Which Arctic plants do woolly bear caterpillars feed on when they wake up from their long winter hibernation? What Arctic insect feeds on caribou and polar bear blood? Why does the Arctic fox's white coat turn brown in summer? And what huge animal with tusks is hunting for clams in the icy Arctic Ocean? Packed with facts, core-curriculum information, and fantastic photographs that support the text, this title takes readers on a mini safari through the Arctic. Like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, readers will discover how the living things that make this habitat their home depend on each other and their environment for survival.
Winner of the National Book Award This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing. The Arctic is a perilous place. Only a few species of wild animals can survive its harsh climate. In this modern classic, Barry Lopez explores the many-faceted wonders of the Far North: its strangely stunted forests, its mesmerizing aurora borealis, its frozen seas. Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other exotic beasts of the region come alive through Lopez’s passionate and nuanced observations. And, as he examines the history and culture of its indigenous communities, along with parallel narratives of intrepid, often underprepared and subsequently doomed polar explorers, Lopez drives to the heart of why the austere and formidable Arctic is also a constant source of breathtaking beauty, mystery, and wonder. Written in prose as pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations.
A rich and revelatory memoir of a young woman reclaiming her courage in the stark landscapes of the north. By the time Blair Braverman was eighteen, she had left her home in California, moved to arctic Norway to learn to drive sled dogs, and found work as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. Determined to carve out a life as a “tough girl”—a young woman who confronts danger without apology—she slowly developed the strength and resilience the landscape demanded of her. By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube brilliantly recounts Braverman’s adventures in Norway and Alaska. Settling into her new surroundings, Braverman was often terrified that she would lose control of her dog team and crash her sled, or be attacked by a polar bear, or get lost on the tundra. Above all, she worried that, unlike the other, gutsier people alongside her, she wasn’t cut out for life on the frontier. But no matter how out of place she felt, one thing was clear: she was hooked on the North. On the brink of adulthood, Braverman was determined to prove that her fears did not define her—and so she resolved to embrace the wilderness and make it her own. Assured, honest, and lyrical, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube paints a powerful portrait of self-reliance in the face of extraordinary circumstance. Braverman endures physical exhaustion, survives being buried alive in an ice cave, and drives her dogs through a whiteout blizzard to escape crooked police. Through it all, she grapples with love and violence—navigating a grievous relationship with a fellow musher, and adapting to the expectations of her Norwegian neighbors—as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a man’s land. Weaving fast-paced adventure writing and ethnographic journalism with elegantly wrought reflections on identity, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of Braverman’s journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving.
Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.
A dozen women join a secret 1850s Arctic expedition—and a sensational murder trial unfolds when some of them don't come back. Eccentric Lady Jane Franklin makes an outlandish offer to adventurer Virginia Reeve: take a dozen women, trek into the Arctic, and find her husband's lost expedition. Four parties have failed to find him, and Lady Franklin wants a radical new approach: put the women in charge. A year later, Virginia stands trial for murder. Survivors of the expedition willing to publicly support her sit in the front row. There are only five. What happened out there on the ice? Set against the unforgiving backdrop of one of the world's most inhospitable locations, USA Today bestselling author Greer Macallister uses the true story of Lady Jane Franklin's tireless attempts to find her husband's lost expedition as a jumping-off point to spin a tale of bravery, intrigue, perseverance and hope.
Named an "Outstanding Science Trade Book for Children" by the National Science Teachers Association. Named a "Teachers' Choice" by the International Reading Association.The Arctic winter is cold, snowy, and dark. The barren landscape is covered by a layer of snow that stretches to the horizon, with nothing to disrupt it but jagged rocks. There are only a few plants and no sunlight. And yet, there are animals hardy enough to survive this bleak environment: the arctic wolf, hare, cod, and fox; the snowy owl, polar bear, ringed seal, and Peary caribou, all inextricably linked together in the chain of life. With lyrical text and glowing paintings that capture this mystically beautiful environment with stunning realism, this unusual book fascinates and inspires children of all ages.
What rain forest creature with a long, sticky tongue is feasting on a meal of termites? How does a capybara stay safe from giant anacondas and jaguars? Why are bats visiting the flowers that grow on kapok trees? And how are bromeliad flowers helpful to tiny rain forest frogs. Packed with facts, core-curriculum information, and fantastic photographs that support the text, this title takes readers on a mini safari through a rain forest. Like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, readers will discover how the living things that make this habitat their home depend on each other and their environment for survival.
The Arctic is the ground zero of climate change, and the polar bear is on the front line. Filled with groundbreaking photography that reveals the breathtaking landscapes of the Arctic and the transformations of the environment through the changing lives of polar bears, it's a firsthand report from the top of our planet. Polar Tales tells the story of an ice world in transformation and a planet nearing its tipping point--the moment when Earth's climate begins to change irreversibly. This book is both a celebration of the wildlife that inhabits this most unforgiving and beautiful environment imaginable--mountains, fjords, enormous glaciers, and the seemingly endless pack ice of the Arctic Ocean--and a cautionary tale of global warming. Rising temperatures have put the Arctic at risk, and the habitats--and lives--of the animals there are increasingly threatened. Set against the dramatic landscape of ice floes and ragged mountains, readers see how polar bears, foxes, seals, walruses, and reindeer now struggle to live in this vulnerable climate. Images of a polar bear mother as she takes her newborns out for their first hunt, a seal pup only hours old, and the spectacle of the polar night are reminders of what is at risk. The authors work like no other photographers: spending months in the field on their expeditions, they live among the polar bears, establishing an uneasy balance and unprecedented access to the world of the kings of the Arctic. Readers are rewarded with unique and stirring images that capture the harsh beauty of a world that few will experience firsthand.
This rich portrait of Arctic science, informed by ethnographic fieldwork and Inuit perspective, speaks to the interplay of science and international politics. It looks at episodes of exploration, colonial control, exchanges with indigenous populations, and the process of knowledge gathering on the Arctic s natural and living resources. Andrew Stuhl s compelling narrative weaves together distinct episodes into a backstory for what some have wrongly called the unprecedented transformations in the circumpolar basin today. "Unfreezing the Arctic" is among the first books to undertake a sustained examination of scientific activity in the Arctic across the long twentieth century, and it will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in the commingled political, economic, and social histories of transboundary regions the world over."
