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Examines major changes in scientific understanding that followed the adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 and the completion of the period of initial formation of the ozone protection regime. Returns to the two disturbing claims made in 1985 — extreme seasonal ozone loss in Antarctica, and large ozone loss worldwide — and traces their investigation over the following three years, their initial resolution in the year after the Protocol, and the consequences of their resolution in spreading calls to completely eliminate ozone‐depleting chemicals (chlorofluorohydrocarbons (CFCs)). The early development of the Protocol's expert assessment panels is also discussed; these are the centrepieces of the regime's structure to adapt to changing knowledge and capabilities.

This chapter considers New Zealand’s strong connection to, and evolving relationship with, Antarctica. New Zealand staked a claim to the Ross Dependency in 1923; in 1958 Sir Edmund Hillary completed the first overland crossing of Antarctica. New Zealand was a signatory to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, and in 1979 the plane crash at Mount Erebus cemented this location in the national psyche as a dangerous, dark place. This chapter identifies both significant historical events in which New Zealand has had an imperial presence, and current connections to Antarctica, at a time when artists, poets and writers have joined scientists in maintaining, developing and inventing the relationship between New Zealand and Antarctica.

Weathering is a necessary precursor for landform development. However, in the context of granite it acquires a particular importance for various reasons. First, many granite terrains show an extensive development of deep weathering profiles, which can be extremely varied in terms of their depth, vertical zonation, degree of rock decomposition, and mineralogical and chemical change. Moreover, the transitional zone between the weathering mantle and the solid rock, for which the term ‘weathering front’ is used (Mabbutt, 1961b), may be very thin. There is now sufficient evidence that many geomorphic features of granite landscapes, including boulders, domes, and plains, have been sculpted at the solid rock/weathering mantle interface and they are essentially elements of an exposed weathering front. Therefore, the origin of granite landscapes cannot be satisfactorily explained and understood without a proper understanding of the phenomenon of deep weathering. Second, granites break down via a range of weathering mechanisms, both physical and chemical, which interact to produce an extreme diversity of small-scale surface features and minor landforms. In this respect, it is only limestones and some sandstones which show a similar wealth of weathering-related surface phenomena. Third, both superficial and deep weathering of granite act very selectively, exploiting a variety of structural and textural features, including fractures, microfractures, veins, enclaves, and textural inhomogeneities. In effect, the patterns of rock breakdown may differ very much between adjacent localities, and so the resultant landforms differ. In the context of deep weathering, selectivity is evident in significant changes of profile thickness and its properties over short distances, and in the presence of unweathered compartments (corestones) within an altered rock mass. Fourth, it is emphasized that granites are particularly sensitive to the amount of moisture in the environment (Bremer, 1971; Twidale, 1982). They alter very fast in moist environments, whereas moisture deficit enhances rock resistance and makes it very durable. Hence, a bare rock slope shedding rainwater and drying up quickly after rain will be very much immune to weathering, whereas at its foot a surplus of moisture will accelerate decomposition.

Boulders, tors and inselbergs (Plates III, IV, V) are regarded as the most characteristic individual geomorphological features of granite landscapes and it is their assemblages extending over large areas that give granite terrains their unmistakable appearance. Although none of these landforms is unique to granite, nor even specific to basement rocks, it is perhaps true that the most astounding ones occur within granite areas. Twidale (1982) in his Granite Landforms considered boulders and inselbergs as two key individual components of granite landscapes and devoted to them almost 100 pages, whereas the other major landforms received only 35. Likewise, rock-built residual hills figure prominently in Klimamorphologie des Massengesteine by Wilhelmy (1958). In the voluminous literature about inselbergs, papers focused on those developed in granite evidently prevail (see the reviews by Kesel, 1973 and Thomas, 1978). Likewise, granite tors, especially in classic areas such as Dartmoor (Gerrard, 1994a) do not cease to attract the attention of geomorphologists. The unifying characteristic of all three landforms considered in this section is that they are essentially outcrops of solid rock rising above a surface cut across a weathering mantle, even if the thickness and lithology of the weathering mantle may be very variable. Outside arid areas there are very few examples of tors and inselbergs, surrounded by a rock-cut platform. Therefore, the discussion about their origin and significance has inevitably been tied to the increasing recognition of the significance of deep weathering. Twidale (1981a, 1982, 2002) reviewed many early accounts and concluded that selective subsurface weathering and subsequent exposure of unweathered cores to form boulders and inselbergs had been appreciated as early as the end of the eighteenth century. Nowadays, there is little doubt that the majority of individual medium-scale granite landforms are due to selective subsurface weathering. Before the presentation of residual granite landforms commences, a few terminological issues need to be raised. Although it may appear that the distinction between boulders, tors, and inselbergs is a simple task, it is in fact not at all straightforward.

Rock slopes developed in granite may take different forms, as reflected in their longitudinal profiles. Field observations and a literature survey (e.g. Dumanowski, 1964; Young, 1972) allow us to distinguish at least five major categories of slopes: straight, convex-upward, concave, stepped, and vertical rock walls. In addition, overhang slopes may occur, but their height is seldom more than 10 m high and their occurrence is very localized. These basic categories may combine to form compound slopes, for example convex-upward in the upper part and vertical towards the footslope. Somewhat different is Young’s (1972) attempt to identify most common morphologies of granite slopes. He lists six major categories: (1) bare rock domes, smoothly rounded or faceted; (2) steep and irregular bare rock slopes of castellated residual hills, tending towards rectangular forms; (3) concave slopes crowned by a free face; (4) downslope succession of free face, boulder-covered section and pediment; (5) roughly straight or concave slopes, but having irregular, stepped microrelief; (6) smooth convex-concave profile with a continuous regolith cover. The latter, lacking any outcrops of sound bedrock, are not considered as rock slopes for the purposes of this section. Young (1972) appears to seek explanation of this variety in climatic differences between regions, claiming that ‘Variations of slope form associated with climatic differences are as great as or greater, on both granite and limestone, than the similarity of form arising from lithology’ (Young, 1972: 219). This is a debatable statement and apparently contradicted by numerous field examples of co-existence of different forms in relatively small areas. Slope forms do not appear specifically subordinate to larger landforms but occur in different local and regional geomorphic settings. For example, the slopes of the Tenaya Creek valley in the Yosemite National Park include, in different sections of the valley, straight, vertical, convex-upward, and concave variants (Plate 5.1). Apparently, multiple glaciation was unable to give the valley a uniform cross-sectional shape.

This chapter considers William Payne’s 1912 novel Three Boys in Antarctica in light of the Robinsonade genre - in particular as an example of a text which relocates the tropical desert-island setting to the icy world of the Antarctic. It argues that, while the story does contain some traditional elements of the Robinsonade narrative, the Antarctic setting has a significant impact on the text’s underlying didactics. The chapter also argues for the importance of spatial considerations within the Robinsonade genre and offers a reconsideration of the traditional topography of the genre, underlining the significant relationship between the space of the text and the characters who inhabit it. Instead of celebrating the adventuring spirit of the traditional Robinsonades, the chapter concludes that Payne’s tale is a cautionary one, and one which seeks to undo the political heritage of the Robinsonade genre at large.

The 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is a path-breaking example of the ecosystem approach to resource conservation and management. It essentially broke the mould in wildlife regulation, departing from the traditional approach of regulating exploitation of species or groups of species. Instead, CCAMLR adopts a modern multispecies ecosystem approach — an approach which now underpins a number of modern environmental treaties, including the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, which has adopted it ‘as a framework for the analysis and implementation of the objectives of the Convention’. In 1991, the negotiation of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty elevated ecosystem protection to a component of all activities in Antarctica. It designates Antarctica as a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science, and requires comprehensive protection of the Antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosystems. Together the Protocol and CCAMLR comprehensively cover the marine and terrestrial ecosystems to the Antarctic. However, it is the marine ecosystem which contains most of Antarctica's flora and fauna, and where the CCAMLR pioneered an ecosystem approach to management. This chapter focuses on the ecosystem approach as it has developed under the CCAMLR. It then evaluates the Antarctic contribution to the protection of ecosystems under international law.

When I started my doctoral research in October 1973 I never imagined that I would spend so much of my career thinking about fire. I had not considered fire as an agent of change on Earth, or that charcoal deposits may preserve its long history on the planet. I had never thought of fire as a preservational mechanism for fossil plants, producing charcoal that would show their anatomy so that they could be identified, and help us to piece together the vegetation that must have clothed the land millions of years ago. In all my years of collecting fossils as a child and student I had never found, or at least noticed, any fossil charcoal. I had wanted to look at the ecology of the plants that were found during the Carboniferous, 300 million years ago. The natural approach was to look at the large fossil plants that could easily be found in rocks such as the Coal Measures that are often found scattered on old coal tips. But many smaller plant fragments are also preserved in the rocks. I started a programme of dissolving the rocks in acids and obtaining residues of the fossil plants that remained. The rocks are made up of minerals that dissolve in different acids from the plant fossils, which are made of organic material. It was hard work, and I spent many hours a day picking through the plant fragment residues, which were about the size of tea leaves, trying to identify what the fragments represented. Incredibly, at that time, few researchers had tried to look at plant fossils in this way. I soon noticed a large number of fragments that looked like charcoal, and examined these with an SEM. Under the SEM the astonishing detail in the charcoalified leaves was revealed (BW Plate 6). The small needle-like leaves had two beautifully preserved rows of stomata. But what kind of plant did they come from? I took the material to Bill Chaloner, who was one of the world’s authorities on the lycopods, one of the most common plants found in the coal measures.

What kind of world dawned after the K/P boundary? We know from studies across localities in the USA that there is evidence of frequent wildfires continuing into the earliest Paleogene. But what happened to the atmospheric oxygen level after recovery from the K/P mass extinction—did it remain above modern levels? Were we still in a high-fire world? If there were fires, what is the evidence in the charcoal record, and do we know anything about the vegetation that was burning? When the charcoal in the coal database was originally compiled, one of the important issues was how we recorded and represented our data. Early to mid-Paleocene Epoch coals (from around 65 to 55 million years ago) are often recorded as ‘earliest Tertiary’ in coal literature. (The Tertiary was the name we used to use for what we now call the Paleogene and Neogene Periods, stretching from around 65 to 1 million years ago.) However, coals that are nearer to the start of the Eocene Epoch, just older than 55 million years ago, are notoriously difficult to date. This is a problem we have with many coal sequences, as they are deposited on land, and most of the fossils used to give ages are found in marine waters. Many coals of this age are often simply recorded as coming from the late Paleocene or early Eocene. Where we have good dating information, Paleocene coals all tend to have high inertinite (charcoal) contents, well above 19 per cent. By the mid to late Eocene (50–40 million years ago), however, worldwide the charcoal contents are low, around 5 per cent or even less. There must, therefore, have been a fundamental change in the Earth system at this time. Another problem is the way in which we chose to represent our data and show the calculated oxygen curve. In order to get sufficient data to plot the curves we decided to use 10-millionyear bins. This was not a problem for the Paleozoic–Mesozoic transition, covering the great Permian mass extinction, which took place 250 million years ago.

This chapter outlines the long history of exploration in early modern and modern science, as well as changing theories about human adaptation, evolution, and acclimatization. It reviews the philosophical and historical arguments about the role of field work in scientific research and discovery, especially in human biology and medicine. It outlines what is meant by "extreme physiology" and considers how it is possible to write inclusive history within a topic that is so traditionally gendered as male, and is dominated by Western voices. It also outlines the arguments and ideas of the chapters that follow.

This chapter looks at the history of physiological work in Antarctica and other extreme environments, to show how small and exclusive communities of highly networked scientists and explorers formed around the emerging discipline of extreme and survival physiology. Given that extreme physiologists work in environments that are impossible to control, and conduct experiments that are⁠—at best—extremely difficult to replicate, this chapter examines how they established their expertise, and asserted the factual nature of their discoveries when their practices were so different from "traditional" modern science in the tightly controlled and replicable laboratory setting. As much of this authority was based on interpersonal networks, it also excluded certain groups of people: most notably women, and the indigenous and non-Western populations of the environments being explored. This chapter also highlights the deeply informal nature of much exchange within this global network, which was facilitated by informal meetings, letters, and the sharing of material culture in the form of objects and biomedical samples.

This chapter examines the encounter between non-Western and Western knowledge in extreme environments, particularly focusing on technologies of survival; it makes the case for expanding our understanding of "bioprospecting" to include material culture and technology. It argues that "local knowledge" can be usefully divided into three categories: embodied knowledge, environmental knowledge, and survival technologies, and outlines the ways in which "indigenous knowledge" could be transformed—through erasure, reinvention, or being "proved right"—to make it acceptable to Western scientists and explorers (and a broader public). It also presents new understandings of the "local," especially in places without an indigenous population, where "local" knowledge could be universalized across (sometimes dissimilar) global environments.

Our attempts to reconstruct the climate of the distant Archaean in Chapter 1 might seem a little like reading a volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace recovered from a burnt-out house. Most of the pages have turned to ash, and only some scattered sentences remain on a few charred pages. The Proterozoic Eon that followed began 2.5 billion years ago, thus is not quite so distant from us in time. We know it a little better than the Archaean—at least a handful of pages from its own book have survived. And this book is long—the Proterozoic lasted nearly two billion years. This is as long as the Hadean and Archaean together, and not far short of half of Earth’s history. Like many a soldier’s account of war, it combined long periods of boredom and brief intervals of terror—or their climatic equivalents, at least. The latter included the most intense glaciations that ever spread across the Earth. Some of these may have converted the planet into one giant snowball. The earliest traces of glaciation on Earth are seen even before the Proterozoic, in rock strata of Archaean age, 2.9 billion years old, near the small South African town of Pongola. These rocks include sedimentary deposits called tillites, which are essentially a jumble of rock fragments embedded in finer sediment. The vivid, old-fashioned term for such deposits is ‘boulder clays’, while the newer and more formal name is ‘till’ for a recent deposit and ‘tillite’ for the hardened, ancient version. Many of the ancient blocks and boulders in the tillites of Pongola are grooved and scratched—a tell-tale sign that they have been dragged along the ground by debris-rich ice. This kind of evidence is among the first ever employed by scientists of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Louis Agassiz and William Buckland, to tell apart ice-transported sediments from superficially similar ones that had formed as boulder-rich slurries when rivers flooded or volcanoes erupted. Ice, then, appeared on Earth in Archaean times.

This chapter examines Jenny Diski's travel memoirs Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America with Interruptions, suggesting that these works celebrate the dislocating nature of travel and urge one to position oneself as an outsider, peering in (or, turning away). It argues that though Diski offered up a portrait of herself as knowing, she is also a withholding author, who played with the idea of discovery and revelation only to deny the ultimate effectiveness of both.

Virtually all the whales obtained in Shark Bay were delivered to the factory ship on the same day as they had been killed; toward the end of the season some carcasses were delivered after midnight, but such instances were comparatively few and far between and no exceptions were made on the records. The expedition's killer boats were allowed to take only an allotted number of whales daily, the number being determined by the factory shop manager. This system prevailed for most of the season. The Australian records was examined every morning by the American inspector. Strictly speaking, the Ulysses had little to do with the actual formulation of Form WI-1 as an official record for the United States government. In Antarctica, the company's disregard for maintaining this form in an accurate manner was even more pronounced. The method of recording the data is in need of some explanation, which this chapter attempts to give.