Dive into the world’s coldest ocean in search of one of the rarest creatures on the planet in this second story in a series of graphic adventure novels. Junior explorers Rocco and Olivia embark on an exciting journey into the frigid Arctic waters with famed explorer Fabien Cousteau and his research team. Together, they hope to find the rare dumbo octopus and uncover how this exceptional creature is able to live in such an extreme climate. To get there, they’ll board an icebreaker to travel to the Arctic Circle, and will come face to face with polar bears, puffins, Artic hares, and more. Then they’ll climb into a submersible and dive deep under the surface to see whales, narwhals, and other incredible species only found in these mysterious depths. Join the team on this deep-sea expedition, and learn how the changing climate affects the ocean and its inhabitants, and discover what you can do to help save the planet!
National bestseller A thrilling odyssey through an unforgiving landscape, from "Canada's greatest living explorer." In the spring of 2017, Adam Shoalts, bestselling author and adventurer, set off on an unprecedented solo journey across North America's greatest wilderness. A place where, in our increasingly interconnected, digital world, it's still possible to wander for months without crossing a single road, or even see another human being. Between his starting point in Eagle Plains, Yukon Territory, to his destination in Baker Lake, Nunavut, lies a maze of obstacles: shifting ice floes, swollen rivers, fog-bound lakes, and gale-force storms. And Shoalts must time his departure by the breakup of the spring ice, then sprint across nearly 4,000 kilometers of rugged, wild terrain to arrive before winter closes in. He travels alone up raging rivers that only the most expert white-water canoeists dare travel even downstream. He must portage across fields of jagged rocks that stretch to the horizon, and navigate labyrinths of swamps, tormented by clouds of mosquitoes every step of the way. And the race against the calendar means that he cannot afford the luxuries of rest, or of making mistakes. Shoalts must trek tirelessly, well into the endless Arctic summer nights, at times not even pausing to eat. But his reward is the adventure of a lifetime. Heart-stopping, wonder-filled, and attentive to the majesty of the natural world, Beyond the Trees captures the ache for adventure that afflicts us all.
To have Billy Connolly as a personal tour guide through some of the world's most dramatic landscapes in the vast wilderness of the Arctic is to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime experience only he can offer. In his own quintessential way, this much-loved Scottish comedian, actor, musician and self-proclaimed 'citizen of the world' takes us zig-zagging from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean via Newfoundland, Canada, the Yukon and the Northwest Passage in an epic adventure only recently made possible through global warming. With his infectious enthusiasm and idiosyncratic humour, Billy goes searching for the beauty of ordinariness and bumps into all manner of weird and wonderful people along the way. He learns how to be a bear whisperer, pans for gold with prospectors, learns how to square dance, kayaks through ice floes between fishing trips, runs bare-assed into a sweat lodge, and attempts the finer complexities of the Inuit language. He jams with fiddlers, kisses a cod, goes hunting for Big Foot, and invokes the spirit of the ancients while iceberg-harvesting. With as many laugh-out-loud moments as they are poignant ones, Journey to the Edge of the World is more than just an informative and entertaining travel guide - it is time spent exclusively in the company of an irascible national treasure.
All four adventures in the exciting and brightly illustrated Fabien Cousteau Expeditions graphic novel series are now together in one collectible paper-over-board boxed set! Join famed explorer Fabien Cousteau and his junior explorers—two different kids at each location—as they travel the world researching and protecting some of the planet’s most exciting and rare wildlife. The intrepid team set sail off the coast of South Africa to investigate the sighting of a massive great white shark, descend in a submarine to find a rare octopus in the frigid Arctic waters, journey along the great Amazon River to prove the existence of a new species of piranha, and dive into the beautiful Pacific waters around Hawaii to save endangered sea turtles from injury and extinction. Along the way, readers will discover a vibrant array of fantastic creatures that have adapted to survive in unique ecosystems and learn what steps everyone can take to protect these environments and save our planet from the dangerous effects of climate change. This paper-over-board boxed set includes: Great White Shark Adventure Journey under the Arctic Deep into the Amazon Jungle Hawai’i Sea Turtle Rescue
Driven by a yearning to experience the vast skies and frozen beauty of the North, Gavin Francis goes in search of the people living along the northern limits of Europe. From the first Greek explorers to the Vikings to modern polar adventurers, he travels through history and legend to find out why – and how – we are drawn to the North. Francis's encounters in the Arctic teach him as much about that sense of longing for the North, and of belonging to the North as the seafarers, warriors, monks and poets whose stories he follows. In Shetland, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and Lapland, Francis finds a way of life characterised by both peace and unease, threatened as it is by the shadow of climate change and the tense, ever-increasing importance of Arctic Europe in global power politics.
It may not be inapt to liken the attainment of the North Pole to the winning of a game of chess, in which all the various moves leading to a favorable conclusion had been planned in advance, long before the actual game began. It was an old game for me—a game which I had been playing for twenty-three years, with varying fortunes. Always, it is true, I had been beaten, but with every defeat came fresh knowledge of the game, its intricacies, its difficulties, its subtleties, and with every fresh attempt success came a trifle nearer; what had before appeared either impossible, or, at the best, extremely dubious, began to take on an aspect of possibility, and, at last, even of probability. Every defeat was analyzed as to its causes in all their bearings, until it became possible to believe that those causes could in future be guarded against and that, with a fair amount of good fortune, the losing game of nearly a quarter of a century could be turned into one final, complete success. It is true that with this conclusion many well informed and intelligent persons saw fit to differ. But many others shared my views and gave without stint their sympathy and their help, and now, in the end, one of my greatest unalloyed pleasures is to know that their confidence, subjected as it was to many trials, was not misplaced, that their trust, their belief in me and in the mission to which the best years of my life have been given, have been abundantly justified. But while it is true that so far as plan and method are concerned the discovery of the North Pole may fairly be likened to a game of chess, there is, of course, this obvious difference: in chess, brains are matched against brains. In the quest of the Pole it was a struggle of human brains and persistence against the blind, brute forces of the elements of primeval matter, acting often under laws and impulses almost unknown or but little understood by us, and thus many times seemingly capricious, freaky, not to be foretold with any degree of certainty. For this reason, while it was possible to plan, before the hour of sailing from New York, the principal moves of the attack upon the frozen North, it was not possible to anticipate all of the moves of the adversary. Had this been possible, my expedition of 1905-1906, which established the then "farthest north" record of 87° 6´, would have reached the Pole. But everybody familiar with the records of that expedition knows that its complete success was frustrated by one of those unforeseen moves of our great adversary—in that a season of unusually violent and continued winds disrupted the polar pack, separating me from my supporting parties, with insufficient supplies, so that, when almost within striking distance of the goal, it was necessary to turn back because of the imminent peril of starvation. When victory seemed at last almost within reach, I was blocked by a move which could not possibly have been foreseen, and which, when I encountered it, I was helpless to meet. And, as is well known, I and those with me were not only checkmated but very nearly lost our lives as well. But all that is now as a tale that is told. This time it is a different and perhaps a more inspiring story, though the records of gallant defeat are not without their inspiration. And the point which it seems fit to make in the beginning is that success crowned the efforts of years because strength came from repeated defeats, wisdom from earlier error, experience from inexperience, and determination from them all.
In 1897, at the height of the heroic age of Arctic exploration, the visionary Swedish explorer S. A. Andrée made a revolutionary attempt to discover the North Pole by flying over it in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty-three years later, his expedition diaries and papers would be discovered on the ice. Alec Wilkinson uses the explorer’s papers and contemporary sources to tell the full story of this ambitious voyage, while also showing how the late 19th century’s spirit of exploration and scientific discovery drove over 1,000 explorers to the unforgiving Arctic landscape. Suspenseful and haunting, Wilkinson captures Andrée’s remarkable adventure and illuminates the detail, beauty, and devastating conditions of traveling and dwelling on the ice.
From bestselling author James Raffan comes an enlightening and original story about a polar bear’s precarious existence in the changing Arctic, reminiscent of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce. Nanurjuk, “the bear-spirited one,” is hunting for seals on Hudson Bay, where ice never lasts more than one season. For her and her young, everything is in flux. From the top of the world, Hudson Bay looks like an enormous paw print on the torso of the continent, and through a vast network of lakes and rivers, this bay connects to oceans across the globe. Here, at the heart of everything, walks Nanurjuk, or Nanu, one polar bear among the six thousand that traverse the 1.23 million square kilometers of ice and snow covering the bay. For millennia, Nanu’s ancestors have roamed this great expanse, living, evolving, and surviving alongside human beings in one of the most challenging and unforgiving habitats on earth. But that world is changing. In the Arctic’s lands and waters, oil has been extracted—and spilled. As global temperatures have risen, the sea ice that Nanu and her young need to hunt seal and fish has melted, forcing them to wait on land where the delicate balance between them and their two-legged neighbors has now shifted. This is the icescape that author and geographer James Raffan invites us to inhabit in Ice Walker. In precise and provocative prose, he brings readers inside Nanu’s world as she treks uncertainly around the heart of Hudson Bay, searching for nourishment for the children that grow inside her. She stops at nothing to protect her cubs from the dangers she can see—other bears, wolves, whales, human beings—and those she cannot. By focusing his lens on this bear family, Raffan closes the gap between humans and bears, showing us how, like the water of the Hudson Bay, our existence—and our future—is tied to Nanu’s. He asks us to consider what might be done about this fragile world before it is gone for good. Masterful, vivid, and haunting, Ice Walker is an utterly unique piece of creative nonfiction and a deeply affecting call to action.
Dive into the world’s coldest ocean in search of one of the rarest creatures on the planet in this second story in a series of graphic adventure novels. Junior explorers Rocco and Olivia embark on an exciting journey into the frigid Arctic waters with famed explorer Fabien Cousteau and his research team. Together, they hope to find the rare dumbo octopus and uncover how this exceptional creature is able to live in such an extreme climate. To get there, they’ll board an icebreaker to travel to the Arctic Circle, and will come face to face with polar bears, puffins, Artic hares, and more. Then they’ll climb into a submersible and dive deep under the surface to see whales, narwhals, and other incredible species only found in these mysterious depths. Join the team on this deep-sea expedition, and learn how the changing climate affects the ocean and its inhabitants, and discover what you can do to help save the planet!
