Since 1988, Neil Shubin has been conducting scientific research in the polar regions. He went first as a student to East Greenland, where his team were deposited on the tundra by a bush pilot with a reassuring “mane of grey hair”. “There are old bush pilots and there are bold ones,” the adage goes. When the plane took off, the team were left alone for six weeks, looking for fossils in rock ledges. Seven years later, on a return visit, Shubin rediscovered his own footprints. On another occasion, his team found a wind-blasted wooden shack 300 miles from any Inuit habitation. Some weathered print on the boards suggested it was Scandinavian. It turned out to be a store left by explorers aboard Fridtjof Nansen’s ship the Fram, who’d passed through in 1902.
Little wonder the poles can seem timeless, places of desolate beauty – tundra and rock in the north, and wind and ice in the south. Though literally poles apart, they seemed united in their unchanging nature, at least in the public imagination. However, if polar science offers one clear message, it is that great change certainly does happen at the poles, and it can happen fast. As Shubin put it, the phrase “glacial pace” may apply to bureaucracy, but not to glacial ice itself. He writes: “Freezing and thawing over millennia, the Arctic and Antarctic are like vaults that hold our planet’s heirlooms. When polar regions melt, the vaults are thrown open – ancient water, carbon, and microbial life return to the surface to shape and change the world.”
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