South Pole Station

Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Fiction A warmhearted comedy of errors set in the world’s harshest place, Ashley Shelby's South Pole Station is a wry and witty debut novel about the courage it takes to band together when everything around you falls apart. Do you have digestion problems due to stress? Do you have problems with authority? How many alcoholic drinks to you consume a week? Would you rather be a florist or a truck driver? These are some of the questions that determine if you have what it takes to survive at South Pole Station, a place with an average temperature of -54°F and no sunlight for six months a year. Cooper Gosling has just answered five hundred of them. Her results indicate she is abnormal enough for Polar life. Cooper’s not sure if this is an achievement, but she knows she has nothing to lose. Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, she’s adrift at thirty and—despite her early promise as a painter—on the verge of sinking her career. So she accepts her place in the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica, where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. The only thing the Polies have in common is the conviction that they don’t belong anywhere else. Then a fringe scientist arrives, claiming climate change is a hoax. His presence will rattle this already-imbalanced community, bringing Cooper and the Polies to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

Winter owns most of the year at the South Pole, starting in mid-February and ending in early November. Total darkness lasts for months, temperatures can drop below -100 degrees Fahrenheit, and windchill can push temperatures to -140 degrees. At those temperatures a person not protected with specialized clothing and an understanding of how to wear it would be reduced to an icicle within minutes. Few people on the planet can say they know what it feels like to walk in the unworldly, frigid winter darkness at the South Pole, but Wayne L. White can—having walked several thousand miles and never missing a day outside during his stay, regardless of the conditions. As the winter site manager of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, White was responsible for the selection, training, and health and safety of the forty-two- and forty-six-person crews. Motivated by the determination and bravery of historical pioneers such as Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton, White honed his leadership skills to guide a diverse group of experienced and talented craftsmen, scientists, and artisans through three winters, the longest term of any winter manager. Despite hardships, disasters, and watching helpless as a global pandemic unfolded far beyond their horizon, his crews prevailed. In Cold White documents his time in these extreme elements and offers a unique perspective on the United States Antarctic Program at the South Pole.

It takes a special person to work in the extreme environment of Antarctica, but many scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians do. A vivid picture of life in the freezing conditions of the South Pole is painted through the photographs in this book. Readers will learn the many kinds of jobs involved in running a polar research center as well as what Antarctic workers do in their free time.

As one of two points where the Earth’s axis meets its surface, the South Pole should be a precisely defined place. But as Elizabeth Leane shows in this book, conceptually it is a place of paradoxes. An invisible spot on a high, featureless ice plateau, the Pole has no obvious material value, yet it is a highly sought-after location, and reaching it on foot is one of the most extreme adventures an explorer can undertake. The Pole is, as Leane shows, a deeply imagined place, and a place of politics, where a series of national claims converge. Leane details the important challenges that the South Pole poses to humanity, asking what it can teach us about ourselves and our relationship with our planet. She examines its allure for explorers such as Robert F. Scott and Roald Amundsen, not to mention the myriad writers and artists who have attempted to capture its strange, inhospitable blankness. She considers the Pole’s advantages for climatologists and other scientists as well as the absurdities and banalities of human interaction with this place. Ranging from the present all the way back to the ancient Greeks, she offers a fascinating—and lavishly illustrated—story about one of the strangest and most important places on Earth.

The Antarctic is the last vast terrestrial frontier. Just over a century ago, no one had ever seen the South Pole. Today odd machines and adventure skiers from many nations converge there every summer, arriving from numerous starting points on the Antarctic coast and returning some other way. But not until very recently has anyone completed a roundtrip from McMurdo Station, the U.S. support hub on the continental coast. The last man to try that perished in 1912. The valuable surface route from McMurdo remained elusive until John H. Wright and his crew finished the job in 2006. Blazing Ice is the story of the team of Americans who forged a thousand-mile transcontinental ôhaul routeö across Antarctica. For decades airplanes from McMurdo Station supplied the South Pole. A safe and repeatable surface haul route would have been cheaper and more environmentally benign than airlift, but the technology was not available until 2000. As Wright reveals in this gripping narrative, the hazards of Antarctic terrain and weather were as daunting for twenty-firstcentury pioneers as they were for NorwayÆs Roald Amundsen and EnglandÆs Robert Falcon Scott when they raced to be first to the South Pole in 1911û1912. Wright and his team faced deadly hidden crevasses, vast snow swamps, the Transantarctic Mountains, badlands of weird windsculpted ice, and the high Polar Plateau. Blazing Ice will appeal to Antarctic aficionados, conservationists, and adventure readers of all stripes.