared the penguins the long, energy-draining march for which other colonies are well-known. It also allowed researchers to observe the penguins’ departures to and arrivals from their foraging journeys, as well as their dangerous interactions with leopard seals and killer whales.
 
Featuring original color photographs and complemented with online videos, Journeys with Emperors is both an eye-opening overview of the emperor penguin’s life and a thrilling tale of scientific discovery in one of the most remote, harsh, and beautiful places on Earth.

Peter J. Marchand’s Life in the Cold remains the one book that offers a comprehensive picture of the interactions of plants and animals—including humans—with their cold-weather environment. Focusing on the problems of “winter-active” organisms, Marchand illuminates the many challenges of sustaining life in places that demand extraordinary adaptations. The fourth edition of this classic text includes a new chapter on climate change and its effects on plants and animals wintering in the North.

From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present.

For years, tour guide Daniel Lum has brought visitors as well as his children out to the remote corners of Barrow, Alaska, one of the northernmost cities in the world, to witness polar bears and walrus on the dark, sandy beaches. Over time, snapping pictures for tourists and shooting photographs of his own, he has been a first-hand witness to the profound environmental changes taking place as his homeland shifts and disappears before his eyes. 

As arguments over climate change rage in more temperate locales, Nuvuk, the Northernmost is a poignant snapshot of life in a town where these changes are impossible to overlook. Lum’s vivid photographs of wildlife, such as whales, polar bears, and birds, offer rare close-ups of animals few ever see. In addition, Lum provides vivid descriptions and pictures of daily life in and around Barrow, offering a compelling insider’s introduction to living on the tip of the world. With Lum as a capable guide, Nuvuk, the Northernmost is a chance to see a rare world before it changes forever.

Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change.

The author, anthropologist Susan Alexandra Crate, has spent three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia. Crate reveals Sakha’s essential relationship with alaas, the foundational permafrost ecosystem of both their subsistence and cultural identity. Sakha know alaas via an Indigenous knowledge system imbued with spiritual qualities. This counters the scientific definition of alaas as geophysical phenomena of limited range. Climate change now threatens alaas due to thawing permafrost, which, entangled with the rural changes of economic globalization, youth out-migration, and language loss, make prescient the issues of ethnic sovereignty and cultural survival.

Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Crate argues that local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions. Furthermore, she makes her message relevant to a wider audience by clarifying linkages to the global permafrost system found in her comparative research in Mongolia, Arctic Canada, Kiribati, Peru, and Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. This reveals how permafrost provides one of the main structural foundations for Arctic ecosystems, which, in turn, work with the planet’s other ecosystems to maintain planetary balance.

Metaphorically speaking, we all live on permafrost.

 

In the early 1950s, a number of Inuit men, women, and children were loaded on ships and sent to live in the cold and barren lands of the Canadian High Arctic. Spurred by government agents’ promises of plentiful game, virgin land, and a lifestyle untainted by Western Influences, these “voluntary migrants,” who soon numbered nearly ninety, found instead isolation, hunting limited by game preserve regulations, three months of total darkness each winter, and a government suddenly deaf to their pleas to return home. The question, still unresolved forty years later, is whether these “experiments” were a well-intentioned governmental attempt to protect the Inuit way of life or a ploy to lure innocent people to exile, hunger, and deprivation in order to solidify Canada’s Cold War sovereignty in the far North. Alan Rudolph Marcus outlines the motives behind the relocation, case histories of two settlements, and the aftermath of the migration. Relocating Eden provides a timely and provocative inquiry into issues of continuing importance to Canada and all native peoples.

“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard of his time with the 1910 Scott expedition to the South Pole. And that’s how most of us still imagine polar expeditions: stolid men with ice riming their beards drawing sledges and risking death for scientific knowledge. But polar science has changed drastically over the past century—as Chris Linder shows us, brilliantly, with Science on Ice.

An oceanographer and award-winning photographer, Linder chronicles four polar expeditions in this richly illustrated volume: to a teeming colony of Adélie penguins, through the icy waters of the Bering Sea in spring, beneath the pack ice of the eastern Arctic Ocean, and over the lake-studded surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Each trip finds Linder teamed up with a prominent science journalist, and together their words and pictures reveal the day-to-day details of how science actually gets done at the poles. Breathtaking images of the stark polar landscape alternate with gritty, close-up shots of scientists working in the field, braving physical danger and brutal conditions, and working with remarkable technology designed to survive the poles—like robotic vehicles that chart undersea mountain ranges—as they gather crucial information about our planet's distant past, and the risks that climate change poses for its future.

The result is a combination travel book and paean to the hard work and dedication that underlies our knowledge of life on earth. Science on Ice takes readers to the farthest reaches of our planet; science has rarely been more exciting—or inspiring.

As a mythical creature, the whale has been responsible for many transformations in the world. It is an enchanting being that humans have long felt a connection to. In the contemporary environmental imagination, whales are charismatic megafauna feeding our environmentalism and aspirations for a better and more sustainable future.

Using multispecies ethnography, Whale Snow explores how everyday the relatedness of the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska and the bowhead whale forms and transforms “the human” through their encounters with modernity. Whale Snow shows how the people live in the world that intersects with other beings, how these connections came into being, and, most importantly, how such intimate and intense relations help humans survive the social challenges incurred by climate change. In this time of ecological transition, exploring multispecies relatedness is crucial as it keeps social capacities to adapt relational, elastic, and resilient.

In the Arctic, climate, culture, and human resilience are connected through bowhead whaling. In Whale Snow we see how climate change disrupts this ancient practice and, in the process, affects a vital expression of Indigenous sovereignty. Ultimately, though, this book offers a story of hope grounded in multispecies resilience.

“The Southern Ocean is a wild and elusive place, an ocean like no other. With its waters lying between the Antarctic continent and the southern coastlines of Australia, New Zealand, South America, and South Africa, it is the most remote and inaccessible part of the planetary ocean, the only part that flows around Earth unimpeded by any landmass. It is notorious amongst sailors for its tempestuous winds and hazardous fog and ice. Yet it is a difficult ocean to pin down. Its southern boundary, defined by the icy continent of Antarctica, is constantly moving in a seasonal dance of freeze and thaw. To the north, its waters meet and mingle with those of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans along a fluid boundary that defies the neat lines of a cartographer.”

So begins Joy McCann’s Wild Sea, the remarkable story of the world’s remote Southern, or Antarctic, Ocean. Unlike the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans with their long maritime histories, little is known about the Southern Ocean. This book takes readers beyond the familiar heroic narratives of polar exploration to explore the nature of this stormy circumpolar ocean and its place in Western and Indigenous histories. Drawing from a vast archive of charts and maps, sea captains’ journals, whalers’ log books, missionaries’ correspondence, voyagers’ letters, scientific reports, stories, myths, and her own experiences, McCann embarks on a voyage of discovery across its surfaces and into its depths, revealing its distinctive physical and biological processes as well as the people, species, events, and ideas that have shaped our perceptions of it. The result is both a global story of changing scientific knowledge about oceans and their vulnerability to human actions and a local one, showing how the Southern Ocean has defined and sustained southern environments and people over time.

Beautifully and powerfully written, Wild Sea will raise a broader awareness and appreciation of the natural and cultural history of this little-known ocean and its emerging importance as a barometer of planetary climate change.