Lost Antarctica
Adventures in a Disappearing Land
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The bitter cold and three months a year without sunlight make Antarctica virtually uninhabitable for humans. Yet a world of extraordinary wildlife persists in these harsh conditions, including leopard seals, giant squid, 50-foot algae, sea spiders, coral, multicolored sea stars, and giant predatory worms. Now, as temperatures rise, this fragile ecosystem is under attack. In this closely observed account, one of the world's foremost experts on Antarctica gives us a highly original and distinctive look at a world that we're losing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Endowed Professor of polar and marine biology at the University of Alabama Birmingham, McClintock distills 28 years of research and 13 field expeditions to the seventh continent in his first book of popular science: an eminently readable, reasonable call to arms regarding the dangers of climate change to both the fragile Antarctic ecosystem and the planet as a whole. Each chapter covers a different angle of the problem, from the deleterious effects of increasing ocean acidification to invasions of the Antarctic Shelf by king crabs spurred by warming waters, as McClintock steadily and carefully builds his case for Antarctica as "the earth's most well-suited natural laboratory" in which to study the impacts of climate change. Though the lab results can be scary, his kinetic, awestruck descriptions of "the Ice" paint breathtaking pictures, such as when he is "flying by helicopter down the gut-dropping length of the Taylor Dry Valley and erupting out of its mouth over the deep-blue waters set against the sparkling white expanse of McMurdo Sound's ice edge." Charming and anecdote-filled, the book's only failing is that McClintock occasionally gets lost in thickets of scientific jargon, but like your favorite undergraduate science professor, he finds a way to make the most difficult, esoteric concepts accessible to the layperson. Photos.
Customer Reviews
Must Read
Unbelievably great book!
Good Overview of Many Issues Facing Antarctica
An enlightening memoir of several decades of a scientist on missions to Antarctica. Some basic and useful information for the first-time traveller to Antarctica, but I think the experienced Antarctica traveller would find much of this book too basic.
Some odd expressions crept into McClintock’s writing that a competent editor would have caught: in discussing leopard seals, McClintock writes that ‘teeth are designed to tear and shred penguin and seal prey.’ (Teeth ‘evolved’, teeth are not ‘designed’); and in discussing crabeater seals, McClintock writes that ‘one of their most unique features is their dentition.’ Sorry, there no degrees of uniqueness.