Download or read book Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica written by Rebecca Priestley and published by Victoria University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rebecca Priestley longs to be in Antarctica. But it is also the last place on Earth she wants to go.In 2011 Priestley visits the wide white continent for the first time, on a trip that coincides with the centenary of Robert Falcon Scott's fateful trek to the South Pole. For Priestley, 2011 is the fulfilment of a dream that took root in a childhood full of books, art and science and grew stronger during her time as a geology student in the 1980s. She is to travel south twice more, spending time with Antarctic scientists &– including paleo-climatologists, biologists, geologists, glaciologists &– exploring the landscape, marvelling at wildlife from orca to tardigrades, and occasionally getting very cold.A constant companion for Priestley is her anxiety &– both the kind that is brought on by flying to the bottom of the world in a military aeroplane; and the kind that clouds our thoughts of how our world will be for our children. Writing against the backdrop of Trump's America, extreme weather events, and scientists' projections for Earth's climate, she grapples with the truths we need to tell ourselves as we stand on a tightrope between hope for the planet, and catastrophic change.Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica offers a deeply personal tour of a place in which a person can feel like an outsider in more ways than one. With generosity and candour, Priestley reflects on what Antarctica can tell us about Earth's future and asks: do people even belong in this fragile, otherworldly place?
Download or read book Antarctica written by Kim Stanley Robinson and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this novel of the near future, the icy continent will become a battleground between those who seek its natural treasures, and those who would keep this wild land untouched--no matter what the cost. "Robinson's most perfect big novel yet."--"The Washington Post."
Download or read book Inventing the American Astronaut written by Matthew H. Hersch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who were the men who led America's first expeditions into space? Soldiers? Daredevils? The public sometimes imagined them that way: heroic military men and hot-shot pilots without the capacity for doubt, fear, or worry. However, early astronauts were hard-working and determined professionals - 'organization men' - who were calm, calculating, and highly attuned to the politics and celebrity of the Space Race. Many would have been at home in corporate America - and until the first rockets carried humans into space, some seemed to be headed there. Instead, they strapped themselves to missiles and blasted skyward, returning with a smile and an inspiring word for the press. From the early days of Project Mercury to the last moon landing, this lively history demystifies the American astronaut while revealing the warring personalities, raw ambition, and complex motives of the men who were the public face of the space program.
Download or read book Southern Light written by and published by Abbeville Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A special slipcased edition of Southern Light. This collection of striking images from Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic is the result of six journeys made by Australian photographer David Neilson in his quest to capture the exquisite light of these southernmost lands. Between 2002 and 2008 he made three voyages from Ushuaia in southern Argentina to the Antarctic and the sub-Antarctic. In 2002 he sailed on the yacht Tooluka to the remote sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia in the middle of the South Atlantic. This heavily glaciated island with numerous high alpine peaks has a remarkable profusion of wildlife along its coasts. In 2006, and again in 2008, he sailed on the yacht Australis to the Antarctic Peninsula. This best-known part of Antarctica contains some of the most spectacular scenery anywhere on the planet and provides many opportunities for photographing scenes of exceptional drama and beauty.
Download or read book Hoosh written by Jason C. Anthony and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antarctica, the last place on Earth, is not famous for its cuisine. Yet it is famous for stories of heroic expeditions in which hunger was the one spice everyone carried. At the dawn of Antarctic cuisine, cooks improvised under inconceivable hardships, castaways ate seal blubber and penguin breasts while fantasizing about illustrious feasts, and men seeking the South Pole stretched their rations to the breaking point. Today, Antarctica’s kitchens still wait for provisions at the far end of the planet’s longest supply chain. Scientific research stations serve up cafeteria fare that often offers more sustenance than style. Jason C. Anthony, a veteran of eight seasons in the U.S. Antarctic Program, offers a rare workaday look at the importance of food in Antarctic history and culture. Anthony’s tour of Antarctic cuisine takes us from hoosh (a porridge of meat, fat, and melted snow, often thickened with crushed biscuit) and the scurvy-ridden expeditions of Shackleton and Scott through the twentieth century to his own preplanned three hundred meals (plus snacks) for a two-person camp in the Transantarctic Mountains. The stories in Hoosh are linked by the ingenuity, good humor, and indifference to gruel that make Anthony’s tale as entertaining as it is enlightening.
Download or read book Mad on Radium written by Rebecca Priestley and published by Auckland University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although New Zealander Lord Rutherford was the first to split the atom, the country has since been known around the world for its nuclear-free stance. In this engaging and accessible book, an alternative history is revealed of "nuclear New Zealand"—when there was much enthusiasm for nuclear science and technology. From the first users of X-rays and radium in medicine to the plans for a nuclear power station on the Kaipara Harbour, this account uncovers the long and rich history of New Zealanders' engagement with the nuclear world and the roots of its nuclear-free identity.
Download or read book Race to the South Pole written by Roald Amundsen and published by White Star Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part historical essay, part scientific article, and part enthralling diary-Roald Amundsen's (1872-1928) book presents intriguing documentation about how his expedition reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, just one month ahead of his rival, Robert Scott. Amundsen organized his gripping account using what is referred to in the film industry as the zooming technique. It starts in the past, examining the history of Antarctic exploration in different eras, and then moves ahead to describe how his own expedition was created, its organization, the slow stages involved in preparing for departure and, finally, the heart-stopping excitement of the race to the South Pole. Supplementing the vivid first-person text are black-and-white archival photographs illustrating the actual expedition, and color photographs depicting the landscape of Antarctica.
Download or read book Antarctica Journey to the Pole written by Peter Lerangis and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA father and his sons embark on a perilous trek to the ends of the earth /divDIV/divDIVIt is May 1909, and the race to the South Pole is on. For years, Jack Winslow has dreamed of conquering the frozen wasteland, but just before he sets sail, his wife dies suddenly. Rather than cancel the voyage, he brings his two grief-stricken sons, Colin and Andrew, on the adventure of a lifetime./divDIV /divDIVAlthough the teenagers have read widely of the Antarctic and the icy, unforgiving sea that surrounds it, no book could prepare them for the journey ahead. Killer whales, temperatures as low as –100°F, and deadly crushing ice floes are only the beginning of their troubles. To survive this trip, the Winslows will have to set aside their grief and come together as a family./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Peter Lerangis including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection./divDIV /divDIV/div
Download or read book A Memory of Ice written by Elizabeth Truswell and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the southern summer of 1972/73, the Glomar Challenger was the first vessel of the international Deep Sea Drilling Project to venture into the seas surrounding Antarctica, confronting severe weather and ever-present icebergs. A Memory of Ice presents the science and the excitement of that voyage in a manner readable for non-scientists. Woven into the modern story is the history of early explorers, scientists and navigators who had gone before into the Southern Ocean. The departure of the Glomar Challenger from Fremantle took place 100 years after the HMS Challenger weighed anchor from Portsmouth, England, at the start of its four-year voyage, sampling and dredging the world’s oceans. Sailing south, the Glomar Challenger crossed the path of James Cook’s HMS Resolution, then on its circumnavigation of Antarctica in search of the Great South Land. Encounters with Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the US Exploring Expedition and Douglas Mawson of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition followed. In the Ross Sea, the voyages of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror under James Clark Ross, with the young Joseph Hooker as botanist, were ever present. The story of the Glomar Challenger’s iconic voyage is largely told through the diaries of the author, then a young scientist experiencing science at sea for the first time. It weaves together the physical history of Antarctica with how we have come to our current knowledge of the polar continent. This is an attractive, lavishly illustrated and curiosity-satisfying read for the general public as well as for scholars of science.
Download or read book The Passage to Cosmos written by Laura Dassow Walls and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry. Humboldt’s science laid the foundations for ecology and inspired the theories of his most important scientific disciple, Charles Darwin. In the United States, his ideas shaped the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman. They helped spark the American environmental movement through followers like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. And they even bolstered efforts to free the slaves and honor the rights of Indians. Laura Dassow Walls here traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.
Download or read book Ice Lens written by Rebecca Priestley and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Crystal Desert written by David G. Campbell and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002-05-07 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author and biologist shares “a superb personal account [of Antarctica] . . . a remarkable evocation of a land at the bottom of the world” (Boston Globe). During the 1980s, biologist David Campbell spent three summers in Antarctica, researching its surprisingly plentiful wildlife. In The Crystal Desert, he combines travelogue, nature writing and science history to tell the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. Between scuba expeditions in Admiralty Bay, Campbell remembers the explorers who discovered Antarctica, the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and the scientists who laid the groundwork to decipher its mysteries. Chronicling the desperately short summers in beautiful, lucid prose, he presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and of the continent itself. Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing and a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship
Download or read book The Lost White Tribe written by Michael Frederick Robinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael F. Robinson traces the rise and fall of the Hamitic Hypothesis, the theory that whites had lived in Africa since antiquity, which held sway in Europe and in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Download or read book The White Darkness written by David Grann and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager, a thrilling and powerful true story of adventure and obsession in the Antarctic, lavishly illustrated with color photographs. "[Grann is] one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honor and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the nineteenth-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton never completed his journeys, but he repeatedly rescued his men from certain death, and emerged as one of the greatest leaders in history. Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. He was related to one of Shackleton's men, Frank Worsley, and spent a fortune collecting artifacts from their epic treks across the continent. He modeled his military command on Shackleton's legendary skills and was determined to measure his own powers of endurance against them. He would succeed where Shackleton had failed, in the most brutal landscape in the world. In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape, life-threatening physical exhaustion, and hidden crevasses. Yet when he returned home he felt compelled to go back. On November 13, 2015, at age 55, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone. David Grann tells Worsley's remarkable story with the intensity and power that have led him to be called "simply the best narrative nonfiction writer working today." Illustrated with more than fifty stunning photographs from Worsley's and Shackleton's journeys, The White Darkness is both a gorgeous keepsake volume and a spellbinding story of courage, love, and a man pushing himself to the extremes of human capacity. Look for David Grann’s latest bestselling book, The Wager!
Download or read book Glacial Geology written by Matthew M. Bennett and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new Second Edition of Glacial Geology provides a modern, comprehensive summary of glacial geology and geomorphology. It is has been thoroughly revised and updated from the original First Edition. This book will appeal to all students interested in the landforms and sediments that make up glacial landscapes. The aim of the book is to outline glacial landforms and sediments and to provide the reader with the tools required to interpret glacial landscapes. It describes how glaciers work and how the processes of glacial erosion and deposition which operate within them are recorded in the glacial landscape. The Second Edition is presented in the same clear and concise format as the First Edition, providing detailed explanations that are not cluttered with unnecessary detail. Additions include a new chapter on Glaciations around the Globe, demonstrating the range of glacial environments present on Earth today and a new chapter on Palaeoglaciology, explaining how glacial landforms and sediments are used in ice-sheet reconstructions. Like the original book, text boxes are used throughout to explain key concepts and to introduce students to case study material from the glacial literature. Newly updated sections on Further Reading are also included at the end of each chapter to point the reader towards key references. The book is illustrated throughout with colour photographs and illustrations.
Download or read book Antarctic Climate Evolution written by Fabio Florindo and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2008-10-10 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antarctic Climate Evolution is the first book dedicated to furthering knowledge on the evolution of the world's largest ice sheet over its ~34 million year history. This volume provides the latest information on subjects ranging from terrestrial and marine geology to sedimentology and glacier geophysics. - An overview of Antarctic climate change, analyzing historical, present-day and future developments - Contributions from leading experts and scholars from around the world - Informs and updates climate change scientists and experts in related areas of study
Download or read book Vostok written by Steve Alten and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East Antarctica: The coldest, most desolate location on Earth. Two-and-a-half miles below the ice cap is Vostok, a six thousand square mile liquid lake, over a thousand feet deep, left untouched for more than fifteen million years. Now, marine biologist Zachary Wallace and two other scientists aboard a submersible tethered to a laser will journey 13,000 feet beneath the ice into this unexplored realm to discover Mesozoic life forms long believed extinct--and an object of immense power responsible for the evolution of modern man. In this sequel to The Loch and prequel to MEG: Nightstalkers, New York Times bestselling author Steve Alten offers readers a crossover novel that combines characters from two of his most popular series. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
