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Geoscience Arts: Antarctica
Through the Eyes of Writers and Artists
Television: Brewing intelligent design
Books: Trapped
in the ice
In
my way of thinking, the creation of the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program
by the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF) was
a stroke of genius. The program “provides opportunities for scholars in
the humanities to work in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean to make observations
at U.S. Antarctic Program stations and research camps and in wilderness areas.”
The program has supported artists of every ilk — authors, historians, photographers,
painters, sculptors and even composers and musicians — so that they may
“increase understanding of the Antarctic and help document America’s
Antarctic heritage.”
This landscape painting by David Rosenthal,
“Glacier Twilight,” is just one product of the National Science Foundation’s
Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which supports photographers, authors,
musicians and artists to travel to the southern continent for inspiration and
education. Courtesy of David Rosenthal.
My first real familiarity with this program was when Barry Lopez, the noted
natural history writer, spent part of a field season with me and my colleague,
Paul Mayewski, on the Newall Glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica
in the mid-1980s. We were digging snow pits to carefully sample and later analyze
the snow for its chemistry, to understand how the atmosphere and climate changed
with time. Lopez was a great campmate and fellow “scientist,” as he
took part in all of our activities, including the rigorous and laborious digging
of 6-meter-deep snowpits!
This past year, I had the great fortune of helping to bring Lopez to Ohio State
University for a speaking engagement, and over lunch, we reminisced about that
field season together in the Antarctic. During his talk that evening, he spoke
of the relationship between humans and Antarctica, the place. Clearly his time
in Antarctica greatly affected him, and his ability to put it into words has
made others, who will never have the opportunity to see Antarctica themselves,
more interested and aware of this faraway continent.
Many interesting products have been generated from this program. These include
a series of reproductions of wonderful landscapes painted by David Rosenthal
that dot the walls of the galley at McMurdo Station, and a large number of black
and white photographs of people “at work” in Antarctica by Jim Barker
that can be found in strategic places around McMurdo, as well as in the NSF
building in Arlington, Va.
Books range from Rebecca Johnson’s Braving the Frozen Frontier,
about women working in Antarctica, and Lucy Bledsoe’s novel for middle
grades, The Antarctic Scoop, to Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent
eco-thriller, Antarctica, and Yvonne Baskin’s recently released
book, Under Ground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World. In
this book about the important contributions of soil and sediment organisms to
ecosystem health, Baskin describes the work of my colleague, Diana Wall, on
McMurdo Dry Valleys soils. The tiny nematode worms that Diana and her group
study are referred to as “the top of the food chain like lions on the savanna.”
Each of these works (and the many other excellent ones that I don’t have
the space to mention) bring the audience an Antarctic experience, be it aesthetic,
historical, philosophical or scientific. The numerous individuals who read or
view the results of these works have all learned something about the Antarctic
and the science that takes place there.
I recently read On the Ice, by Gretchen Legler, who was supported by
this program. It is subtitled as “An intimate portrait of life at McMurdo
Station.” The book is many stories rolled into one: glimpses into Antarctic
history and exploration, the descriptions and activities of people — both
scientists and the service contractors who work in Antarctica — and the
story of the author’s own search for herself and intimacy. The author’s
tale is also very personal, describing her own journey to explore her sexuality.
She discusses the unusual vagaries of human interactions in such a place as
Antarctica, while also acknowledging the same human behavior patterns that could
take place anywhere else on the planet.
I enjoyed reading Legler’s descriptions of the process of leaving McMurdo
Station, the primary travel hub from which people head north and back home via
aircraft. Known as “bag drag,” leaving can be as painful and tedious
as the term implies. Equally revealing to the non-Antarctic visitor are her
accounts of how McMurdo and Antarctic science have changed through the years
in terms of gender equity and a much more dedicated environmental ethic. For
example, Legler explains that the female population in McMurdo has gone from
zero in the 1970s to “at least 40% during the austral summer” by the
late 1990s. She calls the U.S. Antarctic stations “the most clean and ‘eco-groovy’
places on the continent.” The U.S. Antarctic Program takes environmental
issues extremely seriously, with recycling and proper disposal of all waste
done better there than in most other places in the world.
The Artists and Writers Program has now been duplicated by other Antarctic Treaty
signatory nations because it fills an important gap. It allows others besides
scientists, and tourists who can afford to go, to “come to the ice”
and partake of this beautiful but desolate place.
As Legler points out, there are other ways of seeing and knowing than just the
scientific one. This program provides the artist, the writer and the historian
the opportunity to transmit their visions of the Antarctic to the general public,
perhaps in a much more effective way than we scientists can convey our own knowledge
to the lay public.
Legler suggests that Edward Wilson was a person who saw the Antarctic from these
two different frames of reference. Wilson was Robert F. Scott’s scientific
officer on both of his Antarctic expeditions (see story, this
issue). But in addition to Wilson’s scientific duties, he was an artist
as well. Legler describes his pictures as “more valued as data, it seems,
than expressions of feeling, moments of ecstasy or experiences of the sublime.”
Wilson’s desire for accuracy drove both his science and his art.
In our age of narrow scientific focuses, the thought of Wilson as a scientist/artist
is intriguing. However, even in this day of scientific specialization, there
are still scientists/artists wandering in the McMurdo region. I think of Bill
Green, a world-class geochemist and author of the award-winning 1995 book Water,
Ice and Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes, as perhaps, the
best example.
I see that Kathleen Heideman is the current person in Antarctica supported by
this program. She is a poet and her project is entitled “The Scientific
Method — Poems of Antarctic Inquiry.” I can’t wait to read the
results!
Links:
"Can you hear me now?" Geotimes, March 2006 [Check back
later this month to read this Geologic Column.]
Back to top
“500
million years in 50 seconds: Now that’s intelligent design” was the
original title of a press release from Framestore CFC announcing their visual
effects work on a new commercial for Guinness. But “we don’t as a general
rule court controversy, so we dropped the reference to intelligent design —
besides, I felt that few people in the U.K. would even understand the reference,”
says Martin Parker, a marketing executive at Framestore CFC in London, the visual
effects and computer animation company that brought to life the TV ad, which is
airing across the United Kingdom. The commercial’s message is simple, and
to Guinness, incontrovertible: Millions of years of human evolution have directly
led people to one thing — the enjoyment of a good pint of beer. Links:
"noitulovE"
on Framestore CFC Web site
"Evolution Lessons From Infectious Diseases," Geotimes,
March 2006
"Bringing Dinosaurs to Life,"
Geotimes, June 2005
Back to top
 Plows,
Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
by William F. Ruddiman. Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN 0 6911 2164 8. Hardcover, $24.95. |
William Ruddiman has forwarded an exciting and controversial hypothesis that
is fueling a heated debate among climate scientists: Humans may have taken control
of climate thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution. In Plows,
Plagues, and Petroleum, Ruddiman details the ways that humans may have increased
atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations by land clearing and agriculture starting
8,000 years ago.
This well-written book does a great job of summarizing complex topics through
simple calculations and examples, and provides the right balance of cultural
background and scientific data. And Ruddiman’s premise is sure to stoke
the already heated debate in the scientific and economic communities.
Ruddiman’s hypothesis is both novel and controversial because it implicates
a much more significant human influence on climate than previously documented.
The story begins simply with bubbles in ice. After water vapor, carbon dioxide
and methane are the dominant greenhouse gases in terms of their contribution
to trapping solar heat. The gases’ past atmospheric concentrations have
now been well-documented hundreds of thousands of years into the past by sampling
“fossil” air that was trapped in bubbles in the polar ice sheets.
These bubbles tell a fascinating story.
Although, as Ruddiman explains, carbon dioxide and methane concentrations have
operated within “natural” bounds for at least the past 400,000 years
— responding to factors like the amount and distribution of incoming solar
radiation to Earth’s surface and carbon dioxide inputs from volcanoes —
two apparent anomalies seem to defy the natural explanations. Methane concentrations
began increasing 5,000 years ago, and carbon dioxide levels began increasing
8,000 years ago, both at times when Ruddiman suggests they should be dropping.
The timing of the methane trend coincides with the development of the rise of
agriculture in Asia — a major source of methane produced by anaerobic decomposition
of organic matter in wetlands. And the beginning of the carbon dioxide increase
coincides with widespread deforestation by Stone Age peoples in Eurasia, when
burning of biomass released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the global
atmosphere.
Thus, Ruddiman suggests that the human influence on climate began thousands
of years before the Industrial Revolution, when the release of gases through
fossil-fuel combustion has been well-documented. The smaller pre-Industrial
emissions may have been nearly 40 percent as large as the post-Industrial emissions
— truly a staggering revelation.
A huge implication of the pre-Industrial greenhouse gas releases is that humans
may have helped create the “stable” Holocene climate in which advanced
civilizations emerged for the first time in Earth’s history. These “extra”
greenhouse gases that accumulated in the atmosphere may have even helped warm
the planet enough to stop a glaciation in northeastern Canada, thus potentially
averting Earth’s gradual slip into another ice age. Ruddiman suggests that
even short-lived human population crashes over the past two millennia may have
affected the global carbon cycle and climate: Following disease pandemics when
human populations plummeted, previously deforested land lay fallow, leading
to revegetation that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This change
showed up in polar ice cores as a decrease in gas concentrations.
As may be expected for such a novel idea, Ruddiman’s hypothesis has attracted
critical attention and has yet to be completely accepted by the scientific community.
A full acceptance of his hypothesis will require additional tests, and the idea
will need to survive close scrutiny of a skeptical scientific community.
Ruddiman omits from the book some of the more technical details of the arguments,
such as the carbon cycle constraints placed by stable isotopes, and the specific
orbital configurations of past interglacial periods possibly analogous to the
current interglacial period in which we live (see story, this
issue). Additionally, since publication of Ruddiman’s book, newer and
longer ice core gas records have been produced from Antarctica that, to some
researchers, do not support Ruddiman’s hypothesis.
Regardless of the criticism, however, the beauty of his hypothesis is that it
presents a testable idea that future research can refute or validate. Even if
the hypothesis ultimately proves partially or fully incorrect, Ruddiman has
done his job as a scientist by stimulating new research directions, and for
questioning the role of humans in global climate change before the Industrial
Revolution. His idea continues to stimulate new research and modifications to
the hypothesis, and will surely be a hot topic in climate science for many years
into the future of our rapidly warming world.
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