Antarctica 2041
Chapter One
9780767931755|excerpt
Swan: Antarctica 2041
The Beardmore
In the Antarctic summer of 1985 I found myself standing at the inland margin of the Ross Ice Shelf, a crevasse-riven, glacier-fed formation about the size of France. A France without baguettes and cathedrals. A totally Paris-less France.
The ice beneath me ran down a thousand feet. Underneath that, the Bible-black darkness of a cold, unexplored sea.
There were reasons why the Ross Sea remained unexplored. A New Zealand fishing boat once pulled from its waters a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, to distinguish the species from its smaller cousin, the merely giant squid) more than thirty feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds. That's what they had down there, that and God knows what other creatures. Perhaps only Captain Nemo could have handled it.
To report my location on the Ross Ice Shelf above the Ross Sea, in other words, is another way of saying that I was in the middle of frozen nowhere, perched on the brink of an enormous nothingness. "A silence deep with a breath like sleep" is how one man who died there put ... read full excerpt from: Antarctica 2041 ebook
