
Polar Expressed: What if an ancient story about the Far North came true? - Vigier
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/24/polar-expressed
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btown
TL;DR 6000 rambling words about Arctic exploration in the 19th century. I
suppose it's a decent overview of a subgenre of literature, with some history
sprinkled in. But if you were expecting "what if X came true" to expound on
the modern-day consequences of X happening, this is all you get:

> For the once enormous icescape ringing the North Pole, the results have been
> dramatic. Since 1980, sea ice in the Arctic has declined thirteen per cent
> each decade. The Greenland Ice Sheet, which is more than a hundred and ten
> thousand years old and covers six hundred and sixty thousand square miles of
> the Far North, has shed two hundred billion tons of water a year since 2003.
> These changes have already made travel in the region notably easier; in
> 2007, for the first time in history, a ship navigated through the Northwest
> Passage without help from an icebreaker. Such travel will only get easier in
> the future. According to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental
> Panel on Climate Change, by the end of our own century the summertime Arctic
> will be entirely ice-free.

> From time to time during the life of our planet, roughly once every half-
> million years, a curious thing occurs: its geomagnetic field reverses, such
> that the North Pole and the South Pole swap polarities. Lately, our stories
> about the poles have done the same. The nineteenth century dreamed of an
> Arctic that was warm, accessible, and domesticated, but found a remote and
> frozen region indifferent to human life. Now, in the twenty-first century,
> as we approach an ice-free, accessible pole that has succumbed to our
> influence, we dream of a faraway frozen land unspoiled by humankind... Once
> the ice disappears, there will be nothing there. At that point, if we reach
> that point, the Pole will become once again what it was long ago: a place we
> know only through stories.

And that's how the article ends. If it wasn't for the clickbait, it would be
an interesting narrative. But don't read it expecting the "what if" question
to be answered in any more detail than the above. I expect better of the New
Yorker than to package its reporters' work in expectation-mismanaging titles.

~~~
rootbear
I enjoyed reading it, but I agree that the title is misleading to the point of
being insulting.

~~~
SL61
It looks like they've changed the title now. "Literature’s Arctic Obsession:
The greatest writers of the nineteenth century were drawn to the North Pole.
What did they hope to find there?"

