English (Core) · Ch 16 — Journey to the End of the Earth
Summary
Summary
- The journey begins in Madras (about 13.09 degrees north of the Equator) aboard the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy, heading for the coldest, driest and windiest continent on Earth — Antarctica. It takes over 100 hours by car, aeroplane and ship, across nine time zones, six checkpoints and three bodies of water.
- The narrator, Tishani Doshi, feels first relief and then profound wonder at Antarctica's immense white landscape and blue horizon — above all wonder that India and Antarctica were once part of the same landmass.
- The essay reflects on deep geological time: six hundred and fifty million years ago Antarctica lay at the centre of the supercontinent Gondwana, a warm land full of flora and fauna. Over 500 million years it thrived, then broke apart — India drifted north to raise the Himalayas, and South America drifted off, opening the Drake Passage and creating the cold current that froze Antarctica.
- Antarctica holds 90 per cent of the Earth's ice; Doshi describes it as "like walking into a giant ping-pong ball devoid of any human markers," bathed in 24-hour austral summer light and a ubiquitous silence.
- Human impact: civilisation is only about 12,000 years old — "barely a few seconds on the geological clock" — yet the unchecked burning of fossil fuels has wrapped the world in a blanket of carbon dioxide that is warming the planet. Because it is pristine, Antarctica's ice-cores hold half-million-year-old carbon records, making it the ideal place to study Earth's climate.
- The "Students on Ice" programme, founded by Geoff Green, takes high-school students to the poles to foster real understanding and respect for the planet, in the belief that seeing melting glaciers first-hand inspires them to act. …