The Explorers Journal - Winter 2020-2021

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contents WINTER 2020/2021

features MOULINS BLEUS

FAR MORE THAN BEING FIRST

exploring the ephemeral caves of the Greenland ice sheet with Matt Covington, Jason Gulley, and Will Gadd

all too often, notching records in exploration misses the point

images by JASON GULLEY

by WADE DAVIS

interview by ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

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IN T O T HE GR E AT AFRICAN SEA FOREST

REFLECTIONS ON HUMANIT Y award-winning filmmaker Stuart Dunn on our collective global culture images by STUART DUNN

David Rothenberg in conversation with Pippa Ehrlich, director of the film My Octopus Teacher

interview by NICK SMITH

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32

regulars PRESIDENT’S LE T TER

EDITOR’S NOTE

E XPLOR ATION NE WS

4

6

10

HARVESTING THE W ILD

E X TREME MEDICINE

70

72

RE VIE WS

W HAT W ERE THE Y THINKING?

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WILL GADD ASCENDS A ROPE WITHIN A MASSIVE MOULIN IN THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET. PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON GULLEY.

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president’s letter

the best is yet to come RICHARD WIESE President

Despite the global challenges that we have faced over the past year, I am happy to report that The Explorers Club is expanding its reach in a manner that our founding members could not have imagined more than a century ago. And most of this recent progress has come as a result of deep introspection, which began with fundamental questions: Who are we as an institution? And, more importantly, who do we want to be?

Certainly, the idea of making the world a better place is often at the heart of why we all volunteer or participate in nonprofit organizations like the Club. To this end, our goal is to provide a forum for intellectual exchange in which explorers do not need to worry about their color, creed, or sexual orientation. For us, it is about science, truth-seeking, and the furtherance of knowledge.

Nowhere is the direction we are heading more evident than in the breadth of excellence we see in those chosen for our inaugural “Explorers Club 50: Fifty People Changing the World That You Need to Know About.”

They work in 35 countries, represent 12 nations, and are engaged in all areas of field science. I would like to thank the panel of noted explorers tasked with making the selection.

As for funding exploration, we have more than quadrupled the number of grants we have been able to give annually (in 2021, we have a commitment for well over a million dollars in grants), thanks to the generosity of our corporate sponsor Discovery. With their support—along with that of Rolex, Fjällräven, the Mamont Foundation, and OceanX—we are becoming a real player when it comes to financing exemplary field exploration.

And if there has been a silver lining to the challenges posed by the pandemic, it is that we have been able to share our stories of exploration and adventure more widely than ever before via robust online programming. One live-streamed event reached more than 150,000 viewers, and, following any given lecture, we see questions coming in from Israel, Argentina, Norway, Uganda, you name it. That’s pretty incredible, isn’t it?

While the challenges of the day are enormous, I choose to be an optimist, and I am proud of being part of an organization ushering in a new era of exploration. I challenge every member to be part of that positive change and thank you for being members of the greatest Club on Earth.

RICHARD WIESE ATTENDS A BOARD MEETING VIA ZOOM FROM HIS CONNECTICUT HOME. PHOTOGRAPH BY SABRINA WIESE.

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Cruise among icebergs at Jakobshavn Glacier, a UNESCO World Heritage Site

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editor’s note

risk and reward ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER Editor-in-Chief

For this edition of THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL, we venture into the minds of our fellow explorers in an effort to glean insight into how they view the world and how their groundbreaking research has challenged our own perceptions of it.

For this issue’s cover story, glaciologists Jason Gulley and Matt Covington teamed up with Canadian ice climber Will Gadd to gain access to a suite of moulins, vast ephemeral voids in the Greenland ice sheet that are providing a window on the dynamics of its accelerating melt. As they discovered during their expeditions, the mechanics of seasonal meltwater flow and ice sheet movement are not at all what glaciologists had expected—turning out instead to be a terrifyingly beautiful phenomenon that has major implications for the modeling of future melt scenarios in response to rising global temperatures.

And in his cerebration on the motivations that drive exploration, contributing editor Wade Davis lays out in stark terms the difference between vainglorious exercises in personal achievement and journeys that have the potential to profoundly shape our understanding of the planet and the people and other creatures with whom we share it.

Following on Davis’s narrative, contributing editor David Rothenberg catches up with filmmaker Pippa Ehrlich, director of the recently released Netflix nature documentary My Octopus Teacher, which tells the story of a unique and deeply personal relationship that developed between Sea Change Project cofounder Craig Foster and a common octopus in the Great African Sea Forest near his Cape Town home.

For this edition’s contributors, risks taken have yielded abundant rewards.

A SELFIE TAKEN AT THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY TOWER OF BELÉM DURING THE GLOBAL EXPLORATION SUMMIT IN LISBON.

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Richard Wiese

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THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL© (ISSN 0014-5025) is published quarterly by The Explorers Club, 46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL, 46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021.

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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

SUBSCRIPTIONS

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Jeff Blumenfeld James M. Clash Wade Davis, PhD David A. Dolan Michael J. Manyak, MD Milbry C. Polk David Rothenberg Carl G. Schuster Nick Smith Les Stroud

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Manuscripts and books for review, as well as newsstand sales and advertising inquiries, should be sent to the Editor, THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL, 46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021, telephone: 212-628-8383, fax: 212-288-4449, email: editor@explorers.org. All manuscripts are subject to review.

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The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of The Explorers Club or THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL. The Explorers Club, THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL, The Explorers Club Travel Program, World Center For Exploration, and The Explorers Club Flag and Seal are registered trademarks of The Explorers Club, Inc., in the United States and elsewhere. All rights reserved. © The Explorers Club, 2021.

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FOUNDED IN 1904 BY A GROUP OF AMERICA’S LEADING EXPLORERS, THE EXPLORERS CLUB IS A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PROFESSIONAL SOCIET Y DEDICATED TO THE ADVANCEMENT OF FIELD RESEARCH, SCIENTIFIC EXPLOR ATION, AND THE IDEAL THAT IT IS VITAL TO PRESERVE THE INSTINCT TO EXPLORE. THE CLUB’S STEADFAST MISSION HAS BEEN TO ENCOUR AGE AND

PROMOTE SCIENTIFIC EXPLOR ATION OF L AND, SEA, AIR, AND SPACE, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON THE PHYSICAL AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES. AS A PRIMARY AND PRESTIGIOUS CENTER FOR EXPLOR ATION AND EXPEDITION PL ANNING, THE CLUB IS A FOCAL POINT AND UNIF YING FORCE FOR EXPLORERS AND SCIENTISTS WORLDWIDE, WITH 33 CHAPTERS SPANNING THE GLOBE.

For information regarding categories of membership— Fellow, Member, Friend, Term, and Student—and the process of election to The Explorers Club, visit us at www.explorers.org. The downloadable application sets

forth qualifications for all levels of membership. Additionally, inquiries pertaining to sponsorship and local chapters may be made directly through the Club’s Membership Office, 212-628-8383, ext. 23.

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EXPLORATION NEWS EDITED BY JEFF BLUMENFELD

NEW HEIGHT FOR EVEREST WORLD’S TALLEST PE AK, TALLER STILL, AND OTHER NE WS After more than a decade of dispute and controversy, China and Nepal have finally agreed on the height of Mt. Everest: the peak now stands at 8,848.86 meters— just shy of a meter higher than its previously recognized height. Officials from both countries announced the finding on December 8—the result of a major mensuration campaign led by Kathmandubased Susheel Dangol, chief survey officer and coordinator of the Mt. Everest Height Measurement Program.

The agreement marked the end to a long-running debate over the precise dimensions of the mountain—known as Sagarmatha in Nepal and Chomolungma in Tibet—since it was first surveyed in 1852.

E AVE-REST? We’re not sure how this happened, but we’ve been pronouncing the world’s highest mountain all wrong.

Everest was named in honor of Sir George Everest, the

British surveyor general of India from 1830 to 1843, who was largely responsible for the success of the Great Trigonometrical Survey.

According to EXPLORERS JOURNAL contributing editor Wade Davis’s astounding, fact-filled book Into the Silence (Vintage Books, 2011), Everest’s family name was pronounced Eave-Rest. “It is ironic,” writes Davis, “that his legacy was to have a mountain named in his honor yet mispronounced for all time.”

MOUNT EVEREST. PHOTOGRAPH © ARSGERA/ISTOCK.COM.

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E XPL OR AT ION NE WS

“FORE VER CHEMICALS” IN OUTDOOR GEAR POLLUTING EVEREST Traces of “forever chemicals” used in water-repellant outdoor gear have been found in snow from the top of Everest. These humanmade perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—which have been linked to birth defects, high cholesterol, and increased risk of kidney and testicular cancer—could eventually pose a risk for trekkers, climbers, and residents who drink the meltwater, according to Kimberley Miner, a research assistant professor at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute.

The PFAS pollution identified on Everest shows that humans are shedding these chemicals wherever they go. The chemicals were found in snow and meltwater collected from the Khumbu Glacier at Base Camp, Camp I, Camp II, and the Everest Balcony during the 2019 National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition.

This marks the first time that Everest snow and meltwater have been analyzed for PFAS, Miner says, adding that risks inherent in climbing the peak are likely to increase in coming years with growing glacier melt, precipitation changes, geologic shifts, and chemical pollution.

RESPLENDENT ROCK ART FOUND IN THE AMAZON Newly discovered rock art in the Amazon is providing further proof that the rainforest’s earliest inhabitants lived alongside now-extinct giant Ice Age animals, according to a British-Colombian team.

Likely made between 12,600 and 11,800 years ago, the drawings were found within three rock shelters in the Serranía la Lindosa on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon. The thousands of drawings in red ochre, among the oldest showing people interacting with the animals, include renderings of deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, serpents, and porcupines, as well as what appears to be Ice Age megafauna. Among these are a giant sloth, a mastodon, camelids, horses, and several three-toed ungulates with trunks. These native animals, the researchers say, all became extinct, probably because of a combination of

climate change, habitat loss, and hunting by humans.

Communities who lived in the area at the time the drawings were made were huntergatherers who fished in the nearby river. Bones and plant remains found during the excavations show they ate palm and tree fruits, piranha, alligators, snakes, frogs, rodents such as paca and capybara, and armadillos.

The rock shelters, which are largely protected from the elements by overhangs, are far from modern settlements and trails, but were known to some local communities, who helped researchers survey them. The work was carried out by Gaspar Morcote-Ríos and Jeison L. Chaparro-Cárdenas, of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia; Francisco Javier Aceituno, of the Universidad de Antioquia; and José Iriarte and Mark Robinson from the University of Exeter.

PRECOLUMBIAN ROCK ART AT THE SITE OF CERRO AZUL IN THE COLOMBIAN AMAZON WAS MADE AROUND 12,000 YEARS AGO. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIE-CLAIRE THOMAS, COURTESY WILD BLUE MEDIA.

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MOULINS BLEUS exploring the ephemeral caves of the Greenland ice sheet with Matt Covington, Jason Gulley, and Will Gadd images by JASON GULLEY interview by ANGEL A M.H. SCHUSTER

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With a surface area of 1.7 million square kilometers, the Greenland ice sheet is second in size only to that which cloaks Antarctica and covers some 79 percent of the largest island on Earth. If the ice sheet were to melt—and melting it is in the face of climate change—it would result in a worldwide sea-level rise of 6 meters. For the past two decades, glaciologists have been working to understand the mechanics of the melt, but their models had largely fallen short when it came to explaining the exponential rate at which it was happening. That was until recently, when a trio of intrepid explorers ventured into a suite of moulins, vast ephemeral ice caves previously thought too dangerous to investigate. THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL caught up with glaciologists Matt Covington of the University of Arkansas and Jason Gulley of the University of South Florida, along with formidable ice climber Will Gadd, shortly after the October release of their ice-breaking paper, published by the American Geophysical Union. We talked about their daring work and its implications for understanding Greenland’s ice sheet dynamics.

(Our in-depth conversation with them has been edited for length and clarity.)

with us in the Red River Gorge. At the time, I was an undergraduate at Eastern Kentucky University with plans to pursue graduate work on karst caves.

Doug started talking about his work on Everest, in the Khumbu region, where he had been studying lakes that formed on glaciers, only to quickly drain through conduits that appeared in the ice. I was fascinated by his work, but then who doesn’t get excited about Everest? He showed me a couple of pictures and, from what I saw, the conduit shapes looked very much like limestone caves. My immediate reaction was, “Dude, has anybody been inside these things? If we can get inside these voids, we can probably figure out how they formed.” The next day, I took him to a limestone cave and showed him everything that we can infer about its formation based on bedding thickness, fracture frequency, and other telltale features. And I said, “If we can get into the Khumbu glacier caves, we can totally figure out how they formed.”

At the time, the only thing that Doug really knew about caves was that they were dark, and the only thing that I knew about glaciers was that they were cold. He had no background in caving, and I had no background in ice, but we got quite tight that night and wrote up bullet points for a series of expedition proposals.

We knew that the idea of going into glacier caves was so out-there that we were unlikely to get funding from major research organizations such the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the Natural Environment Research Council, the British equivalent, so we reached out to everyone we could think of. We ended up raising a little more than $10,000—some of which came from The Explorers Club. With my mom, who worked for an airline, able to get us standby tickets to Nepal for a reduced cost, we had just enough to fund our first expedition to Nepal—four people living in the Khumbu for two months—on the biggest shoestring budget ever.

THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL: What lured you into the magical world of ice caves?

JASON GULLEY: It all began in 2004 over drinks with Doug Benn, a glaciologist from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

He had been lecturing at the University of Cincinnati when a mutual friend brought him down to Kentucky to go rock climbing

OPENING SPREAD: EXPEDITION MEMBERS SHARE A SANDWICH BEFORE BEGINNING THEIR ASCENT OUT OF A MOULIN BENEATH THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET. FACING PAGE: MATT COVINGTON AND TEAM MEMBER DAVID OCHEL RAPPEL INTO A 100-METERDEEP MOULIN TO RECORD ITS SIZE AND CONTOURS, DATA THAT WILL BE USED TO CREATE COMPUTER MODELS OF MELTWATER FLOW THROUGH THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET.

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“Well, this is just not the way ice caves are supposed to be forming.”

What we found in the glacier caves was completely unexpected based on what was in the glaciological literature at the time. In preparation for our expedition, we assumed we would be encountering dendritic caves that were steeply dipping into the glacier, controlled by gradients in ice pressure, so we showed up in Nepal with two dozen ice screws and hundreds of meters of rope.

Much to our surprise, every cave that we got into was horizontal. It was like, “Well, this is just not the way ice caves are supposed to be forming.” The other thing that we found was that they were all associated with debris bands in the ice. And it looked like there were heterogeneous features in the ice that were controlling flow, which the water was able to exploit. Realizing that was what was forming the caves was great from my perspective because that’s exactly how karst caves form.

So as a result of that trip, I knew I had stumbled upon a super unique opportunity to make some really important contributions to glaciology. At the same time, I was going to get to do a lot of cool exploration.

Reading National Geographic growing up, I was inspired by all these scientists going out and having incredible adventures while doing great research. Today, most of the research that people get excited about at

funding agencies involves some $400,000 machine that goes ping, advanced computer simulation, or satellites.

I worked with Doug in Nepal, and later on Svalbard, and also with Jonathan Martin at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

We put together a research design for my dissertation that included work on glaciers around the globe. I would start the year in Alaska, where I would spend a month working on the Matanuska Glacier, which is a temperate glacier. From there, I’d hop to Svalbard and spend another month or so working on glaciers that were cold-based and polythermal. Being below the pressure melting point, the ice there is literally frozen solid, so it provides a great thermal analog for what we have on the Greenland ice sheet, which at the time was just too expensive for me to work on given the logistics.

We’d end up in Nepal in November and December. So that was more or less what I did every year for the four years it took to complete my dissertation.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: A SEASONAL “RIVER” DISAPPEARS INTO A MOULIN, WHICH FUNNELS VAST QUANTITIES OF MELTWATER FROM THE SURFACE OF THE ICE DOWN TO THE GLACIER BED DURING THE SUMMER MONTHS. FACING PAGE: GLACIOLOGIST JASON GULLEY AND DAVID OCHEL DESCEND INTO A MOULIN.

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For me, Greenland was always the objective, so everything that I was doing was preparatory to understanding what was happening in Greenland. It’s just so vast and expensive to get to. Chartering a helicopter, which you need to get anywhere in Greenland, alone runs about $5,500 an hour. I was finally able to get to Greenland in 2009 when I managed to get out on the ice with a British team. While I didn’t have the chance to do any caving, it gave me my first experience on the ice, and I was totally hooked.

MATT COVINGTON: Sometime in 2008, when I was finishing my PhD in theoretical astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I went to a conference on future directions in karst science, as I have been a lifelong caver. I have been on a number of Bill Stone’s expeditions to Sistema Cheve in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. I met Jason at the symposium, and we wound up chatting about his PhD work on glacier caves, which sounded fantastic and I was intrigued.

At that time, I was wondering if I had chosen the right career path. But then I realized that, when I completed my PhD, I could take my math and physics skills and apply them to study in caves instead of galaxies.

I found myself switching fields and doing a couple of postdocs in hydrogeology and geomorphology.

A couple of years later, I had just finished a paper in karst science when Jason contacted me and asked if I would be interested in joining him on an expedition to Svalbard and to work on a paper applying similar ideas to glacier caves. And that was the start of the glacier thread of my research. After several expeditions to Svalbard, we finally got a proposal funded to test out some of our theories in Greenland, in 2011 and 2012.

TEJ: What was your primary objective on the Greenland expedition?

JG: We knew from a 2002 paper published by Jay Zwally, the chief cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, that as the Greenland ice sheet was melting, it was speeding up, and the faster it melted the faster it moved. At the time, that was a real shock because everybody had been thinking of the Greenland ice sheet as this really big ice cube. As temperatures got warmer, that ice cube was going to melt faster on the surface. They weren’t expecting, based on what was known about glacier hydrology at the time, for meltwater to make its way to the base of the ice sheet and seep out under it, lubricate ice motion, and increase the flow of ice toward the ocean. In order for us to understand future melting scenarios, we had to come up with some sort of reasonable way of modeling that process.

Traditionally, people have measured the water pressure at the base of the ice sheet by drilling holes down through the ice with these very big, expensive, hot water drill rigs. It can take 24 to 48 hours to drill each hole. They’d put a pressure logger in at the base of the ice sheet and try to measure water level fluctuations at the glacier bed. What they were finding was super counterintuitive. The water pressures really didn’t fluctuate. A lot of times the ice sheet was speeding up when the water level was going down. So, no one really understood what those pressures meant.

Based on what I knew from karst aquifers, I realized that people had been measuring water pressure in all the wrong places. We might be more successful at measuring subglacial water pressure if we measured it in the moulins, where the meltwater was actually flowing off the surface of the ice sheet and down to the glacier bed.

Moulins are these vertical shafts in the ice that open up during the summer months, as meltwater, which is heavier than the ice,

TEAMMATE DAVID OCHEL ASCENDS OUT OF A MOULIN ON THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET.

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flows into and pries open crevasses or other cracks in the ice. Moulins are natural holes in the ice that connect to the most active regions of the subglacial hydrological system. I figured if we could measure water level in moulins, we should therefore be able to measure water level fluctuations in the parts of the subglacial drainage system that control ice motion. I had toyed with this idea about ice sheet melt and movement for a couple of years while I was a postdoc at the University of Texas, but I would need to measure the water level and pressure within the moulins to prove it.

To gather the data, our plan was to lower a pressure transducer into several moulins via these giant armored cables. The first year, the water levels within the moulins fluctuated so much and dropped so low that Matt, who was managing this part of the project, didn’t even have enough cable, so we had no idea what the total fluctuation was. The following year, we showed up with like 700, 800 meters of armored cable, which turned out to be so heavy that if we needed to move it across the ice, we had to completely unspool the cable and carry it like a fire hose. That year, we recorded water level fluctuations on the order of 150 to 200 meters a day. Everybody was shocked.

We were super stoked about it. It got published in Nature.

While we gained tremendous insight from that work in 2011 and 2012, we didn’t actually understand much about the size or shape of moulins, which are an important control on water level fluctuations—questions that could be answered through direct observation.

JG: In December 2016, I happened to be at a research conference in San Francisco, when I got a seemingly random email from Will Gadd. Its header read, “From: Will Gadd; Subject: Glacier Cave Systems.” I’m like, “No way, it can’t be that guy.” Having gotten into ice climbing, I definitely knew who he was—a rock star of the ice climbing world. In the note, he basically said, “I’m really interested in glacier caves. I hear that you know a lot about them. I’d be very curious about what you’ve found and what you’re thinking on water flow through glaciers and maybe doing something neat.”

Over a series of emails and phone calls, we hashed out a couple ideas for expeditions that could use Will’s climbing expertise and eventually settled on Greenland. As it began to sink in, I went from, “Wow, that’s super cool,” to, “Man, I don’t know. I’m a scientist and this is Red Bull, which tends to sponsor base jumpers and other adventurers doing extreme things.” I wasn’t going to say no, but I definitely wanted to find out more about it before committing to such a project.

WILL GADD: From my perspective, I was interested in the ice-caving work that Jason been doing in the Khumbu, on Svalbard, and a couple of other places around the world.

I had been doing some work underneath the Athabasca Glacier here in Canada, providing logistical support for a scientific team from the University of Alberta, which has been examining previously unknown lifeforms within the glacier. Once I started learning about this other world beneath glaciers, I was just blown away by it all. I felt like I was making some small contribution to a far greater understanding of ice, which is totally my world.

TEJ: After being turned down a number of times, you eventually did get an expedition to enter the moulins funded by Red Bull.

We were quite surprised to see them listed as a lead sponsor, along with the NSF, in a refereed science journal. How did that come about?

PREVIOUS SPREAD: MATT COVINGTON CLIMBS A FIXED ROPE WHILE DAVID OCHEL, BELOW, DERIGS THE CLIMBING AIDS THAT HAD BEEN INSTALLED. FACING PAGE: OCHEL MAKES AN ASCENT OUT OF A MOULIN.

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“Moulins are pretty spectacular, but they are also a pretty intimidating place to work, with the sound of ice popping all around you.”

I started looking around to see who else was doing excellent work on glaciers and Jason’s name kept popping up. So, I contacted him and asked if I could help in any way and, if so, please let me know. And he said, “Yes, I would love to go into the moulins underneath the Greenland ice sheet, but I haven’t been able get funding for it.”

I said, “I have an idea.” And that’s how it all started. While it’s not a typical Red Bull project, in that it’s scientific research, it was going to be a journey into one of the coolest places on Earth, literally. As I had hoped, Red Bull was totally up for funding it.

hoped to actually enter them. But one of the reviewers of our grant application shot us down on that particular aspect of the project, saying, “These guys are just adrenaline junkies trying to go in this really risky cave.” But Jason and I knew from more than a decade of prior work in ice caves in Svalbard and Nepal that they could be relatively stable, despite their ephemeral nature. As long as you know the risks to anticipate what to look for—what’s dangerous, what’s not—you can actually safely explore these things.

WG: After that first expedition into the moulins in 2018, I think the NSF and others realized that this could be done in a way that, while not entirely safe, certainly wasn’t outlandishly dangerous, and that laid the groundwork for the subsequent expedition in 2019.

TEJ: You were the first to venture into the moulins on a mission to understand their morphology.

MC: People in the field of glaciology simply thought moulins were too dangerous to enter. When we were seeking funding for our initial work in Greenland, we had

TEJ: What is it like inside the moulins?

MC: They’re pretty spectacular, but they are also a pretty intimidating place to work, with the sound of ice popping all around you. We are constantly checking to make sure that the walls are solid and there aren’t

PROFESSIONAL ICE CLIMBER AND RED BULL ATHLETE WILL GADD ASCENDS A FIXED ROPE WITHIN A MOULIN.

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big cracks going through them and so on. Where in a limestone cave things are changing over thousands of years, within the moulins they are developing and changing over a period of days or weeks. And because of that, they’re a more dynamic environment to be in, where things are changing rapidly, potentially.

TEJ: So what is next?

MC: I think that largely our work has raised a lot of questions, many of which will be difficult to answer without further moulin exploration.

We have only ventured into two moulins, both on the west coast of Greenland, so we have a very small data set. It’s hard to detect trends when you just have two data points. Jason and I are hoping to do more extensive moulin exploration, particularly in the Greenland interior where the ice is far thicker. Exploring more moulins across a wider range of settings would start to give us an idea of what might be going on more at the ice sheet scale. How do these things vary, and why?

JG: From what we know, moulins tend to form on the periphery of the ice sheet, in the ablation zone where the ice is actually melting and where you get more melting every year than you get snow accumulation. And so, the long-term concern and one of the motivating factors for our research is what’s going to happen as the ice sheet warms up and the ablation zone expands such that moulins start marching into portions of the ice sheet that have never had moulins before? All of a sudden, you’re subjecting greater and greater portions of the ice sheet to this meltwater-induced lubrication, which will lead to the ice sheet moving faster every year.

We’ve got two primary avenues of inquiry.

I think Matt and I are going to start working on another round of proposals to look at size variability in moulins across the ice sheet, so we want to go work in some different areas and try to see how big or small the moulins are in those locations. We would also like to launch an ROV or AUV into the flooded portions of the moulins. Unfortunately, we don’t have any more funding for the project right now, but we are hoping that just might change.

TEJ: What surprised you most?

MC: First of all, the moulins were much larger than we ever imagined. Even though we had been working around them for several years, we could never see down into them. We knew they were deep but were stunned by their volume. Early work with one of my hydrological models, trying to understand the water level variations that we observed in the summer, suggested large storage volumes. However, these volumes just seemed too big to be the moulins themselves, and we initially thought maybe the water was flowing into a network of crevasses that were somehow connected to the moulins or something.

We didn’t really understand how big these could be until we entered the first one.

Even though the model, simple as it was, effectively predicted these large volumes, we just didn’t believe it.

TEJ: What are the implications of the greater-than-expected volume?

MC: Our observations of water levels inside moulins, and a model of water flow through the ice, now suggest that storage capacity in moulins has a big impact on how much the water pressure beneath the ice changes. When water backs up into moulins, and the water pressure beneath the ice increases, glacier sliding accelerates, leading to more rapid loss of ice into the ocean. How much the water levels vary in the moulins is also an important factor in determining what type of drainage systems develop beneath the ice sheet.

THE AURORA BOREALIS LIGHTS UP CLOUDS IN THE NIGHT SKY ABOVE BASE CAMP ON THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET.

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REFLECTIONS HUMANITY ON

award-winning filmmaker Stuart Dunn on our collective global culture images by STUART DUNN, interview by NICK SMITH

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If you’ve ever watched a wildlife documentary on the National Geographic channel, you’ll have seen filmmaker Stuart Dunn’s work. For more than two decades he’s traveled the globe, capturing his award-winning footage.

While on the road, he’s also photographed the everyday people he’s encountered the way. His stunning images have now been collected in the new book Only Us: A Celebration of Humanity, just released by Unicorn Publishing Group.

In his mid-forties, Dunn is a graduate of the Northern Media School in the UK, where he gained a master’s degree in screen arts.

While still at college, he embarked on his first filming expedition, traveling to the Tamil Tiger-controlled regions of northern Sri Lanka on a shoestring budget, with the aim of telling the story of the civil war that had raged there for as long as he had been alive. His ambition was, through his work, to give a voice to the half-a-million refugees displaced by the conflict. “It was,” he says, “a baptism of fire, to say the least.”

Dunn’s sense of adventure and unfailing eye for a human story have combined to create a deeply personal outlook on humanity in a way that examines our similarities, rather than differences, from a positive and uplifting stance. As the elder statesman of British exploration, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who wrote the foreword to Only Us, says of Dunn’s photography, it is a “moment to

celebrate what it means to be human and enjoy who we are and just how far we’ve come. Our achievements are quite simply staggering, and we should be able to stand back and appreciate that fact every once in a while.”

EXPLORERS JOURNAL contributing editor Nick Smith recently caught up with Dunn to discuss his life-affirming project that salutes humanity across the globe.

NICK SMITH: Photographing people…that’s got to be one of the hardest jobs for the photographer. Are there any secrets to getting so many wonderful shots of the people of the world?

STUART DUNN: To be honest, in one very real sense, I don’t know what I’m doing. And that’s because every encounter is different.

There are places geographically where it is definitely easier to photograph people, and there are others where it is quite difficult indeed. But I do know one thing: it’s all about trust. People need to be comfortable and happy with what you’re doing as a photographer. And once that connection, that trust, is happening, then I can start to take a few pictures. It can happen quickly, or it could take a long time to establish.

NS: What made you want to become a documentary maker?

SD: When I started out a few decades ago, it was always about the travel. I was going to all these beautiful places filming expeditions. But there was also something about the people and the landscapes I encountered that inspired me. Even then, I had in the back of my mind the idea that I was eventually going to do something with these photographs. It’s a project that’s been distilling quietly for years, starting out just wanting to tell a story of some description. As time went by, the concept narrowed to telling a narrative of people in their environments.

OPENING SPREAD: SUNSET RIDE, SALALAH, OMAN. “SALALAH WAS THE STARTING POINT FOR AN EXPEDITION I WAS ABOUT TO EMBARK ON TO CROSS THE RUB’ AL-KHALI DESERT,” SAYS DUNN. “HERE, I GRABBED THE CAMERA AS QUICKLY AS I COULD, SNAPPED ABOUT THREE SHOTS BEFORE THE SUN DIPPED BELOW THE HORIZON AND THE MOMENT HAD ENDED. I JUST PRAYED THAT I’D GOT THE SHOT.” FACING PAGE: GOAT HERDER, MAGADO, ETHIOPIA. LIVESTOCK IS THE MAIN ASSET OF PASTORALIST COMMUNITIES. BEING MOBILE ALLOWS PASTORALISTS TO ADAPT TO THEIR ENVIRONMENT, MOVING TO FERTILE REGIONS DEPENDING ON THE SEASONS.

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“There is very little that separates us in terms of what drives us in life.”

NS: Do you remember your first documentary photograph?

SD: Definitely. I was really young, and I had no money, but I managed to get enough together to go to South Africa where I worked in the safari camps putting up tents and stuff like that.

I wasn’t even a photographer then, but I had a small camera and I just went about taking pictures of people on safari. All the pictures were terrible. Then I was in a car accident and everyone involved was taken to a police station in Durban. While we were there this big South African policeman came in with this tiny local guy he’d arrested. I asked if I could take his photo and the policeman said: “Okay, let me just get this guy to smile for you.” At which point he twisted the man’s arm until he screamed, and I took the shot. After I had the film developed, I realized that I had a photo that told the story of inequality out there.

finite detail and you realize that we are all so similar in our hopes, desires, and fears. The daily grind is the same. We gather goods to feed and clothe our families. Whether we work a job to earn money in order to buy these items or set out on a dugout canoe to catch some fish, the end goal is the same.

And while I wanted to show people all these strange and exotic places, I make the point that there is very little that separates us in terms of what drives us in life.

NS: How do you go about photographing people over such a prolonged period?

SD: It’s all about consistency. Consistency is the hard thing. In different parts of the world, you will get different reactions from people, especially if you have a camera with you. If you go to somewhere like Cameroon, for example, it’s incredibly difficult to get good photos because the people there aren’t welcoming to the camera at all. When I first started going to China 20 years ago, people didn’t like the

NS: And you’ve not looked back since?

SD: I’d say that this was the moment I realized that there’s more to photography than taking holiday snaps and that it could be a tool for something more profound. So I decided to go back to college, to study photography and take the next step on that journey.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: THE ONLY WAY TO TRAVEL, SVALBARD. “THE TEMPERATURE WAS INCREDIBLY LOW, SOMEWHERE IN THE REGION OF ABOUT -20ºC. I RACED AHEAD OF THE DOGS AND CROUCHED IN THE SNOW WITH THE DOGS CHARGING TOWARD ME. ONCE THEY WERE CLOSE ENOUGH, I FIRED OFF A FEW SHOTS BEFORE LITERALLY DIVING OUT OF THE WAY.” FACING PAGE: ILLUMINATED, DOME OF THE ROCK, TEMPLE MOUNT, JERUSALEM. “THE TEMPLE MOUNT IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT RELIGIOUS SITES IN THE WORLD. NON-MUSLIMS ARE GENERALLY NOT PERMITTED TO ENTER, SO I WAS INCREDIBLY LUCKY TO BE INVITED INSIDE.”

NS: Your photographs show the diversity of the planet and its people, and yet you maintain that we all share fundamental similarities.

SD: When you first start doing this, everything seems so different, so bizarre and unusual.

But then, once you start to spend some time in these places, you whittle it down to the

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“They always talk about the ‘natural world ’ as if it’s something separate, as if humans aren’t part of it.” camera at all, especially in the cities. But it’s also a case of training your eye, knowing when something is going to happen, and making sure you capture it, especially if the light, composition, and color are all working in your favor. Then it’s a case of injecting yourself into that situation while making people feel comfortable enough for you to photograph them.

You need to communicate—maybe a hand gesture or a smile. And you need some sort of acknowledgment that it’s okay to carry on.

primate doing what we do best. I think that we should celebrate that. We are living today in a culture of beating ourselves up, making one long apology for who we are, and I just don’t get that. I wanted to put that to the side to make some time to celebrate how incredible we are. There’s too much negativity surrounding humans these days. One of the purposes of these photographs is to celebrate without being embarrassed. It’s tempting to paint a bleak picture of humanity, but that’s kind of been done to death.

NS: Having met so many people in so many places around the world, are you optimistic about the short-term future for humanity?

SD: I think it’s vital that we are. I’ve spent a lot of time in my career filming wildlife, which means I’ve spent a lot of time with conservationists, listening to all their doom and gloom. When you enter into a conversation with these guys, they always talk about the “natural world” as if it’s something separate, as if humans aren’t part of it: we’re one thing and the natural world is something else. I just don’t believe that’s true. We are all part of this, and we are a very, very successful

NS: For all our similarities, we are different.

SD: You can’t help looking at other people’s lives from the perspective of your own culture. It’s easy to think that just because there are such vast disparities in factors such as material wealth, that somehow other lives are less important. You have to be careful how you assess these contexts because there have been times, especially when visiting remote tribes, when I look at these people with a kind of envy. I’ve spent time with various tribes in the Amazon: very remote, no health care, no electricity, nothing. And yet their family life is enviable. They go out hunting or fishing and then come back and hang out with their families, eat, and tell stories. I know that I’m seeing these things through a Westerner’s eyes and that there are big issues to contend with here. But I have learned that happiness definitely isn’t related to money, status, or anything like that.

There are lots of things we’ve got wrong.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CONCEALED, ETHIOPIA. THE TRIANGULARSHAPED PONCHO WAS APPARENTLY INVENTED TO BE WORN WHEN CARRYING A RIFLE, KEEPING IT HIDDEN AND DRY. RAFT FISHING, ÎLE SAINTE-MARIE, MADAGASCAR. TWO BOYS ON THEIR MAKESHIFT RAFT FISHING AS THE SUN SETS. THEIR EQUIPMENT COMPRISES AN OLD PLASTIC BOTTLE USED AS A FLOAT AND SOME SPARE FISHING LINE.

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FAR MORE BEING FIRST THAN

all too often, notching records in exploration misses the point

by WADE DAVIS

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A FELLOW OF THE EXPLORERS CLUB AND A RECIPIENT OF ITS HIGHEST HONOR, THE EXPLORERS CLUB MEDAL, WADE DAVIS IS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST, ETHNOBOTANIST, AND WRITER WHOSE WORK HAS FOCUSED ON INDIGENOUS CULTURES. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF TWO DOZEN BOOKS, INCLUDING THE AWARD-WINNING INTO THE SILENCE: THE GREAT WAR, MALLORY, AND THE CONQUEST OF EVEREST AND THE RECENTLY RELEASED MAGDALENA: RIVER OF DREAMS . FOR MORE, VISIT: WWW.DAVISWADE.COM.

It is hard to imagine that in our own time so much of the Earth remains unexplored. We know more about the surface of the Moon than the floor of the ocean. We spend billions sending probes into space to seek evidence of water on Mars, or ice on the moons of Jupiter, while largely ignoring what lies below the seas that cover 70 percent of our blue planet. This is the deep unknown, the last frontier for explorers like Sylvia Earle, Robert Ballard, and Victor Vescovo, ocean depths that no human has seen or experienced.

On land, it’s another story, and always has been, with the noted exception of Antarctica.

The true and original explorers, men and women who actually went where no humans had been, were those who walked out of Africa some 65,000 years ago, embarking on a journey that in 2,500 generations—roughly 40,000 years—would carry the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.

Since then, terrestrial exploration has rarely been divorced from power and conquest. Searching for a passage to the Indies, Jacques Cartier is said to have discovered the St. Lawrence River in 1534, though the valley was clearly settled at the time, and the waters offshore crowded with a Basque fleet, manned by fishermen with no interest whatsoever in flaunting the location of their discovery, a cod fishery that would feed Europe for three centuries.

History heralds Francisco de Orellana as the first to travel the length of the Amazon, in 1541, a journey documented by his companion, Gaspar de Carvajal, who wrote of fleets of native canoes and riverbanks dense with settlements, home to just some of the ten million people then living in the basin.

In one of the stranger episodes of the Spanish conquest, a trio of expeditions led by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, Sebastián de Belalcázar, and Nikolaus Federmann, coming from the north, south, and east, all reached the savanna of Bogotá. At a hastily assembled parlay, the explorers agreed to set sail for Spain so that its king, Charles V, might determine who was the official discoverer of the place, roughly the size of Belgium, which was the domain of more than a million Muisca.

When James Cook, arguably the finest navigator in the history of the Royal Navy, landed in Hawaii in 1778, his flagship was met by a flotilla of 3,000 native canoes. At Tonga, he observed that local catamarans could cover three leagues in the time it took his ship to achieve two. He encountered men from the Marquesas who could understand the language of Tahitians, though nearly a thousand nautical miles separated their islands. And in Tahiti, he met a navigator and priest, Tupaia, who drew from memory a map of every major island group in Polynesia, save for Hawaii and Aotearoa (New Zealand). More than 120 stones were placed in the sand, each representing an island across a span of more than 2,500 nautical miles, from the Marquesas in the east to Fiji in the west, a distance equal to the width of the continental United States.

OPENING SPREAD: WITH THEIR BELONGINGS STRAPPED ON A SLED, ARNARULUNGUAK, KNUD RASMUSSEN (CENTER), AND MITEQ SET OFF FROM POINT BARROW, ALASKA. IMAGE COURTESY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVES. FACING PAGE: A PORTRAIT OF JACQUES CARTIER BY THÉOPHILE HAMEL (CA. 1844). COURTESY WIKICOMMONS.

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Tupaia later sailed with Cook from Tahiti to New Zealand, a circuitous journey of nearly 8,000 nautical miles that ranged between 48 degrees south latitude and 4 degrees north.

To his astonishment, Cook reported, the Polynesian navigator was able to indicate, at every moment of the voyage, the precise direction back to Tahiti, though he had neither benefit of sextant nor knowledge of charts.

Cook and his naturalist, Joseph Banks, who both learned Tahitian, recognized the obvious cultural connections between the distant islands of Polynesia. They were convinced that the settling of the Pacific had occurred from the west, yet neither man could accept that these journeys had been feats of discovery and settlement as purposeful and deliberate as their own.

The twentieth century brought more of the same. Hiram Bingham III shot to international fame and a place in the U.S. Senate with his “discovery” of Machu Picchu, an Inca site well known at the time to local farmers, who told Bingham where it was and how to get there.

In 1921, George Mallory and his climbing companions walked off the map on their first attempt to climb Everest, a mountain no one had approached at close quarters, save for the countless Tibetans they encountered as they trudged 650 kilometers across the plateau. Their arrival at Rongbuk at the base of the mountain made little impression. The lama, Dzatrul Rinpoche, declined to break his retreat to greet them. In his namthar, a record of the spiritual and social life of the monastery,

the arrival of the subsequent expedition in 1922 earns but a few lines, including: “I felt great compassion for them to suffer so much for such meaningless work.” Climbing to heights where oxygen deprivation obliterates consciousness, courting death and placing at risk a precious incarnation and all its potential for spiritual transcendence was, from the Buddhist perspective, an act of pure folly.

In the Arctic, exploration morphed from discovery to adventure to athletic competition in less than a century, even as Greenland gave birth to the greatest Arctic explorer of all time, Knud Rasmussen, a scholar and ethnographer who personified what the search for knowledge, the true exploration of the unknown, could mean in the modern era.

The English had first looked north to the Arctic in the sixteenth century, with the legendary explorations of Martin Frobisher (1576–78), John Davis (1585–87), and William Baffin (1615–16). Legendary is the operative word. By the time the admiralty turned its attention to the Northwest Passage in the nineteenth century, these earlier voyages had been completely forgotten, lost in the mists of memory and lore.

With the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the number of seamen in the British Navy dropped from 140,000 to 19,000. Officers, men of lineage and class, were retained, all 6,000. By 1817, however, 90 percent of these men were unemployed.

For them, exploration offered the only avenue to promotion and acclaim. Professional ambition as much as patriotism would inspire a new generation of Arctic explorers, such as naval officers John Ross and William Parry.

The near successes of Ross’s two voyages in 1818 and 1829–33 induced many others to try, a wave of hubris and desire that culminated in the ill-fated expedition of Sir John Franklin (1845–48/49). The loss of both of his ships, Erebus and Terror—which had sailed in the Antarctic under the command of James Clark Ross years earlier—and

TOP: HIRAM BINGHAM III PITCHES A TENT NEAR THE INCA SITE OF MACHU PICCHU IN 1912. COURTESY WIKICOMMONS. BOTTOM: MEMBERS OF THE 1924 BRITISH EVEREST EXPEDITION, BACK ROW FROM LEFT: ANDREW “SANDY” IRVINE, GEORGE MALLORY, EDWARD NORTON, NOEL ODELL, AND JOHN MACDONALD; FRONT ROW FROM LEFT: EDWARD SHEBBEARE, GEOFFREY BRUCE, HOWARD SOMERVELL, AND BENTLEY BEETHAM. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY JOHN NOEL PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE, RGS.

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“In character, heart, motivation, and vision, Rasmussen was everything that Peary was not.” the disappearance of all officers and crew, seemingly without a trace, took on mystical significance in Britain. A national outpouring of sentiment, amplified by Sir John’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, a woman of wealth and considerable influence at court, inspired nearly 40 relief expeditions. In seeking the ghost of Franklin, these rescue missions morphed into voyages of discovery, charting the vast and unknown reaches of the High Arctic.

Britain’s obsession with Franklin only faded as war in Crimea (1853–56) filled the morning papers with casualty lists—17,580 dead from disease alone—that eclipsed lingering concerns for 134 men who had perished years before in a quixotic quest for glory.

In the 1870s, Arctic exploration took a fateful turn from the practical and nautical to the personal and ultimately meaningless, as men from several nations set their sights on the North Pole, a point on the ice with no intrinsic significance save as an emblem of physical achievement and national will. In many ways, this was the beginning of what would become, in the twentieth century, an entire industry of adventure.

Reaching the North Pole was less a journey of discovery than a quest for personal glory and fame. Men such as Frederick Cook and Robert Peary clung desperately to their claims, often demonstrably false, even as they branded their expeditions indelibly with themselves. With endorsements, sponsorships, book deals, and lecture tours in mind, Peary expunged his indispensable companion,

Matthew Henson, deliberately distancing himself from the African-American, while the four Inuit men—Ootah, Egigingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah—who accompanied them both to the pole, remain largely unknown to history.

In 1897, some 12 years before reaching the pole, Peary kidnapped an Inuit family, including a young boy named Minik, and brought them to New York as living specimens to be exhibited. Minik’s father soon died and the boy’s care was entrusted to a staff member of the American Museum of Natural History. It was there that he came upon the skeletons of his father and the others on display in a diorama. Minik survived 12 miserable years in the United States. In 1909, he begged Peary to take him home, but the famous explorer refused. By the time Minik finally returned to the Arctic, he was destitute, broken in body and spirit, lost between worlds, incapable of speaking his language, unable even to support himself as a hunter.

The man who defied Peary and brought Minik home, if only to return his father’s remains to his homeland, was none other than Knud Rasmussen. In character, heart,

TOP: MATTHEW HENSON WITH INUIT MEMBERS OF THE PEARY NORTH POLE EXPEDITION—OOQUEAH, OOTAH, EGIGINGWAH, AND SEEGLO. COURTESY WIKICOMMONS. BOTTOM: PEARY AND AN INUIT FAMILY ON THEIR WAY TO NEW YORK IN 1897 (FROM LEFT: NUKTAQ, ATANGANA, AVIAQ, AND UISAAKASSAK, WITH QISUK AND MINIK BEHIND THEM). COURTESY THE PEARYMACMILLAN ARCTIC MUSEUM.

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motivation, and vision, Rasmussen was everything that Peary was not. What he achieved in a life cut short—he would die at 54, having eaten kiviak, an Inuit delicacy, tainted with salmonella—a man of Peary’s ilk could neither appreciate nor understand. An enameled faith in the superiority of his own culture left Peary half-blind, even as he stumbled north to the pole.

The son of a Danish missionary and a mother of Inuit blood, Rasmussen moved effortlessly between social and cultural realms, slipping in and out of roles with ease, garnering respect and affection in all that he did and every hunting camp and settlement he graced. Not to mention the literary salons and theaters of Copenhagen and Paris, where, at the height of his fame as a writer, his star shone so brightly that guards had to be posted at every door to keep his female admirers at bay. Such notoriety came only after a lifetime of exploration and achievement; Rasmussen neither sought attention, nor made much of it. What mattered to him was the Arctic and the story of its people.

Raised among the Greenland Inuit, knowing their language from birth and running his own dogs by the age of nine, Rasmussen could and did live as a native. He thought nothing of slipping naked beneath caribou hides to share his body heat with an elder.

Like his indigenous fellows, he didn’t fear the cold; he made use of it. A sled could be made from the carcass of a caribou, with runners made of rolled caribou skin, and crossbars of frozen char and walrus meat cut to the right size. If things got tough, as Rasmussen once quipped, you could always eat your sled.

KNUD RASMUSSEN AND INUIT COUSINS ARNARULUNGUAK AND QAVIGÂRSSUAQ MITEQ, WHO ACCOMPANIED THE DANISH EXPLORER ON HIS FORMIDABLE FIFTH THULE EXPEDITION, ON A VISIT TO WASHINGTON, D.C. COURTESY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVES.

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From an outpost at Thule in remote northwest Greenland, Rasmussen and his partner in exploration, Peter Freuchen, launched seven research expeditions between 1912 and 1933, all epic in scale, that explored the length and breadth of Greenland and much of the eastern Canadian Arctic. Their most ambitious effort, the Fifth Thule Expedition, consumed four years as they traveled overland from northern Greenland to the western limits of Alaska and the Bering Sea, 33,000 kilometers altogether, all by dog team and sled. Nothing like it had been done in North America since Lewis and Clark.

Rasmussen did not undertake such journeys with endurance records in mind. He had no interest in being the first to do anything; his ambitions had nothing to do with self. Given a choice, he preferred “hardship to boredom, danger and exposure to inactivity, the knife blade of hunger to the dull satisfaction of gluttony.” But, like the Inuit, he never sought adventure or courted death. He laughed in the face of starvation and confronted tragedy with fatalistic indifference simply because in the Arctic there was no other way. Death and privation were everyday events.

Travel allowed Rasmussen to enter the culture of the Inuit through the only portal that made such access possible, shared experience on the open tundra, hunting in the winter night as men mimic seals to attract polar bears, only to confront them in the darkness. As the bear lunges for the kill, it exposes the warm underbelly, the only part of its anatomy not protected by an armor of sea ice. The Inuit hunter plants his harpoon in the ice, as the bear falls upon him. Killing an ice bear was one of the challenges that marked the path of the shaman.

Rasmussen’s holy grail was not an object or a place, but a state of mind, a depth of understanding that would allow him to reveal to the world the wonder of Inuit life. Stretching across the circumpolar

expanses was a common culture of the northern ice; people speaking dialects of the same language, sharing beliefs and myths, responding to the same adaptive imperatives. Only one who had crossed a continent could report, as Rasmussen did, that a youth in Greenland would recognize a tale told by a grandfather on the northern slope of Alaska, just as that elder would know the folklore of indigenous northwest Greenland.

Though a child of the Arctic, an adopted son of the Inuit, Rasmussen never abandoned his fidelity to Denmark, or his obligations as a writer and scholar to record his observations. The research contributions of the Fifth Thule Expedition, published in 1946, fill no fewer than ten volumes, with separate monographs dedicated to natural history, archaeology, linguistics, and ethnography, along with photographs of some 20,000 artifacts. These reports remain to this day a definitive source, offering an invaluable portrait of the Inuit before sustained and corrosive contact in the 1950s forever transformed their lives.

Rasmussen never doubted that the true glory of the Arctic resided in the genius and vision of the Inuit. His life’s mission was to know the world as they did, to understand the patterns of their lives, to enter their realms of magic and shamanic power. With knowledge as his goal, cultural understanding the quest, Rasmussen redefined the promise and potential of exploration, not only in the Arctic but throughout all of the inhabited world.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: INUIT DANCE RITUAL WITNESSED BY KNUD RASMUSSEN IN THE COMMUNITY OF “DANCING HOUSE” ON VICTORIA ISLAND. FACING PAGE: A MAN RASMUSSEN MET FROM THE UMINGMUKTOGMIUT INUIT GROUP DURING HIS FIFTH THULE EXPEDITION. IMAGES COURTESY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVES.

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INTO

THE GREAT AFRICAN SEA FOREST David Rothenberg in conversation with Pippa Ehrlich, director of the film My Octopus Teacher

THE E XPLORERS JOURNAL

When the documentary My Octopus Teacher debuted on Netflix this past September, it ushered in a new approach to nature filmmaking, one in which the interaction between humans and other creatures takes center stage. The documentary chronicles the intimate relationship that developed between South African filmmaker Craig Foster and a wild common octopus he met while freediving in the kelp forests near his Cape Town home—a daily therapeutic activity he took up to help him recover from career burnout. So moved was he by the octopus’s capacity to share her world, that he founded the Sea Change Project, a conservation organization dedicated to preserving her fragile coastal habitat. He also wanted to share his own personal experience in an “incredible wilderness full of weird and wonderful creatures.”

But, as Foster explains it, it can be difficult to direct your own story, no matter much you may know about your craft, so he brought in fellow diver Pippa Ehrlich to direct the film.

Since its release, the film has captivated millions, providing a welcome sense of wonder as that strange year of 2020 drew to a close.

EXPLORERS JOURNAL contributing editor David Rothenberg recently caught up with Ehrlich via Zoom only hours after she emerged from a morning dive in the cool waters of the Great African Sea Forest, which continues to draw her in on a daily basis.

waves with these feathery-like tentacles in the water column, waiting to trap tiny bits of food.

And if you touch it, it suddenly sucks back inside its hole. I was just showing some friends a few things. It’s quite amazing. If you take people who don’t know that place well, even something small can really blow their minds.

DR: When did you first dive in the kelp forest?

PE: In 2010, shortly after I moved to Cape Town. Back then, I was wearing a five-mil wetsuit, with ten mils on my chest. But I didn’t realize how little I knew about that environment until 2015, when I began diving with Craig Foster and my friend Ross Frylinck, who cofounded the Sea Change Project with Craig. I felt as if I was walking into a totally new ecosystem, guided by Craig’s gift for reading the natural world, specifically the kelp forest. Even though I had been diving in the kelp forest for several years, it was like putting on a pair of magical glasses.

DR: And Craig had you freediving only—no wetsuit, no compressed air.

PE: At first, I was very intimidated by it all.

But Ross had told me quite a bit about the physical effects of freediving in such cold water. As I soon learned, the shock of the frigid water brings you into the present in a very visceral way—the cold blasting through any other thoughts you might have in your mind. When you start doing something for the first time, it’s an incredibly exciting and awakening experience. Your mind and body start tuning into something entirely new. And that is precisely what happened.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: What was today’s dive like? What did you see?

PIPPA EHRLICH: The wind was howling, so the visibility was quite poor. We decided to go into the tidal pool. I saw an octopus and a thing called a Christmas tree worm, which is beautiful. It twists up like a Christmas tree and

DR: By now you have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours diving down there.

PE: I think I’m probably still in the hundreds, although I might be at a thousand by now.

OPENING SPREAD: THE GREAT AFRICAN SEA FOREST IS A RELATIVELY UNKNOWN ECOSYSTEM THAT HARBORS EXCEPTIONAL ABUNDANCE AND BIODIVERSITY. FACING PAGE: THE OCTOPUS TEACHER STARES OUT CALMLY FROM HER DEN.

DR: The film has been hailed for its innovative approach to nature documentaries. What led to your radical departure from the norm?

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“Everything in an octopus’s life is about the conflict between curiosity and fear.”

PE: Traditional “blue chip” natural history is very impersonal. It’s all about the animal.

But Craig’s own story was deeply personal.

He learned so much from this animal. He felt so privileged to have seen into her world. I think he’s still processing what that means.

When we started on the project, Craig had captured some of their interactions on film, but we had very few shots with Craig actually in the picture, apart from three or four things that he self-shot, which were absolutely golden for us. So, we spent a lot of time filming him in the kelp forest, getting general beautiful shots of the environment, getting shots of other animals that live there, and getting the extreme close-ups we needed.

One of the interesting things about the story is that it doesn’t speak to a specific threat that we are exposing or a cause that we are arguing for—certainly not in an overt way. The cause is a general reconnection with the natural world because all of the environmental problems we see today are a symptom of our disconnection and lack of understanding when it comes to nature and how complex natural systems work.

having a deep relationship with a wild place— more than just one octopus. Filmmaking is a funny thing. When you become so involved in a project like this for such a long period of time, to tell such a deeply personal story as Craig’s, you do start to understand how someone else thinks, and that’s your job.

DR: Can we understand what it’s like to be an octopus?

PE: I don’t think you can ever completely put yourself into the mind of another animal, but certainly you can start to imagine their world from the things that you know about them.

We actually had a Canadian octopus psychologist, Jennifer Mather, consulting with us.

The first thing she said was: “Everything in an octopus’s life is about the conflict between curiosity and fear.” So that’s the first bit of information that you can take into consideration when you try to imagine what life looks like from their point of view. And then you can imagine the fact that you’ve got these eight amazing arms that can move and twist like an elephant’s trunk. And each of the arms to some degree has a mind of its own. You can imagine what it must be like to manage that.

DR: Part of this film for you as director must’ve involved getting inside someone else’s head about his own story, something that he was so wrapped up in for so many years. Do you feel like you were able to relay his vision of what happened with this one special octopus?

PE: Yeah, I do. I feel that I’ve made my way into his vision of what it’s like to commit yourself to

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CRAIG AND THE OCTOPUS TEACHER. FACING PAGE: KELP FORESTS MAKE UP 25 PERCENT OF OUR GLOBAL COASTLINE, BUT MANY OF THEM ARE IN DECLINE AND SOME HAVE COMPLETELY VANISHED OVER JUST A FEW YEARS. THE GREAT AFRICAN SEA FOREST IS A THRIVING HABITAT, BUT IT FACES MANY THREATS INCLUDING POACHING, POLLUTION, AND COASTAL MINING.

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Then you can think about the fact that the kelp forest is just packed with predators.

And when you are a mollusk that’s traded the safety of a shell for the potential of a highly developed brain, then you can imagine how vulnerable you must feel all the time, and how your whole reality becomes about finding ways to outwit predators, catch prey, and keep yourself entertained. When we look into an octopus’s eye—and I wouldn’t say I’m getting into the mind of an octopus—that creature engages with me. It stares straight back.

When I swim out into the kelp forest and the visibility is poor, I think about the fact that this is one of the great white shark hotspots of the world. At that moment, it is clear that I too am prey, just like the octopus. I think human beings are under an illusion that we have kind of hacked our way out of the system, climbed out of the food chain, but we haven’t. That’s just an impression that we have, we are walking among the creatures that we share this place with. The coronavirus has proven that to us—it is a tiny, tiny thing that has brought us to our knees. I think when you spend so much time in the natural world, you can’t predict anything. I’m learning to weigh things up all the time, figure out what’s safe. While I think the octopus and I face similar challenges in that world, it’s much more vulnerable, but it’s got superpowers that I could never dream of.

DR: You have become quite involved with the Sea Change Project through making this film.

PE: When Craig and Ross launched the Sea Change Project, their goal was to bring together a group of scientists and storytellers who were dedicated to spending time in nature every day, specifically the kelp forest, telling those stories in a way that allows people

PYJAMA CATSHARKS ARE BOLD AND AGGRESSIVE AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR AN EXPOSED OCTOPUS. THEY ARE ALSO A VULNERABLE SPECIES THAT CAN LIVE UP TO 22 YEARS AND ONLY REACH SEXUAL MATURITY AFTER MANY YEARS.

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to generate an emotive connection in themselves and with the natural world. Twentyfive percent of our coastline is covered by kelp forests, and they are the second most vulnerable ecosystems to climate change. In some places they are shifting, and in others they are disappearing completely. Tasmania’s disappeared in just a few years because of a warm current drifting down that allowed sea urchins to devour it. It’s something that no one’s talking about, everyone’s talking about coral reefs and rainforests, but no one even knows that we have giant underwater kelp forests in so many places.

an insect dry itself. It’s a miraculous thing just to observe. It makes you feel good. I don’t know why. I think it’s because it’s something we’ve been doing since the beginning of time—observing other animals, because knowing them was critical to our survival.

Hopefully, our film shares a perspective on the potential relationship between people and the natural world, one in which we start viewing ourselves as part of this place, not apart from it, and narcissistically in charge of it. We need to reimagine how we relate to nature. It’s not as if we can leave tomorrow and go to another planet. We evolved on Earth along with all of the animals that we shared the planet with since the beginning of time. We need a new vision. And we need to recognize the fact that nature is not just important because it provides. It is critical for a healthy mind, body, and spirit. We evolved in this world.

Physiologically we’re animals, and animals are designed to be in tune with nature.

DR: How has this film affected your conservation work?

PE: For Sea Change Project specifically, the film aimed to showcase the Great African Sea Forest and I think the environment really speaks for itself in the film. The response to it has been incredible for us. It’s been a complete game changer. We went from a tiny little organization with a social media following of maybe 3,500 to nearly 70,000, and that’s in a matter of weeks. We were receiving an email every three seconds the day after the film went live. Now we have organizations wanting to talk to us that we’ve been wanting to get in touch with for a very long time. We didn’t anticipate the film to be interpreted as an impact project in the way that it has been, but we couldn’t be happier that it’s worked out like this.

DR: What is next for you?

PE: While we were making the film, we were very focused, editing every day as we were diving. That was pretty much the priority of my life for three whole years. Now that we’ve finished the process, a lot of things have drawn our attention away from the natural world—making the film festival rounds and doing interviews. I am looking forward to taking some time out to reimmerse.

In storytelling, there’s a balance to be struck between feeling and fact, and you want to give people just enough information that they can make sense of what’s going on and have their minds blown every now and again, but not too much information so that the heart connection is dissolved.

DR: What message would you offer to people who may not be divers, who might be far from the sea, somewhere else in the world?

PE: Wherever you are, there are sentient wild beings. You will do yourself an enormous favor by slowing down and having a good, quiet experience with other creatures. The other day, for instance, I jumped in the pool and I pulled out a very strange-looking fly and I put it on the bricks and then I sat and watched it dry itself for about ten minutes.

This was the best part of my day, watching

PIPPA FILMS CRAIG IN UNUSUALLY CLEAR WATER. THE KELP FOREST IS OFTEN MURKY DUE TO OCEAN SWELL OR ALGAL BLOOMING. THEY HAD TO MAKE THE MOST OF DAYS WITH THIS KIND OF VISIBILITY.

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HARVESTING THE WILD

story of a shoreline

by LES STROUD and CHEF PAUL ROGALSKI

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mussel broth “sea-foam” with shore greens SERVES 4

IN EVERY EPISODE OF WILD HARVEST WE TRY TO NOT ONLY EDUCATE ABOUT WILD EDIBLES AND CELEBRATE THE LOCALE, BUT ALSO LOOK FOR THE STORY WITHIN IN THE PLANTS WE GATHER. CHEF PAUL MUST THEN TELL THE STORY OF WHERE WE ARE, ON THE PLATE: THE MOMENT IN TIME; THE BEAUTY; THE EXPERIENCE; AND, ULTIMATELY, THE TERROIR. HE REALLY NAILED IT WHEN I TOOK HIM TO NORTHERN CALIFORNIA AND FINALLY GAVE HIM A LITTLE PROTEIN TO PLAY WITH!

2. Bring the broth to a simmer, add walking stick kelp, and cook for 30 seconds. Using a long-handled sieve, remove the kelp and set aside. Then remove the broth from the heat while you complete the next steps.

3. In a medium sized bowl, beat egg white into soft peaks and set aside.

4. On four separate side dishes or flat pieces of driftwood, divide the wild radish greens into equal portions and do the same with the bladder wrack. Set aside.

5. Return broth to heat and stir in miso paste and green onion. Balance the flavor with soy sauce and salt to taste. Fold in whipped egg whites and return to heat.

When the egg white turns to foam and floats, it’s time to serve.

6. Divide walking stick kelp and mussels between four bowls. Ladle on the sea-foam broth and serve with the side of radish greens and bladder wrack. Instruct your guests to dump them in just before eating.

Enjoy!

1 tbs canola or vegetable oil 2 tbs shallots, finely chopped 1 large garlic clove, finely chopped 1 lb mussels, cleaned and debearded 2 quarts water 3 cups walking stick kelp, cleaned, washed, and cut in small squares 1 egg white 2 tbs miso paste ¼ cup green onion, chopped 1 splash of soy sauce 1 pinch of salt 1 cup wild radish greens, cleaned, washed, and coarsely chopped 1 cup bladder wrack ends 1. For the broth: Heat a large pot or wok over high heat. Add oil, shallots, and garlic. Cook briefly to extract flavor. Toss in the mussels.

Add the water and cover. When the mussels are fully cooked, remove from broth with a long-handled sieve and set aside. When the mussels are cool enough to touch, remove the meat from the shell and set aside.

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EXTREME MEDICINE YOUR HEALTH AND SAFETY IN THE FIELD

catching one’s breath travel in the wake of coronavirus

by MICHAEL J. MANYAK, M.D., FACS

With all the attention over the past year paid to the pandemic caused by SARSCoV-2 (covid-19), it is important to not lose sight of the fact that other respiratory infections are a leading cause for travelers to seek medical care. The demands on the respiratory system may be significantly increased in travelers and those on expeditions. People breathe about 25,000 times a day and with each intake of air, there is a risk (although usually small) of entry of infectious agents into the respiratory tract.

However, in addition to infectious agents, risk on travel includes respiratory difficulties related to altitude or environment, and exacerbation of existing conditions such as asthma and allergies.

Viruses are the most common cause of respiratory infections in travelers. The most common respiratory ailment associated with travel is seasonal flu. Common colds, incorrectly called flu, are almost always due to a viral upper respiratory tract infection (URTI). More than 200 viruses are potential causative agents, though most are in the class of rhinoviruses. There is no cure for viral URTIs, although the symptoms can be treated. Proximity to a person suffering from a viral URTI does increase risk. Transmission occurs by aerosolized droplets or direct contact with contaminated objects, making hand-washing a key component of prevention. Thanks to covid-19, this lesson is now ingrained in preventive measures for viral 72

transmission and works well to decrease transmission. In fact, preliminary results suggest that there is a decreased incidence of seasonal flu in this pandemic time of frequent hand-washing, social distancing, and mask use. There is a common misconception that recirculated air in an airplane increases viral infections, but airlines have gone to great lengths to filter air. Frequent recirculation of decontaminated air during flights occurs with use of HEPA filters, medical-grade filters that kill 99.95 percent of viruses in addition to bacteria.

A seasonal flu shot is not only recommended for prevention for yourself, but also to protect any indigenous people at your destination, as they are unlikely to have immunity. Viral strains are predicted for the coming season and annual vaccines are matched to those expected strains. But rapid rates of viral mutation may render the vaccinations only partly effective after production. Viral strains often differ in northern and southern hemispheres and the “flu season” is different.

One potential source of transmission that is not usually considered is the nose.

The nose is a portal of entry and reservoir for infection. We touch our nose 100 times a day on average and transmit germs to and from our nose and hands when we do so. Approximately 23 percent of patients screened in a large VA system study had methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in their nose. Sanitizing the nose interrupts the cycle of contamination between the hands and nose. An interesting commercial nasal swab product called Nozin is very effective. Together with hand hygiene, sanitizing your nose can help shield you and others from infection.

In addition to the now notorious SARSCoV-2 coronavirus, six other coronaviruses cause disease in humans. While some of these are mild, others cause very dangerous diseases such as SARS-CoV-1 and Middle

East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). These should always be considered for travelers coming from areas where these diseases exist, like the Arabian Peninsula for MERS. Likewise, highly pathogenic avian flu viruses such as H5N1 and H7N9 should be considered if a traveler acquires a severe acute respiratory illness where no known cause can be identified, particularly with a history of recent travel (within two weeks) to an area where there are confirmed animal or human cases of these viruses.

Bacterial causes of respiratory illness are less common but can certainly be the cause of secondary infection after a viral respiratory illness. Many deaths associated with respiratory complications of covid-19 are related to secondary bacterial pneumonias. There are also sporadic and rare outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease usually caused by bacterial colonization of poorly maintained air conditioning systems.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a common bacterial disease in many parts of the world.

Travelers to high-risk countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, are more likely to be exposed to TB. A traveler in close contact with infected persons is at risk. In the case of airline exposure to someone with active TB, people in the proximate two rows to the infected person are at the highest risk.

Symptoms such as persistent fever, night sweats, and weight loss may take weeks to months to develop. Although TB can present in almost any organ system, respiratory problems are the most likely and well known.

The increasing incidence of drug-resistant TB strains is of serious concern, though the incidence is still relatively slight. Consult your physician if you think you have been exposed to TB. If exposure has occurred, your physician will likely order a test to determine whether you have active disease or previous exposure. A chest X-ray will help determine whether there is active disease.

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BOOK REVIEWS EDITED BY MILBRY C. POLK

ICE WALKER

BY JAMES RAFFAN

192 PP • NEW YORK: SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2020 • ISBN-10: 1501155369 • ISBN-13: 978-1501155369 • $18

Approaching polar bears through the lenses of myth, culture, science, and his own experience in the field, prolific author and geographer James Raffan has written a lyrical paean to this magnificent animal in his new book, Ice Walker.

We do not know much about polar bear evolution, Raffan explains, as little or no fossil record has survived because they “lived and died on or over water,” however

modern science has filled in many gaps. DNA points to their origins as brown bears that probably emerged in Siberia some 200,000 years ago when food pressures forced some off the land and onto the sea ice to hunt. Over time, they became the extraordinary creatures we see today—white-furred, stealth swimmers, with sharp teeth, acute hearing and smell, and the ability to thrive on seals and other marine mammals.

Through the lens of culture, Raffan draws parallels between the polar bear and the ancestors of the modern Inuit, who likely moved beyond the safety of the boreal forests, learned to live on the ice, and became dependent on seals for sustenance. He writes, “the triad of bear, hunter, and seal—and the ice upon which they live— that is central to the survival of the Arctic world.”

The author eloquently tells his own story through his tracking of Nanurjuk (“the bear-spirited one”), a polar bear who is the titular “Ice Walker.” Raffan follows the bear through her lifecycle and the seasons of the year.

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As she hunts, for example, he explains physically how she is able to stay warm and hydrated in the frozen desert of the north. He follows her through her impregnation, creation of a winter den, and giving birth to twins.

He explains the fascinating and complex digestive tract of the bear—that allows the creature to go from gorging on seal fat to hibernation, during which she will not eat for up to ten months—and how grazing on tundra grass helps her stomach stay flexible until she can find a meal. We learn how bears’ sensitive olfactory glands inform them of the slightest changes around them. As the bears continue on their journey, Raffan explains how they are tagged by scientists, to glean the information we have gathered to date.

Raffan believes understanding the interdependence of bears, seals, and ice will help those of us further south to “adjust our behavior in response to climate change.” He more than makes the case that “threats to polar bears are also profound threats to us.”

BOOK RE VIE WS

CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM

BY NEIL PRICE

624 PP • NEW YORK: BASIC BOOKS, 2020 • ISBN-10: 0465096980 • ISBN-13: 9780465096985 • $35

Drawing on decades of fieldwork, archaeologist Neil Price has produced one of the most comprehensive treatises on the Norse to date: Children of Ash and Elm, which delves into who they “really were, what made them tick.” The “ash” and “elm” of the title are a reference to the English names for the Norse “first peoples,” who, from 750 to 1050 CE, “ranged from the eastern American seaboard to the Eurasian Steppe, changing the political and cultural map of Europe.” Using innovative sailing technology, fueled by curiosity and desire, the Norse traversed the known world, having a profound effect on Europe for the next thousand years.

Calling on his extensive field archaeological experience, complemented by evidence in surviving manuscripts—including law texts, land-grant charters, accounts by “monks, priests, travelers, diplomats, merchants, spies, poets,” and Icelandic sagas—he creates a profound insight into the Viking mind. He says the Viking world was a “strongly multicultural and multiethnic place,” that welcomed all peoples, yet it was also violent, comprised of “a warlike people in a conflicted time.”

Price has divided his book into three sections that respectively examine the space the Vikings occupied both on the land and in their beliefs; their armed family migrations, which effected the rise of towns, governments, and of sea power itself in Europe; and how they reorganized their home territory in response to the influence of Christianity.

The Norse were some of the most ambitious travelers and explorers known in human history. They extended their influence thousands of kilometers from Scandinavia as they roamed the world, trading, plundering, fighting, and colonizing, leaving an indelible mark that is felt to this day. This book brings together a wide body of scholarship that makes the world of the Vikings all the more comprehensible.

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THE SIRENS OF MARS

BY SARAH STEWART JOHNSON

288 PP • NEW YORK: CROWN, 2020 • ISBN-13: 978-1101904817 • $28.99

Sarah Stewart Johnson is eminently qualified to write about space, being a professor of planetary science; Rhodes Scholar; MIT graduate; and consultant for NASA’s Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers. Her new book, the beautifully written Sirens of Mars, is, as one would expect, a tour de force.

She begins with her own expeditions to Mars-analogous landscapes on Earth, where she studies how microbes can survive in harsh terrains.

These include the Dry Valleys of Antarctica; the Atacama Desert in Chile; and the Nullarbor Plain in Australia, where she can “hone [her] skills at finding life.”

Stewart has been drawn to Mars because, she says, Mars is our “foil.” Humans

BOOK RE VIE WS

have projected onto Mars all kinds of ideas, longings, and hopes and, “as a result, Mars has human history inscribed on its surface even though no human has touched it.”

In her book, Stewart profiles the modern explorers of Mars who, like herself, have longed for life on the planet, “knowing that even the smallest glimpse of some greater, deeper, other realm might change everything.”

Beginning with the 1965 Mariner 4 spacecraft’s pioneer fly-by of Mars, Stewart discusses the development, challenges, successes, failures, and discoveries of this and subsequent missions to the Red Planet, along with the people who dreamed up and created these amazing journeys. She also discusses the groundbreaking 1976 discovery—by microbiologist Imre Friedmann—of martian rocks on the frozen Antarctic landscape that yielded traces of microscopic algae “colonizing the air spaces inside the porous sandstone.” His findings raised high hopes that life might be found on Mars, a quest that has been propelling all subsequent exploration of the planet.

Throughout the book, Stewart weaves her own story into that of the growing field of martian studies, transmitting on every page the excitement that it takes to make discoveries on an alien planet.

TA L E S F R O M T H E A N T W O R L D

BY EDWARD O. WILSON

240 PP • NEW YORK: NORTON, 2020 • ISBN-13: 978-1631495564 • $26.95

Tales from the Ant World is a marvelous look back at a life spent teasing out universal truths from one of the smallest creatures by Edward O. Wilson, author of some 30 books, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, and a Harvard professor of international repute. Wilson explains that most of his books are more scientifically cast and he wanted this one to be an adventure—and that it is.

Through Wilson’s wonderful storytelling we learn about some of the 15,438 species of ants, “the most dominant land carnivores.”

They are, he writes, the “most warlike of all animals,” thinking nothing of eating “their mangled and dying sisters” or charging their elderly with the most dangerous tasks as

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they are expendable. Ant colonies, Wilson explains, are almost entirely female, with the role of males “little more than flying sperm missiles.”

Wilson discusses his early natural interests and gradual move into the ant world, which was helped by the early gift of a microscope and family moves that gave him access to a variety of natural landscapes teeming with insects and reptiles. Later, at the University of Alabama, he homed in on ants and began a lifelong journey.

He delves into the story of how ants impacted human history, such as the 1518–19 plague of stinging ants that attacked Spanish colonizers of the New World on the island of Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, ants destroyed crops and invaded homes to such an extent that the fledgling city of Santo Domingo was moved to no avail. In time, the plague subsided.

Ants have taken Wilson to the far corners of the world where he has made fascinating discoveries, such as an African termite queen that laid 86,400 eggs in a single day, to leaf-cutter ants that tend gardens. Reading this delightful volume, you will never look at ants the same way again. As Wilson suggests, you might leave a thumbnail treat on the floor and watch a world unfold.

THE E XPLORERS JOURNAL

T HE R E IGN OF W OL F 21

BY RICK MCINTYRE

272 PP • VANCOUVER: GREYSTONE BOOKS, 2020 • ISBN-10: 1771645245 • ISBN-13: 978-1771645249 • $26.95

The Reign of Wolf 21 is the second book in a trilogy about the wolves of Yellowstone National Park by renowned expert Rick McIntyre.

McIntyre, better known as the “wolf interpreter,” started working in Yellowstone as a seasonal naturalist in 1994, and began following the newly reintroduced wolves the following year. He has tracked them daily since then, becoming one of the most well-versed humans on wolf behavior, and his books offer a startlingly intimate portrait of individual wolves.

In this volume, McIntyre primarily trains his sight on the so-called Druid wolf pack, which claimed the northeast section of Yellowstone Park.

He chronicles the comings

and goings of various members of the pack, and their interactions with some of the other packs in the park, beginning two decades ago. The size and number of packs varies from year to year, as younger members break off to form their own packs or merge with others.

The story McIntyre tells primarily focuses on Wolf 21, starting from his early days until he takes over the Druid pack. He makes note of which females he mates with, watches him raise his offspring, and follows him on his hunts, scouting forays, and interactions with other wolves. Wolf 21 emerges as a devoted, loving, yet fierce male wolf.

McIntyre witnessed several fights between wolf packs, including one where Wolf 21 charged into “a cluster of Nez Perce wolves…a stunning demonstration of bravery in the middle of a battle…of a father wolf risking his life to protect his mate and family.”

McIntyre estimates that he has helped about 100,000 people see wolves and explain their behavior. It is only through this kind of hands-on experience that we can hope to save these magnificent creatures, which play such a vital role in maintaining a balanced environment, making recent efforts to lift the ban on hunting wolves all the more controversial.

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ARCTIC: CULTURE AND CLIMATE EDITED BY AMBER LINCOLN, JAGO COOPER, AND JAN PETER LAURENS LOOVERS

320 PP • NEW YORK: THAMES & HUDSON, 2020 • ISBN-13: 978-0500480663 • $60

A lavishly illustrated companion volume to a new British Museum exhibition of the same name, this book examines how weather has shaped Arctic cultures over the millennia, focusing on the resilient strategies that have evolved in response to climate change and the rich variety of artifacts that have been produced to meet the environmental challenges.

For the four million people of the Arctic regions, climate change is all too real. By 2050, the average temperature there will have risen 4ºC, “faster than anywhere else on the planet.” More important, climate change threatens the very fabric of life in the Arctic, where material culture has long been intertwined with available resources. This is a lovely and profound book about one of Earth’s great cultural spheres.

THE E XPLORERS JOURNAL

chapter chairs THE E XPL ORERS CLUB 46 EAST 70TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10021 WWW.EXPLORERS.ORG | 212-628-8383

AFRICA Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka gladys@ctph.org

FLORIDA Joseph Dituri, PhD joe@gallantaquatic.com

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA Lesley Ewing lesleycoastal@gmail.com

SOUTHERN FLORIDA Bruce C. Matheson bcm09@bellsouth.net

AL ASK A Mead Treadwell meadwell@alaska.net

GEORGE ROGERS CL ARK Cindy Irvin cirvin100@yahoo.com

NORWAY Synnøve Marie Kvam Strømsvåg explorers.norge@gmail.com

SOUTHWEST Robert Louis DeMayo rdemayo07@aol.com

ATL ANTA Steve Pigott jagter@msn.com

GREAT BRITAIN & IREL AND Mark Wood, Chair mark@markwoodexplorer.com Rory Golden, Vice Chair rgolden@eircom.net

PACIFIC NORTHWEST John All, PhD john.all@wwu.edu

ST. LOUIS Cynthia Peters cynthiaspeters@gmail.com

PHIL ADELPHIA A.J. “Buddy” Obara, Jr. ajo_@msn.com

SWEDEN Lars E. Larsson llarsson@explorersclub.se

POL AND Mariusz Ziółkowski mziolkowski@uw.edu.pl www.explorersclubpoland.pl

SWITZERL AND Laurent Develle ldevelle37@gmail.com switzerland@explorers.org

HONG KONG Angélica Anglés aangles@explorershk.org

ROCK Y MOUNTAIN Jeff Blumenfeld jeff@blumenfeldpr.com www.explorers-rm.org

TEX AS Nancy McGee nancy@islandtimescuba.com

NEW ENGL AND Gregory Deyermenjian paititi@alumni.clarku.edu

SAN DIEGO Charlene Glacy cglacy@yahoo.com

NORTH PACIFIC AL ASK A Joshua C. Lewis & Victoria M. Becwar-Lewis npac1@me.com

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Charles Carmona explorersclubsocal@gmail.com David Dolan DavidDolan@aol.com

AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEAL AND Todd Tai todd@mivision.com.au BHUTAN Matthew DeSantis matt@mybhutan.com CANADA George Kourounis chapterchair@explorersclub.ca CENTRAL & SOUTH AMERICA Acting Chair: Synnøve Marie Kvam Strømsvåg sstromsvag@explorers.org CHICAGO/GREAT L AKES Robert A. Shuchman, PhD shuchman@mtu.edu EAST & SOUTH ASIA Steven R. Schwankert steven@sinoscuba.com

GREATER PIEDMONT James Borton asiareview@yahoo.com HAWAII Mark Blackburn mblackburn@aol.com

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WASHINGTON, DC Bruce Molnia glaciers@verizon.net www.explorersclubdc.org WESTERN EUROPE Ief Winckelmans westerneurope@explorers.org

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legacy society “I’M PROUD TO PLAY A PART IN BUILDING OUR LEGACY ENDOWMENT AND ENCOURAGE ALL MEMBERS TO JOIN THE LEGACY SOCIETY!” —RICHARD GARRIOTT DE CAYEUX, LM’98!

Mark R. Allio • John G. Alexander • Alan B. Albright • Robert J. Atwater • Capt. Norman L. Baker* • Barbara Ballard • Robert D. Ballard, PhD • Samuel B. Ballen* • Mark Gregory Bayuk • Daniel A. Bennett • Josh Bernstein • Bruce Blanchard • John R. Bockstoce, DPhil • Jack Aaron Boggs* • Bjorn G. Bolstad* • Capt. Bruce M. Bongar, PhD • Brian M. Boom, PhD • Jill Botway • Garrett R. Bowden • Capt. Lawson W. Brigham, PhD, USCG (ret.) • Harry Davis Brooks • Lt. Col. Jewell Richard Browder* • August “Augie” Brown* • John C.D. Bruno • Marc Bryan-Brown • Lee R. Bynum* • Virginia Castagnola Hunter • Julianne M. Chase, PhD • James M. Chester* • James Thomas Chirurg • Maj. Gen. Arthur W. Clark, USAF (ret.) • Capt. William Clark* • Steven Cohen, PhD (hon.) • Leslie E. Colby* • Jonathan M. Conrad • Catherine Nixon Cooke • Sandra B. Cook, PhD • S. Allen Counter, PhD, D.M.Sc.* • John Craparo • Lynn D. Danaher • Constance Difede • David A. Dolan, MA, MPH, M.Div. • Mr. & Mrs. James Donovan • Col. William H. Dribben, USA (ret.)* • Amelia Earhart* • Sylvia A. Earle, PhD • Edwin L. Ecclestone, Jr. • James M. Edwards, MD • Lee M. Elman • Alan Feldstein • Michael L. Finn • Robert L. Fisher, PhD • John W. Flint* • Capt. Joel Fogel • Kay Foster • James M. Fowler* • W. Roger Fry* • Max Gallimore • Richard Garriott de Cayeux • Char Glacy • Alfred C. Glassell, Jr.* • George W. Gowen • Randall A. Greene • Susan Ross Grimaldi • Jean Charles Michel Guite • Les Guthman • Capt. Robert “Rio” Hahn • Penrose Hallowell • Allan C. Hamilton • Scott W. Hamilton • O. Winston “Bud” Hampton, PhD* • Brian P. Hanson • James H. Hardy, MD • Ira Haupt, II • Judith Heath* • Robert A. Hemm • Gary “Doc” Hermalyn, PhD • Sir Edmund P. Hillary, KG, ONZ, KBE* • John A. Hodge • Carlota “Lotsie” Clark Hermann Holton • Christy Holton Hubbard • L. Ron Hubbard* • Charles B. Huestis* • Robert Edgar Hyman • J.P. Morgan Charitable Trust • Robert M. Jackson, MD • Theodore P. Janulis • Linn E. Johnson • Kenneth Kambis, PhD • Kenneth M. Kamler, MD • Prince Joli Kansil • Lorie M.L. Karnath, MBA, PhD (hon.) • Anthony G. Kehle, III • Anne B. Keiser • Kathryn Kiplinger • Martin Klein • Thomas R. Kuhns, MD • Carl C. Landegger • Leon “Lee” V. Langan • John R. Lawrence • Robert M. Lee* • Michael S. Levin • Florence Lewisohn Trust • J. Roland Lieber • James E. Lockwood, Jr.* • Jose Loeb • John H. Loret, PhD, DSc* • Margaret D. Lowman, PhD • Michael Luzich • Daniel J. Lyons • Robert H. Malott* • Leslie Mandel* • Robert E. Maroney • Michele Mass, MD • Robert E. McCarthy* • George E. McCown • Lorus T. Milne, PhD* • James M. Mitchelhill* • Arnold H. Neis • Nancy Nenow • Virginia E. Newell • Walter P. Noonan • Alan H. Nichols • Martin T. Nweeia, D.D.S. • Dr. John W. Olsen • Kathleen Parker • Alese* & Morton Pechter* • Cynthia S. Peters • William E. Phillips* • Ashley Pilipiszyn • David S. Press • Prof. Mabel L. Purkerson, MD • Roland R. Puton • Timothy A. Radke, MD • Dimitri Rebikoff* • Mabel Dorn Reeder* • John T. Reilly, PhD • Adrian Richards, PhD • Bruce E. Rippeteau, PhD • Merle Greene Robertson, PhD* • Otto E. Roethenmund • James Beeland Rogers, Jr. • Faanya L. Rose • William J. Roseman • Rudy L. Ruggles, Jr. • Gene Rurka • Wayne J. Safro • David J. Saul, PhD* • Willets H. Sawyer, III • A. Harvey Schreter* • Donald L. Segur* • Margaret Segur* • Walter Shropshire, Jr., PhD, MDiv. • Richard T. Silver, MD • Robert H.I. Silver* • Theodore M. Siouris • William J. L. Sladen, MD, DPhil* • Susan Deborah Smilow • Capt. David D. Smith, PhD, USNR (ret.) • Mark A. Smith* • Ernest R. Sohns* • Sally A. Spencer* • Ronnie & Allan Streichler • Arthur O. Sulzberger* • Vernon F. Taylor, III • Mitchell Terk, MD • Lowell Thomas, Jr.* • C. Frederick (Rick) Thompson • James “Buddy” Thompson* • Edward B. Tucker, MBE* • Wendy Tucker • Edmund S. Twining, III • Marc Verstraete Van de Weyer • William F. Vartorella, PhD, C.B.C. • Robert C. Vaughn • Ann Marks Volkwein • Alexander Wallace • Julia M. Wallace • Don Walsh, PhD • Johnny Waters • Leonard A. Weakley, Jr. • William G. Wellington, PhD* • James S. Westerman • Robert H. Whitby • Julius Wile* • Holly Williams • Francis A. Wodal* • Lindley Kirksey Young • Eric Zember • Santo (Sandy) Zicaro * Deceased

THE LEGACY SOCIE T Y COMMIT TEE

THE E XPLORERS CLUB

David A. Dolan (Chair), Robert J. Atwater, Brian M. Boom, Alan Feldstein, Kay Foster, George W. Gowen, Penrose “Pen” Hallowell, Scott W. Hamilton, Brian P. Hanson, Virginia Newell, Walter P. Noonan, Mabel L. Purkerson, Timothy A. Radke, Faanya L. Rose, David D. Smith, and Eric Zember

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46 East 70th Street New York, NY 10021 212-628-8383 for additional info: legacy@explorers.org

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WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? GREAT MOMENTS IN EXPLORATION AS TOLD TO JIM CLASH

Nick Hague

the great escape NICK HAGUE IS ONE LUCKY MAN. ON OCTOBER 11, 2018, LESS THAN TWO MINUTES INTO FLIGHT, TRAVELING AT 4,000 MPH AND ABOUT 30 MILES ABOVE EARTH, HIS SOYUZ MS-10 ROCKET FAILED. QUICK THINKING AND AUTOMATED SYSTEMS SEPARATED THE CREW FROM THE ROCKET IMMEDIATELY, ALLOWING THEM TO MAKE A VIOLENT BULLET REENTRY INTO THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE. THEY LANDED WAY OFF COURSE IN A REMOTE PART OF KAZAKHSTAN, BUT, MOST IMPORTANTLY, THEY WERE ALIVE AND UNINJURED. HAGUE DID NOT THINK TWICE ABOUT RETURNING TO SPACE, LAUNCHING WITH THE SOYUZ MS-12 CREW ON MARCH 14, 2019, TO JOIN ISS EXPEDITION 59/60.

JC: What do you remember about the moment of failure?

NH: You rely on your hours and hours of training with the crew, so you’re always waiting for something to go wrong. This was the first time I launched in a rocket, so there was also the sensory overload and smoothride expectations. And then everything happened in about a quarter of a second. First was the aggressive side-to-side shake that hit us pretty good. Then was the head-over-heels tumble motion when the master caution goes off and you hear the blaring in your ear, the red light flashing, saying we’ve had a rocket failure. But we had simulated it once before, eight months earlier.

JC: What happened next?

NH: Alexey [Ovchinin] found where we needed to be in the procedure list. He was immediately talking with the ground, communicating that we had a rocket failure. I was diving into the computer for information to give to the ground so they could get projections for where we were going to land. If you go out of the flight parameters too much, the escape system kicks in. When the external tank smashed into the rocket, it pushed us off course enough that it immediately fired the rockets in our fairing. That pulled us to safety.

JC: How was the reentry?

NH: The parachute opening was a really aggressive event.

They pop open and you’re just kind of spinning around.

I’ve seen Go-Pro footage from the inside of our capsule that shows our zero-G meters flying all over the place for a solid 10 seconds.

JC: You launched again five months later.

NH: Without hesitation.

A fellow of The Explorers Club since 1999, Jim Clash is the author of The Right Stuff: Interviews with Icons of the 1960s .

ASTRONAUT NICK HAGUE. IMAGE COURTESY NASA.

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From vast ocean depths to the frontiers of outer space, THE EXPLORERS JOURNAL offers firsthand reporting from those pushing the limits of knowledge and human endurance.

Founded in 1904 to promote exploration “by all means possible,” The Explorers Club is an international organization dedicated to the advancement of field exploration and scientific inquiry. Among our members are leading pioneers in oceanography, mountaineering, archaeology, and the planetary and environmental sciences.

DILLON ELLIS DESCENDS INTO THE “INFERNO ROOM” DURING AN EXPEDITION THAT REVEALED A HOST OF NEW PASSAGEWAYS IN THE FAMED NATURAL BRIDGE CAVERNS SHOW CAVE IN TEXAS. PHOTOGRAPH BY BENNETT LEE.