Poles Apart

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Mini Kapoor :New Delhi, Jan 20 2013, 06:12 IST

Chile has no qualms about asserting its claim to 1.25 million square kilometres of its territory. To cut a long story short, Wheeler was soon enough in residence in an igloo in Antarctica, and as you may imagine, it was not exactly idyllic: “When camping in the Antarctic, you take so many items into the sleeping bag to prevent freezing that there is barely room to get in yourself. You always need your waterbottle in with you, and in a crowd the babywipes (the polar substitute for washing), camera, batteries for the tape recorder, underwear ready defrosted for the next day, and any odd scientific equipment that happens to be lying around. It is like sleeping in a cutlery drawer, in a deep freeze.”

However, she followed up that description of her ordeal with the view that would greet her outside the next morning: “When I scanned the 360-degree horizon, and I saw the curvature of the earth, as if I were in space, and the sun a white stain on the blue, then, at that moment each day, I thanked God out loud for bringing me to the most heartbreakingly beautiful place on earth, and I forgot about the igloo.” And how cold was it those months? “When we threw a mug of boiling water in the air outside, it froze before it landed.”

Or, as she wrote in another essay: “The mean annual temperature is minus 49 degrees C. Nothing works in that kind of cold. Metal

... contd.

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