Antarctica
What Everyone Needs to Know®
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In this addition to the What Everyone Needs to Know® series, David Day examines the most forbidding and formidably inaccessible continent on Earth. For over a century following its discovery by European explorers in 1820, Antarctica played host to competing claims by rival nations vying for access to the frozen land's vast marine resources -- namely the skins and oils of seals and whales. Though the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 was meant to end this contention, countries have found other means of extending control over the land, with scientific bases establishing at least symbolic claims. Exploration and drilling by the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Japan, and others has led to discoveries about the world's climate in centuries past -- and in the process intimations of its alarming future.
Delving into all the relevant issues -- the history of the continent, its wildlife, underwater mountain ranges, arguments over governance, and the continent's effect on global climate change -- Day's work sheds new light on a territory that, despite being the coldest, driest, and windiest continent in the world, will continue to be the object of intense speculation and competition. With new evidence that Antarctica's ice is melting three times faster than it was a decade ago, the need to understand the world's southernmost region has never been more pressing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sweeping but uninvolving history of Antarctic exploration revolves around the question of who owns a continent that no one really wants. Historian Day (Claiming a Continent) traces two centuries of expeditions that struggled to unravel the mystery of Antarctica (is that unapproachable line on the horizon a coast, a group of ice-bergs, a fog-bank, an island, or a continent?). Entwined in the explorers' epic befuddlement are perennial efforts by rival nations to claim sovereignty over the elusive terrain by means of competitive mapping and landmark naming and stately possession rituals flag dropping, fusillade firing, cairn building, plaque inscribing, and proclamation reading performed for audiences of bemused penguins. There are moments of high drama in the saga, from Scott's and Shackleton's doomed journeys to the pole to Robert Byrd's heroic overflights, but mainly it is a picaresque and a sometimes tedious one of semihapless voyages and treks and semiserious diplomatic wranglings. Day provides frustratingly little scientific information about the unique polar environment, but in the background he shows us a swelling fleet of seal hunters, whaling vessels, and factory ships as they slaughter the region's abundant marine wildlife to the verge of extinction. More than the farcical human empire building he foregrounds, that gripping natural history provides the book's drama. 35 b&w photos.
