Human Impact and Climate Change

Against the vast backdrop of geological time, Doshi measures the brief span of human existence. Human civilisations have been around for a "paltry 12,000 years — barely a few seconds on the geological clock," yet in that short time we have etched our dominance over Nature with villages, towns, cities and megacities. The rapid increase of human populations has left us battling other species for limited resources, and the unmitigated burning of fossil fuels has created a blanket of carbon dioxide around the world that is slowly but surely raising the average global temperature.

Climate change, she observes, is one of the most hotly contested environmental debates of our time. Will the West Antarctic ice sheet melt entirely? Will the Gulf Stream ocean current be disrupted? Will it be the end of the world as we know it? Antarctica is a crucial element in this debate — not only because it has never sustained a human population and so remains relatively "pristine," but more importantly because it holds in its ice-cores half-million-year-old carbon records trapped in its layers of ice. If we want to study the Earth's past, present and future, Antarctica is the place to go. …