The Magnetic North

Some people can't stay away from cold places. Wheeler here recounts her travels to the Arctic Circle, the polar opposite of the Antarctic trek recorded in her best-selling Terra Incognita. The Arctic Circle crops Canada, Alaska, regions of Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland, and assorted islands. It is an area of fragile life, where native peoples survived in close balance with the land long before the disruption of shoe-eating explorers, missionaries, the Gulag, and geologists. The Arctic has been a last frontier, land of mythmaking, and victim of greed for the gas, oil, diamonds, and gold of the land and the blubber beneath the shrinking ice. Wheeler visits scientists doggedly studying the history of the ice and the impact of climate change and describes the isolation and beauty of their barren open laboratories. Remains of human travel and habitation, the imposition of nationhood, and the degradation of the landscape as well as less visible radioactive and chemical contamination all affect this landscape.