Polar Studies: Books

This comprehensive treatment of the environmental history of northern North America offers a compelling account of the complex encounters of people, technology, culture, and ecology that shaped modern-day Canada and Alaska. From the arrival of the earliest humans to the very latest scientific controversies, the environmental history of Canada and Arctic North America is dramatic, diverse, and crucial for the very survival of the human race. ...

When every land seems already explored, and space travel has declined in scope and prestige, the northern exploits of our Victorian forebears offers a pleasantly distant mirror from which to regard our own time. The Arctic regions have been the subject of a long-lasting visual fascination, one which has from the outset crossed boundaries between fine art and mass entertainment, "high" and "low" cultures, and even national identity. In the mid-nineteenth century, this polar passion reached a peak, dominating the visual culture of both Britain and America, and yet its history is scarcely known. Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North on Visual Culture, 1818-1875 illuminates the nineteenth-century fascination with visual representations of the Arctic, weaving together a narrative of the major Arctic expeditions with an account of their public reception through art and mass media. ...

A beautiful literary anthology published to commemorate the International Polar Year--and remind us what we're in danger of losing. The Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves have been an object of obsession for as long as we've known they existed. Countless explorers, including such legends as Richard Byrd, Ernest Shackleton, and Robert Falcon Scott, have risked their lives to chart their frozen landscapes. Now, for the first time in human history, we are in legitimate danger of seeing polar ice dramatically shrink, break apart, or even disappear. The Ends of the Earth, a collection of the very best writing on the Arctic and Antarctic, will simultaneously commemorate four centuries of exploring and scientific study, and make the call for preservation. ...

High mountains, polar expanses, volcanic peaks are exciting and special environments. 13 leading international geographers explore different aspects of these environments - disorientation, exploration, native knowledge, polar research. This is the first book to do this. High places - be they mountain peaks or the vast expanses of the polar latitudes - have always captured the human imagination. Inaccessible, extreme, they are commonly invested with awe and reverence, as places of physical challenge, intense experience. Increasingly, they are also treated as unique locations for science. High Places explores the fascinating geographies of these special environments, revealing how senses are challenged, objectivities exposed, cultural assumptions laid bare. ...

On June 24, 1993, one hundred years had passed since Fridtjof Nansen and his companions set out on one of the most daring and exciting research expeditions the world had ever seen. They allowed their vessel, the Fram, to be frozen into the ice close to the New Siberian Islands, in the Arctic Ocean. Three years were to elapse before the ice released its hold on the Fram and allowed her to return to Norway via the strait between Greenland and Spitsbergen, which later came to be known as Fram Strait. The research carried out during Fram's drift in the ice altered forever our concept of the Arctic Basin.

The Polar Regions is a systematic investigation of both the geopolitical commonalities and the differences between the Arctic and the Antarctic. It is the first book to integrate polar studies of this nature with teaching and research on political geography and geopolitics. ...

The harsh beauty of the polar regions has long fascinated explorers and armchair adventurers alike. The forbidding terrain and exotic life-forms appeal to our sense of wonder, and while we may think of them as similar, the Arctic and Antarctic are as unlike as Kansas and Kenya. In Poles Apart, Galen Rowell takes us on an exhilarating visual journey to the top and the bottom of the world, using his camera to reveal the fascinating differences in these polar opposites. ...