Introduction
Many of my writings are excerpted from or based on my manuscript, Albedo: Reflections from Antarctica. Albedo is a work of lyrical nonfiction, a collection of narrative, descriptive, and poetic fragments, mixed with commentary on the literature and history of Antarctica. The writing grew out of a passion for Antarctic landscape and its effects on the self.
For eight austral summers, I traveled the Ross Sea region of the Antarctic as a worker in the United States Antarctic Program. From small field camps on the East Antarctic ice cap to the industrial anomaly of McMurdo Station on the coast, I enjoyed a long slow study of Antarctic geography.
Like all deserts, the Antarctic icescape is empty, lunar, and sometimes harsh. The ice continent challenges our perceptions of the physical world and of ourselves. Often the beauty is so overwhelming that we simply look away. With both notebook and camera, I have tried instead to attend in detail to the blankness that fills the landscape.
Most stories about the Antarctic look outward to penguins and icebergs, or homeward to convey familiar chronicles of early exploration, scientific research, or journalists' brief visits. I've been drawn more often to the details of the self's dialogue with the Antarctic as we maintain our foothold within and against it. Albedo is the measure of how much radiating energy, e.g. sunlight, a surface reflects. Antarctica has the highest continental albedo on Earth; its near-perfect blue-whiteness reflects over 80% of the sun's energy. As a result, the whiteness of the Antarctic absorbs so little heat that the sun scarcely warms the continent. The ice remains ice, remains itself, due in large part to its albedo.
I have loosely translated this physical term for personal purposes because I am interested in Antarctica's capacity to give reflection to thought. For eight summers in the century of human activity on the ice, I have been busy with the idea that there is much more to say about Antarctica's play on the imagination. Here the geography is so singular that our presence is inseparable from our desire to see: here we are the only figure on the figureless ground we study. This is the bright ground that obsesses me. Where else on Earth could I find such marvelous reflection?
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