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Tuesday, January 03, 2006

 

Islands Under Ice Caps

You can forgive me if you've heard mention of this already, but ice is everywhere. More specifically, the ice that is temporarily at the poles North and South.

Perhaps this fascination is an escape from endless images of death in a Middle Eastern sandbox, a way for us to commit to an overwhelmingly fruitless endeavor that doesn't involve bodies in bags or people speaking foreign tongues. Or maybe we've gotten tired of all that sand.

Ice is the new beached whale, the new harvested rainforest, the new dolphin in a tuna can.

For Christmas, my brother gave me a copy of Nicholas Johnson's Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange & Menacing World of Antarctica, which is the first he has read front to back in, oh, 30 years or so. I will post a review upon reading it. I was previously familiar with Mr. Johnson's work via a link to his Big Dead Place site on some glaciologist's research page.

Also, Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent New Yorker series on global warming comes to a bookish head this spring with the release of Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

Obviously, there are a slew of tie-ins and points to be made about what people are saying about the ice. And, for some, it is a way of life. The Ice Capades, for example. And this barely touches on issues of Scandinavian heritage, or even the burgeoning field of Canadian Studies, which must hit ice when it moves 50 miles north of the Canada-U.S. border.


And, Winter Olympics 2006. Ice. Look for renewed intimacy between the casual sports enthusiast and the curling events.

But what will people say when they find that no one has claimed the Arctic islands currently trapped under all that ice?

And what about pole shift, happening now?

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