Eve here. I remember in 2007 when I was invited to the Open House of Explorers Club in New York City. It has made it clear that all people, explorers and scientists who have recently visited the Arctic Circle are already dramatic and vigilant about the warming in its polar regions by historical standards. However, this was a time when climate studies were successful in portraying them as too speculative to measure seriously.
This work provides a useful overview of the areas where EF sightings do not always give them the audience they deserve, yet a cohort of scientists and explorers visits and reports regularly.
Jaime Herndon, science writer and editor Hoe Work has appeared in publications such as Book Riot, Goaset/Eastern Mountain Sports, Healthline, and American Scientist. Originally published on Undark
It is a symbolic image: a polar bear perched on a lonely ice cap floating in the sea. Is fateful climate change prepared for this powerful Arctic inhabitant? 2004, discovery of the jaws of a fossil polar bear in Svalbad, another possibility for forest forests to the Norwegian Islands. The fossils came from bears that lived 110,000 to 130,000 years ago.
However, studies of genomes extracted from fossils showed that ancient bears have more great diversity than modern polar bears. Scientists have assumed that when ice has declined in the past few millennia, polar bears may move to the land and be buried with brown bears, herpels may adapt to warmer climates. Polar bears today may not carry either, as they probably have fewer genetic resources.
Book Review – “The End of Earth: A Journey to the Polar Lands in Search of Life, the Universe, Our Future,” Neil Schvin (Dutton, p. 288).
It is one of many condemned discoveries covered in “Earth of Earth: A Journey to the Polar Lands in Search of Life, Cosmos, Our Future.” And the tenuous fate of the polar bear suggests a question at the heart of his story.
Polar regions account for only 8% of the Earth’s total surface, but the impact is much greater than expected. “Nearly 70 freshwater plants on all planets are frozen in ice,” writes Shubin. “On land, polar permafrost holds 160 billion tonnes of carbon, about double that across the entire atmosphere today.”
“Confined in the poles of the earth and ice are what shapes the future of our planet,” I continued. “From the origins of our species to the establishment of our social structure and technology, the event milestones of human evolution occurred during the polar ice age.”
Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago, led decades in the Arctic and Antarctic. In the Canadian Arctic Circle, which considers its important evolutionary connection between fish and humans, 375 million-year-old fossils are surrounded by the Canadian Arctic Circle.
In his new book, Shubin brings the polar world back to life through a combination of travel and immersive science writing. He takes readers to Antarctica, Canada, Norway and institutes around the world, and talks with scientists in fields ranging from paleoclimatology to geology. Along the way, Shubin explores adaptations that allow the changes in plants, animals and topography needed to survive in harsh polar climates to tell us about our world, as well as the stories that ice tell us through metstones embedded for millions of years. It is also a story of polar exploration. That is, methods and tools that have been fine-tuned over time, including those developed by Indigenous communities.
And finally, it is the story of the environment itself. Particularly the deep changes to these landscapes due to pole flanges and global warming. For example, Shubin wrote about the effects of hundreds of wildfires that occurred in Siberia in 2021: “At the carbon-rich Pedat Underground, the fire was smoldering under the ice for several months.”
The Arctic does not usually have lightning bolts that can cause thunderstorms and wildfires, but since 2010, the Arctic summer lightning incident has tripled,” he writes. “In recent years, lightning has even hit less than 6,000 people in the Arctic.” IT SEM, a rising temperature in the region, has promoted more frequent and longer storms.
The first chapter, entitled “Ice Is Hot,” names the glacier experts from the description given to Shubin by Sridhar Anandakrishnan during an expedition to the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Water is a solid, liquid, or gas in a rather narrow temperature spectrum, and he is handed over and “due to the physics of the molecule, ice gets hot with the heat of the temperature required to dissolve in the liquid”, especially with other materials such as steel. Also, ice under high pressure melts at even lower temperatures, so the bottom layer of the glacier is “in a melted state.”
The ever-changing nature of ice is a recurring theme. Glacier ice can be multiple at once in a variety of places. Liquid, some solid. It can be met, breathed, endured, and acted like a gel. It goes against a simple explanation, and Shubin notes that Inuktitat language uses different combinations of words and phrases to explain the different properties and properties of ice.
We explored an astounding variety of plants, insects and animals that have adapted to polar water. Arthur DeBrees, for example, was a physiologist at the University of Illinois who worked at McMurdo Station in the 1960s and found an attractive protein in the blood of icefish. This protein had a structure that allowed it to bind to ice crystals to prevent cells from growing and damaging. When he and his colleagues arranged the proteins, they found it was roughly the same as the digestive proteins of fish liver. “This liver protein was reused in antifreeze in Icifish’s Ancets due to some small mutations over time,” I concluded. Since then, the variety “antiphase compounds have been found in a variety of fish, insects, plants and fungi that live in both the Northern and Antarctic regions.”
But the poles don’t just provide clues to how to live on Earth. Since the first met stone was discovered in Antarctica in 1912, more than 50,000 people have been recovered from Antarctica, providing a glimpse into the history of space. Planets and others.
Shubin’s direct response to the effects of global warming on the polar regions is only towards the end. Permafrost, the ground that has been frozen or under frozen for at least two years, accounts for about 15 peccents in the Northern Hemisphere. If it melts, the results can be devastating. “Melting permafrost changes the landscape, and liquid water reduces the volume of ice. One of the craters of Batagai in the Far East of Russia began to form in the 1970s and is now about half a mile long, expanding 20 feet each year.
Meanwhile, Arctic communities are learning to adapt as best as strategies that involve relocation. The erosion of water and land in Encloakulasi forced the villages below Askan to undergo complicated processes of moving the entire town, making them even more complicated in remote areas. The Newtok community is successfully lobbying the federal government’s Emergency Management Agency to help secure federal funding and establish new villages, Shubin writes, but building housing remains a challenge. In December 2024, with nearly 20 families living in a temporary small home on the Newtown Site, Newtok’s critical infrastructure was turned and the final packaging of nearly 400 residents was finished.
As Shubin shows in “the edge of the earth,” harsh polar regions pose extreme challenges not only for humans but for all living things. But through adaptation, life finds its way. “Polar success and longevity are completely different subjects from other places,” Schvin reflects in the final chapter of the book. “It’s a story of survival of resilience.”
