Ice Diaries

Book excerpt: What do we stand to lose in a world without ice? A decade ago, novelist and short story writer Jean McNeil spent a year as writer in residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world's most enigmatic continent, Antarctica. Access to the Antarctic remains largely reserved for scientists, and it is the only piece of earth which is nobody's country. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil's years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent. In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice. In entering this world, McNeil unexpectedly finds herself confronting her own upbringing in the Maritimes, the lifelong effects of growing up in a cold place, and how the climates of childhood frame our emotional thermodynamics for life. Ice Diaries is a haunting story of the relationship between beauty and terror, loss and abandonment, transformation and triumph.