Poles Apart
Mini Kapoor :New Delhi, Jan 20 2013, 06:12 IST
snaps. I have seen scientists in tears when the humidity barometer flutters between zero and one and all their instruments die. Yet many people at the Pole work outside, bulldozing ice to make water or maintaining equipment.” All of that for the sake of science, with the visitors forced to live by their wits and improvisation — there is a story, for instance, of a doctor who removed his own appendix. The cold, isolation and darkness (in the winter months) can be devastating for one’s spirit, with well over half winter residents reporting severe depression and complications arising out of “hostility and anger”: “During one Antarctic winter, a Russian at Vostok station killed a colleague with an ice axe during a row about a game of chess. To ensure it doesn’t happen again, the authorities banned chess.”
The other Pole is quite different, and for Wheeler that difference revealed itself too in her motivations for venturing northwards more than a decade later. As she wrote in The Magnetic North, where Antarctica’s “geographical unity and unownedness” attracted her younger self, she was “prejudiced against the complicated, life-infested north.” But as she travelled around the Arctic, “fragmentation, disputed ownership, indigenous populations immobilised on the threshold of change” appealed to her older self: It was “an elegy for the uncertainties and doubts that are the chaperones of age”. And its experience involves us all — it is where our planet’s fragile equilibrium is most dramatically being put under strain. Climate change is
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