Summary of the Lesson

The long journey south

The essay opens with the sheer scale of the author's journey to Antarctica. Setting out from the warmth of Madras, Tishani Doshi travels aboard the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy an enormous distance — over a hundred hours by car, aeroplane and ship, across nine time zones and through several distinct climate and ecological zones — before she reaches the coldest, driest and windiest continent on Earth. By the time she arrives she feels she has come to a place utterly unlike anywhere in ordinary human experience. Her first reaction is one of relief at having finally arrived, quickly followed by profound wonder at Antarctica's vast white emptiness, its overwhelming silence and its purity.

Reflections on Gondwana and Earth's past

Standing amid this immensity, Doshi is led to reflect on the deep history of the planet. She recalls that six hundred and fifty million years ago Antarctica lay at the centre of an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana — a single huge landmass that was then not frozen at all but warm and full of a huge variety of flora and fauna, in a time before humans had arrived. Gondwana thrived for some five hundred million years; then, around the time the dinosaurs were wiped out and the age of mammals began, it broke apart and its fragments drifted to form the continents we know today. She marvels that India and Antarctica were once part of the same landmass, and she uses the idea to place human beings in perspective: measured against the immense age of the Earth, human existence occupies only the briefest, most recent moment.

The warning of climate change

From this contemplation of the past, the essay turns to the threatened future. Doshi notes that in a "paltry 12,000 years" of civilisation, humans have burned fossil fuels unchecked, wrapping the world in a blanket of carbon dioxide that is slowly but surely raising the average global temperature. She points to the fiercely debated questions the continent raises — whether the West Antarctic ice sheet will melt and whether the Gulf Stream will be disrupted — and observes that near the South Pole the threat becomes undeniable, with glaciers visibly retreating and ice shelves collapsing. Antarctica, precisely because it is so pristine and holds half-million-year-old carbon records in its ice, becomes the ideal place to read these changes.

Students on Ice and the lesson of small things

Doshi explains the purpose of the "Students on Ice" expedition that has brought her here: founded by Geoff Green, it takes high-school students to the ends of the world in the hope that direct experience will awaken in them a lasting sense of environmental responsibility. She then draws attention to one of the continent's smallest but most important inhabitants, the phytoplankton — microscopic single-celled plants that use sunlight to make their food and form the base of the entire Southern Ocean's food chain. She warns that a further depletion of the ozone layer would harm these organisms and ripple upward through all marine life and the global carbon cycle, offering the parable that if we take care of the small things, the big things will fall into place.

The closing insight …