Wow! eBook
Blazing Ice: Pioneering the Twenty-first Century’s Road to the South Pole
Author(s): John H. Wright (Author)
- Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
- Publication Date: 15 Sept. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 336 pages
- ISBN-10: 1612344518
- ISBN-13: 9781612344515
Book Description
Blazing Ice is the story of the team of Americans who forged a thousand-mile transcontinental “haul route” 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-first century pioneers as they were for Norway’s Roald Amundsen or for England’s Robert Falcon Scott when they raced to be first to the South Pole in 1911–1912. Wright and his team faced deadly hidden crevasses, vast snow swamps, the Transantarctic Mountains, badlands of weird wind-sculpted ice, and the high Polar Plateau.
Blazing Ice will appeal to Antarctic lovers, adventure readers of all stripes, conservationists, and scientists grappling with the conjunction of institutional culture and their fieldwork.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“John Wright and his team’s mission raised the challenge of reaching the South Pole to a huge scale, well beyond that of past explorers. Wright’s rare combination of strong will and steady focus, coupled with his background in the science of geology, provides a near-perfect perspective from which to tell this story. To that mix, add humor, irony, and insight.”–Ted Scambos, lead scientist, National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, and Antarctic field glaciologist
“Nowhere in Antarctic literature is there another piece of exploration writing like
Blazing Ice. It’s a firsthand account of a remarkable modern achievement but also a beautiful and profound meditation on the often disastrous conjunction of institutional culture with fieldwork. Everyone who plans to work in places wild and woolly should sit up and take notice.”–William Fox, Antarctic veteran and author of Terra Antarctica“The day the traverse team arrived, the entire South Pole Station population anxiously scanned the horizon. A big U.S. flag flew above their lead tractor. They had just proved a route never before traveled, a monumental benchmark in Polar history. In
Blazing Ice, Wright tells the story of this historic achievement with the same attention to detail that he applied to the project. His tale is laced with earthy humor that puts the reader right there in his crew.”–Jerry W. Marty, NSF Representative South Pole Station (retired), Office of Polar Programs, National Science Foundation“There are a number of success stories in the history of the United States involvement in Antarctic research and logistics, and this is certainly one of them worth telling. . . . The word ‘Pioneering’ in the subtitle of the book is meaningful, for there are few pioneering feats remaining in Antarctica. This book will appeal to anyone with Antarctic experience as well as a general audience, the key attraction being that of adventure and an example of the concept of an idea that evolved into a major success.”–John Slpettstoesser,
Polar Times
